If the Democrats stay mired in the 2016 election, Republicans will win in 2018. CHOOSE the future!

2016 was an historic election cycle. 

There can be no denying it. The Democratic Party had a long-fought primary, with one candidate pushing a new/old Populist New Deal message and one calling to arms the women and POC and LGBTQ whose labor has built most of America for the past two hundred years but whose political power has been subjugated by the power of straight, white, men since the founding of the nation.

Either one of these candidates could have run a powerful, successful general election and beaten Donald Trump in November — if the supporters of the other side had transferred over after the primary ended.

Except in this case, the division and in-fighting of the primary carried over into the National Convention and then the general election season. Loud and grating, this in-fighting suppressed the vote when it was most needed to push Clinton over the edge in the mid-western states in Nov 2016. 

The question is, how long can our Party afford to continue to browbeat itself over the loss of the Oval Office in 2016? What can we possibly learn from all of this angst and anger which will help us win future elections? Because if THAT isn’t the goal, then it’s nothing more than crying over spilled milk. 

I say we don’t have any more time to spare in discussion of What Happened in 2016. That election is in the history books. We cannot change it. We surely don’t want to repeat it. So, where do we go from here?

Why looking to 2018 is the better choice.

To my fellow women still mourning the loss of ‘breaking the highest glass ceiling’, I beg of you to look outside of your silo and see that it was only ONE RACE and there are many, many other women in politics and one of THEM will be the person to finally achieve the dream of ‘Madame President’. 

Should we cherish the fact that our Party was the first to field a viable and possible presidential candidate who was a woman? Hell, yes, we should. It was a significant achievement for the women of America. I remember when we had the first woman Vice Presidential candidate, Geraldine Ferraro. I hope to see the first woman President in my lifetime, and I’m damned sure hoping it’s a candidate from the Democratic Party.

But we simply cannot allow our Party to be split in half over the last election forever. It will cause us to lose future elections to the Republicans — and in the era when they already have majorities in Congress and over 2/3rds of the Statehouses AND the Oval Office and a clear majority on the Supreme Court, we just cannot afford to allow that to happen. 

The nation will fail and splinter over continued majority rule by the xenophobic, homophobic, misogynistic Republicans and their power structure of straight, white, males. It will. That ideology is too-focused on hate and anger to build a decent future on. 

We must, as a Party, decide what is most important to us

Because you can live in the past or you can live for the future —  but you cannot do both at the same time. 

Shall we sit mired in the past, bemoaning past losses and trying to affix blame for those past losses? 

Or shall we let the past be the past, and marshal our forces for the coming battles of 2017 (there is a Alabama US Senate seat up for grabs on December 12th, 2017) and 2018? 

Which path seems a more likely path to winning the future? 

For me, it is a clear choice. 

I choose the future.