Democrats need to be like Walter Payton & just keep pushing forward.

Instead of attending to every new outrage on the right, let’s just focus on winning elections and reminding Americans of all the forward progress we are making.

Enjoy the summer because the coming campaign season is going to be tough.

When that starts, actual accomplishments will not be enough, though they are plentiful: leading us back after the pandemic, managing the strongest economic recovery in the world, shrinking unemployment to record lows, reducing inflation, narrowing long standing racial gaps pay, holding off Russian military aggression, rebuilding international alliances, re-balancing our trade relationship with China, updating America’s long-ignored infrastructure, lowering drug prices, making real progress on climate change, and creating the conditions for massive new private investment in American manufacturing.

None of this matters to today’s Republican Party.  That movement is no longer the Party of Lincoln, or of Reagan, or even of the Bushes. It is an angry cult, a political apparatus dominated by Christian Nationalist zealots. They will not be convinced by facts. Their rage and fear crowd out reason and obscure facts. This has consequences for us all.

Where Republicans hold power, they use it to rip from women the dignity of choice. They create a license to discriminate against LGBTQ Americans. They  alter forms of our government to declare themselves invested with power to legislate over us. They will not campaign to bring the country together. They will not campaign on a set of governing ideas. Instead, we should expect them claim the least powerful amongst us are the biggest danger to us, to sew and to reap whatever resentments poll the strongest, to take credit for spending they voted against, to cheat where they can. This is not a partisan accusation; it is simply only a partial list of what they have already done.

Having survived the overturning of Roe, their partisan Supreme Court went on a new spree, claiming new powers, weakening the other branches of government, and dictating to us all. This time inventing new doctrines to supplant their rule over Congress and the Executive Branch, creating a license to discriminate against LGBTQ people, telling us race does not matter in America and ending affirmative action in very the same session where they found racial discrimination alive and well in a voting rights case.

Any time you look at the news you see new confirmation that the GOP is as bad as we think it is. Case in point, Mike Pence recently told a crowd that he doesn’t “really buy into the rich need to pay their fair share.” Or over in Virginia, where Governor Younkin quietly removed all resources to support the LGBTQ community from the state’s websites.

But it’s summer and the campaign season is not upon us just yet.

I have been taking my dog for longer walks, enjoying the incredible canopy of trees that has grown so lush across Chicago: Sycamore, Green Ash, Catalpa, Osage Orange, Ginko, Elm, Bradford Pear, Maple, Oak and even White Mulberry. Everywhere I look, there are flower filled pots and window boxes. And by the lake, well, there’s not much better than Lake Michigan in the summer.  Chicago has its lawlessness, its brutal and racist legacies. But those alone do not define us.

There is beauty here. 

And a lesson.  This is, after all, the city where the great Chicago Bears’ running back Walter Payton gained more than 10 miles in yardage while entire defenses were built to stop him.

Maybe we Democrats should be more like Walter Payton.

The late Walter Payton of the Chicago Bears.

Instead of attending to every new outrage on the right, let’s just focus on winning elections and reminding Americans of all the forward progress we are making even as the entire GOP is organized to stop us.

I’m cheered by the fabulous efforts of people in Michigan who rebuilt their Democratic Party and rescued their state. Just a few years ago Michigan was a GOP led state that poisoned local water supplies, took over local governments, and, along the way, made the state poorer, sicker, and sadder. But because of the work of millions of Michiganders and the leadership of great women, that state is now getting stuff done. On top of progressive wins, their good governance has attracted vast sums of private equity that is building a strong economic base for years to come.

I’m thrilled by similar efforts in Wisconsin that have, after a terrible decade, finally put the state’s entrenched GOP on the defensive. And I am in awe of movements that have grown up outside of political party structures to support our democracy. Groups like Swing Left, Check My Ads, and Indivisible. I’m impressed beyond words by the work of the last Congress, under Speaker Pelosi, that passed so much consequential legislation, and by the Biden administration’s ability to turn that legislation in impact.

I’m optimistic about what we can do because we keep doing it.

No serious person can have imagined that creating the world’s first truly multi-racial, multi-faith democracy would be easy. Not a single step that has brought us to this precipice was easy. Yet from here, after so long, here we can finally see it.

We just have to beat these guys a few more times.