Fighting for the Soul of my Party
A personal story for the holidays
NOTE: We are very sorry about all the emails people received about going on to Substack. Our team had a fight with the Substack tech backend, and we obviously lost that fight. Now that we are set up and moving forward, hopefully this won’t happen again.
This is the opening post of a new substack, one that I am titling Soul of the Party because I believe passionately that the Democratic Party will never consistently win elections until it returns to its roots as the party of working people. The soul of our party should be the mission to lift working people up, to improve their lives, and to fight the big money forces that want to take advantage of working folks and keep them in their place.
I am an old soul who has been around the political world a long time now. I started my political organizing career doing farm, labor, and community organizing in my home state of Nebraska and then in Iowa in the 1980s. Being in Iowa connected me to presidential politics, and I worked on my first presidential campaign in 1984. In the 1988 cycle, I worked for the first Joe Biden presidential campaign, as well as for Paul Simon when Joe got out of the race. In 1992 I ended up going down to Little Rock to work on the Bill Clinton campaign, and when we won I moved to the DC area to work in the Clinton White House.
I have been here ever since, doing political consulting, writing a couple of books, doing a lot of blogging, picking fights with corrupt corporations, working to elect Democrats but also fighting with certain party leaders when I thought they were losing their focus on helping working people.
If you want to get a flavor for how I am thinking about the Democratic Party and the progressive project in general, and what needs to happen next to win back the hearts and minds of the country, I have posted below the columns I have written since Election Day 2024.
However, since I am just introducing myself to some of you, and since the Christmas season is a good time for family stories, I am going to go a little deeper into my origins…
The 4th kid who almost didn’t make it, and the 5th who joined our family
My mom decided when she was very young that she wanted to have four children- for some reason she thought that was the perfect size for a family. My oldest sister was born less than 10 months after mom and dad’s marriage, and my brother arrived two years later, so everything was going according to plan. However, when my mom got pregnant a third time, her unborn baby died about three weeks before her birth. The asshole small town doctor made her carry the dead baby to term, a tragedy that haunted her the rest of her life.
Fortunately, my second sister came along fairly quickly thereafter, helping mom overcome her grief. But after that pregnancy, mom’s doctor (a different one) told mom that her uterus had a tendency to develop cysts, which could become cancerous. He strongly recommended she have her uterus removed sooner rather than later, and that she not have a fourth child. But she was determined to follow her dream of four children, and thus I made it into the world.
My 8 year old brother suggested Mike as my name, and my parents went along with it. My minister’s daughter mom and lay leader of the Methodist church dad knew that Michael was the archangel who defeated Satan when he was in the form of a dragon, and also the angel who stood up to God when he wanted Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac, saving the boy from death. I guess I was expected to stand up to the powerful and fight for the weak.
When I was about two months old, being the precocious little shit that I was, I managed to reach up in my crib for an overhanging toy and get it caught in my throat. My mom happened to walk by a couple of minutes later and saw me turning blue, got the toy out of my throat, gave me mouth to mouth resuscitation, and told my 10 year old sister to run to the neighbors to see if they could drive us to the hospital.
While she was in the hospital praying for me, she promised God that if I lived and was okay, she would take on the care of another child who needed her. The accident gave me a mild form of cerebral palsy, which meant I had to walk for a few years with braces and made me the slowest kid in class and the last one picked for sports team at school. But I was otherwise okay. When my mom and dad met a little boy who was developmentally and physically disabled, living in a home where the older boys were burning him with cigarettes and making fun of him, they brought him home to be our brother.
Kevin couldn’t talk very well or move very fast, but he was funny and kind. He had the courage to get in between people who were having heated arguments, asking them to calm down, in spite of (maybe because of) being physically abused as a little boy. He was as good as a son could be – after he moved away from home, he would call my mom every day right at 4:00 to tell her about his day. If I was visiting and answered the phone, he would say “Mike, talk to you later, this is my time to talk to mom.” Kevin was not only a beloved brother, but an inspiration to me ever since I met him.
Ayn Rand vs the party of the people
If my mom hadn’t had a miscarriage; if she had taken her doctor’s advice to have her uterus taken out; if she hadn’t walked by my crib when she did, I would not be around. If it wasn’t for the accident, or if Kevin had not been a part of my life, I might not care so much about fighting for those who have more challenges in life. If my folks had been followers of Ayn Rand, who thought people with disabilities should be left by the side of the road to die, rather than Methodists who believed that the poor and the hungry and the hurting should be lifted up rather than thrown away, neither Kevin nor I would have had their love.
But I was raised to care about the people who had less. That made me want to be a Democrat. Nebraska was a Republican state, but I went to high school with the children of people who worked at the Goodyear factory and the railroad. I grew up learning that Democrats were the party of working people and Republicans were the party of wealthy bankers and businessmen. That too made me want to be a Democrat. I was proud to join that party, and have been proud to spend my life fighting for that party and the working families we are supposed to represent.
Ayn Rand’s philosophy has become the guiding ideology of the modern Republican Party, the inspiration for the Trump generation. We Democrats have to be the ones who fight for those who have less, for the communities and neighborhoods left behind, for the workers getting paid less than they deserve even as they work their asses off, for the families being squeezed and nicked a thousand different ways by corporate monopolies and billionaires.
As I will argue on this Substack, playing that role of fighting passionately for working families is not only morally right but is our only path back to winning elections. I hope you will join me as I explore the strategy for fighting the Trumpies and building an enduring Democratic majority.
In the meantime, have a great holiday season. I hope that whatever faith tradition you do or don’t follow, your holiday is more about celebrating love and joy than embracing cruelty and bullies. As someone who almost didn’t make it into the world, I know the fragility of life. As someone who has been loved and lucky once I did get here, I have known the joy of being on this earth. Here’s hoping that you have some of that same joy in the years to come in spite of all the challenges we face.
Thank you, James, good to hear from you.
Completely agree with you, Rob. I think the money coursing threw our political system like a massive firehose permanently on is the biggest threat to democracy we have. I plan to write a lot about how we combat that in the years to come.