Rochelle Riley: Duggan, other Dems agree: Party is in disarray

Rochelle Riley | Detroit Free Press

MACKINAC ISLAND — Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan offered a stinging rebuke to the Democratic Party on Thursday, warning that its disarray could give rise to a third national political party and that he was "so frustrated with the Hillary Clinton campaign, I could have screamed."

"They never articulated a vision for why there would be more opportunity for people willing to work hard and get new schools," he said. "Detroit is a lot of blue-collar folks, and they never could articulate why (people should choose them).

"'He's terrible. Vote against him,' Duggan said, citing the party's mantra against Donald Trump. "They left themselves vulnerable and look what happened.

Read more:

"I don't see the Democratic Party solving that right now. Some of the things the president is doing are so damaging, (but the party) seems perfectly happy to attack him. If the Democratic Party doesn't come up with a set of principles and policies that create opportunity for people who haven't had it, I think a third party is going to emerge."

Duggan's comments came a day after Clinton told an audience at the annual Code Conference in Ranchos Palos Verdes, Calif., that she lost the election because of media coverage of her use of a private e-mail server, the broad assumption that she was going to win and widespread fake stories some believed were news. She blamed everything but her own campaigning, which was widely panned in Michigan.

Duggan also spoke a day after his widely lauded presentation at the Mackinac Policy Conference on the history of how racial discrimination caused Detroit's most challenging current problems, a presentation he said he pulled together from the history he learned while visiting 250 families during his campaign for mayor. Many of those families, he said, did not get any sense last year that the Democratic Party cared about them.

The great irony, too, is that Democrats last year were licking their lips at what they perceived as an implosion of the GOP, a splintering that spiraled into a primary with 17 candidates and the election of the least Republican candidate as the 45th president.

Duggan was not alone in his assessment of how desperately unorganized the Democratic Party is as it still appears to reel from a defeat few expected and from which some cannot recover.

A visibly frustrated U.S. Rep. Debbie Dingell, D-Dearborn, said she tried to sound the alarm last year and "people didn't listen. People didn't believe me."

"We need to understand how to build an inclusive party," Dingell said. "People who worked a lifetime saw their pensions threatened. People want to make enough money to live in a safe neighborhood, to afford to put food on the table, to go to the doctor when they need to, to afford the medicine and treatment they need and have a safe retirement. Donald Trump showed empathy. She didn't."

"Trade matters," she said. "I worked for General Motors for 30 years. I understand that we're competing in a global marketplace. But I also understand fair trade. Governments of other countries — Japan and China — fight for their companies. We need to do the same thing. He talked about it."

Dingell said she told the party that they needed to spend more time talking about jobs, but was asked to talk about the export-import bank.

They care about their jobs and whether they're going to be shipped overseas and they care about their pensions and how they can live in a safe neighborhood."

Dingell said it would be very difficult to start a third party but "I share his (Duggan's) concern. I don't think we're getting our act together the way that we need to. But I also recognize that it's easy to bitch and we have to be a part of solving the problem."

U.S. Rep. Brenda Lawrence, D-Southfield, who had just appeared on a panel with Dingell at the Mackinac Policy Conference on cutting through the politics of the state's bipartisan leadership, said the Democratic Party clearly is in trouble.

"I will admit we clearly saw failures in our message," Lawrence said. "The results of the election proved that. We have been painfully going through the restructuring of the Democratic Party. We've had some past practices of how we ran campaigns that's not relative to where we are today. How can we as a Democratic Party who are the fighters for the poor and the disadvantaged have them turn on us for someone like a Donald Trump? So we clearly have some work to do. I'm not supporting a third party but I am supporting revamping this party and making sure the Democratic Party and the values they stand for are communicated and that we don't become hostage to statisticians and pollsters on who we are."

State Rep. Sheldon Neeley who watched his hometown of Flint suffer under a water crisis for the past two years, said America already has a third party.

"I can speak to the black and brown vote, and many people in the black and brown community feel like they've been disenfranchised by both parties to a certain degree," Neeley, a Democrat, said Thursday. "We have historically adopted the Democratic Party as the party aligned with our agenda but right now, the Democratic Party is not sparking enough interest in the black and brown community to get them out to the polls. Fifteen percent turnout ... means we have to really speak to those issues in those communities to get those people motivated to get out and vote.

"Right now, there is already a de facto third party," he said. "The third party is apathy. That's what we're seeing in these disenfranchised communities, organized urban deconstruction throughout the state of Michigan. People who were feeling disenfranchised are feeling even more so now. If the mayor is saying it's giving rise to a third party, I'm saying there already is one: apathy.

"What the Democratic Party needs to do is speak to the needs of those communities... That includes health care disparities, mass incarceration, low education, actual ongoing crises in our communities, such as Flint. We need to see action, not just talk."

U.S. Rep. Dan Kildee, D-Flint Township, who recently decided to not run for governor so he could stay in Congress to fight against changes Trump is attempting to make, said Duggan was right on the status of the party.

"I think it's a fair characterization to say the Democratic Party failed to present a discernible, unifying economic message to voters that were looking for that," he said. "I don't know if it results in a third party or it results in this continuing malaise. The structure of the American political system has been the same for a long time. Who knows? But what he identified is a real problem ... and I think this is where we have to ask ourselves: Who are the Dems? The Dems are not (party chair) Tom Perez and Keith Ellison, the leaders of the organization. We're the Dems and he's the Dems. I'm the Dems."

Wayne County Executive Warren Evans said he didn't know whether the nation is headed for a third party, but he agreed with the mayor on the Democratic Party's status.

"Even after the election, the attempts to pull parties together to try to have new leaders for the Democratic Party kind of fell across traditional progressive lines and they didn't seem to be comfortable sitting next to each other," he said. "Obviously, a third party could be an answer, but I don't think I got that far ahead."

Duggan emphasized that Trump was neither Democrat nor Republican, but was elected as a Republican because "people felt like they were being left out. And you had some people supporting him that made him completely unacceptable to Detroiters. But his message resonated in Detroit and a lot of places. I hope the Democratic leadership finds its way back to its roots."

It better hurry if it plans to have any chance of winning in Congress, or in America, in 2018 and 2020.

Contact Rochelle Riley: rriley99@freepress.com. Follow her on Twitter@rochelleriley.