It’s an insult to Michael Moore to do this but he’s the best fit I can come up with as someone who might have resembled Trump during the 2008 election. Like Trump, Moore had increased his profile and won over the hearts of a lot of people by standing up to the sitting U.S. president and criticizing him with intemperate language. Like Trump, Moore was primarily an entertainer, and he excelled at self-promotion.
So, imagine, if you will, that Michael Moore had decided to run for president in 2008. To make this a little easier to envision, I want you to also pretend that Barack Obama never existed. The race was between the 2004 Democratic veep candidate John Edwards, the former First Lady and senator from New York, Hillary Clinton, and Michael Moore.
Now imagine that Moore had simply run away with the early primaries and caucuses, and he’d done so by being outrageous and flaunting conventions about how a candidate is supposed to act. Additionally, imagine that he was unmercifully criticizing Edwards, Kerry, and Clinton for having voted for the war and was blasting every major Democrat and Democratic institution for being weak and feckless and corrupt.
Now, imagine the panic and resentment in the Democratic establishment as they realized that the base of the party agreed with Moore and was willing to say “fuck it, at least this guy has the balls to fight the Republicans.”
Reasonable people would point out that Michael Moore had super high unfavorables and little appeal to moderates or independents. They’d note that he didn’t have the requisite experience to be the president and that his temperament was suspect.
It’s obviously not a perfect thought experiment because Michael Moore wouldn’t have advocated torture or received endorsements from organizations as loathsome as the Ku Klux Klan. He wouldn’t have held rallies where he encouraged his supporters to beat on protestors.
But that’s not the point. The point isn’t to denigrate Michael Moore. I just want you to try to put yourselves in the Republicans’ shoes.
What would have happened to the Democratic Party back in 2008 if Michael Moore was the likely Democratic nominee and Democratic lawmakers and thought-leaders were coming out of the woodwork to say that they would never vote for him under any circumstances?
No matter how much Moore captured the imagination and the energy of the anti-Bush left, he would have been slaughtered in those circumstances. And that’s because the Democrats can’t win national elections if they’re that badly split.
The left-wing blogosphere came into being because the Democratic Party and the media had been useless in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq. We were incredibly pissed off with our elected officials and the whole left-wing establishment.
But we didn’t follow the first person to come along with a little fame and a little charisma and think we could fix the Democratic Party that way. We wanted to blow everything up and start over, but what we actually did was far more practical.
Looking back, it worked until it worked.
Once Obama was elected, the blogosphere splintered into two main factions. One wanted to go to work with the president and the Congress we had helped elect, and the other wanted to continue screaming about tearing the whole thing down.
So, we had our split, too. But we waited to win, and win everywhere, before we lost our shit.
