An Agenda for American Hope and Freedom

Beyond the frightening seriousness of the stakes of the 2024 election, beyond Biden’s debate performance and the ups and downs of the polls, there is a pervasive sense of angst and gloom in America today. 

Not only about this particular election, but about the nation we have become, where the country we love seems to be slipping away. That someone as repulsively odious as Trump could be elected president again is just one sign of a country battling some serious demons. The threat of fascism at our door is all too real, but the dystopian future of climate change and AI and social media ripping us further apart also weighs on us whenever we lift our view from the short-term threats to the longer term.

Proverbs tells us that where there is no vision, the people will perish. America needs a powerful vision today -- a vision that will inspire and give hope at this moment when hope is desperately needed, but will also lay down a marker on the fight we have ahead for a better nation. And Joe Biden, if he is to survive this present crisis in his campaign, as well as defeat the barrage of lies and ugliness from Donald Trump, must give us that kind of vision. 

We need a relaunch of this campaign. Democrats must build a compelling vision of what a hopeful American future looks like.

One of Joe Biden’s early friends and mentors in the United States Senate was Hubert Humphrey, who was known as the “Happy Warrior” because, at his best, he campaigned with a spirit of joy and passion. The president needs to become that kind of happy warrior in his last campaign. He can show people the kind of joy and passion he did in North Carolina the other day.

Even more importantly, the president should be campaigning on his bold vision for America in his second term: An Agenda for American Hope and Freedom.

This relaunch needs to do two things: first, it should be uplifting, inspiring, and compelling. It should not be a long laundry list of every little legislative item the president hopes to get accomplished in the second term, but there should be enough meat on the bones to get people excited about eating the meal. 

Second, at the core of the agenda should be picking a fight with corporate greed and the enormous power a few major corporations have gained over our political and economic system. This agenda should be clear in taking a side in the fight between the people and the powerful, and the gaming of the system by the top 1%, things that our Factory Towns polling shows are highly popular with working-class swing voters.

Regarding substance, the agenda should include the broadly popular Democratic agenda items of the first term, some of which we made progress on, but need to make more, some of which did not get done -- lowering prescription drug and health care costs, child care and elder care, voting rights and civil rights, abortion rights, lowering energy prices and dealing with climate change, taxing the wealthy and profitable big corporations, taking on monopoly power and price gouging.

Beyond those specifics, his vision needs to lift us higher. We need, as Lincoln would say, a new birth of freedom for this country, a new sense of American optimism that we can have joy again in our public life and can build a more perfect union. We need to lift people out of their cynicism, we need to keep hope alive to take on corporate power and the challenges of the future. 

As we enter this July 4th weekend, we need to do what Lincoln said in the Gettysburg address, and MLK echoed in his "I Have A Dream" speech. We need to rebuild our nation of the people, by the people, and for the people, a nation dedicated to the proposition that all of us are created equal. 

Democrats need to break through the doom and gloom of this moment. We need to show which side we are on and show up to the fight with more than a butter knife. We need to lift up a modern vision of freedom, and then as MLK told us, carry the vision forward:

When we allow freedom to ring — when we let it ring from every city and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, “Free at last, Free at last, Great God a-mighty, We are free at last.