Marching for Dimes

Remember the March of Dimes? When I was a kid, practically every cash register had a little plastic box with a picture of some poor kid in leg braces or lying in a hospital bed or some other pitiful, helpless situation with Jerry Lewis somewhere in the picture with his hand out. My wife absolutely hates the idea of the March of Dimes, which was mostly an organization staffed by millionaires’ trophy wives guilting working people out of their spare change. As my wife says, “If the millionaire class stopped hoarding their fortunes and spent a little of it on medical research or eliminating poverty or improving public education, poor people wouldn’t have to chip in their ten cents to keep the trophy wives occupied.”

Likewise, the Democratic Party is running its own March of Dimes these days. While the billionaire class buries the Republicans in dark money, Democrats are reduced to asking working people for spare change. They aren’t even good at that, so most of the regional and state Democratic candidates are reduced to buying email lists to beg for money all across the country. There is no Democratic National Committee as far as any sort of national organization is concerned. The DNC’s sole purpose in 2016 was to elect Hillary Clinton President of the United States, all other campaigns be damned. As a result of hustling one of the two most disliked candidates in US history and taking a much undeserved vacation during the entire Obama presidency, the party lost more than 1,000 seats in state legislatures, governor's mansions and Congress between the 2012 and 2016 elections. The party, which had geared itself up to do exactly what it did in 2016 for 2008 when voters overwhelmingly rejected Clinton for Barak Obama, sat on its ass and did nothing to help local, state, and national candidates for 8 years. Now, there is no national Democratic Party organization and the US is close to becoming a single-party nation. There are plenty of role models to follow at the state level, all of those states are red and all of them are economically, educationally, and culturally disadvantaged. There is no example in the country of a state that has done better under Republican rule, but those Koch brothers’ servants don’t care. Their brains are washed clean.

This spring, Democrats had practically nothing to do with the money they stashed during the 2016 debacle and at three House seats were up for grabs: Kansas, Georgia, and Montana. The DNC did what it does best, ignored those campaigns until the March of Democratic Dimes managed to point out the weakness of the Republican opponents in those races. Still, the DNC didn’t raise a finger to help the last vestiges of Democratic progressive candidates fight millions of Koch dollars. I suppose the DNC is hanging on to its cash in case Hillary or another Clinton wants to run in 2020?