Screw 'Uniting the Country'-- That's Not What Democrats Need in 2020

Republicans have gone terribly low. The way to unite the country isn’t lofty rhetoric but winning the White House and Congress and passing laws to help regular people again.

Michael Tomasky
02.12.19 4:54 AM ET

So now we have nine declared Democratic candidates for president, with presumably a few more on the way. I don’t know yet if it’s a great field. They all have strengths, they all have weaknesses. But here’s one thing I like so far. I’m not hearing many sappy calls for unity or pledges to bring the country together. This is a grand development.

Pundits of course are supposed to bemoan this and demand that presidential aspirants summon us toward our better angels. I may have believed this once, but those days are gone. Calling for unity is a sucker’s game for Democrats and has been for a number of years.

It’s been clear since the 1990s that the Republican Party has had no interest in uniting the country. The GOP’s interest—since Newt Gingrich, the rise of Rush and the radio talkers, the illegitimate Bill Clinton impeachment, and the Brooks Brothers Riot of the 2000 election—has been to win. To dominate the other guys. Yes, George W. Bush said while campaigning in 2000 that he’d be a “uniter, not a divider,” and of course he employed some of that kind of rhetoric after 9-11.

But he rarely governed that way. This is largely forgotten now, but after the Supreme Court named him president, there were calls for him—the man who had lost by 500,000 votes and had very obviously carried Florida only because of a bad ballot design that had Palm Beach Jews voting for Pat Buchanan—to appoint moderates to key positions and govern from the center. He did nothing of the sort.

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