A Pile of Regrets,
A Pile of Promises

| published May 28, 2026 |

By Bob Armstrong,
Thursday Review contributor

The Wall Street Journal came through with a spectacular triple play on Friday, May22. A straight news story, an editorial, and a column by Kimberley Strassel highlighted the blunders besetting the Democratic Party as time ticks away toward the looming midterms.

Let's begin with the softball straight news story that contains a hardball within. Reporters sometimes sweat blood working on the first paragraph of a story. It pretty much has to tell the reader all that will follow. I'm guessing the Journal's John McCormick and Tarini Parti ran through several pints of the precious fluid coming up with a brilliant one-sentence opening paragraph on the Democrats releasing an autopsy on blowing the 2024 presidential election: "The Democratic National Committee on Thursday released an incomplete and critically annotated report detailing the party's mistakes in the 2024 presidential election, reversing course on plans to bury the document after pressure from activists and elected officials to share it."

This sober intro had me rolling on the floor with laughter. This really is a fair and objective assessment of the report. And yet: It is "incomplete," it details "the party's mistakes," then it "reverses course," and for good measure a plan is cooked up to "bury" the bad news specifically called for by the high table Democrats in order to avoid repeating the same mistakes.

The comedy gets even richer as we move past the first graph. Party officials and Democratic "insiders" trash DNC chair Ken Martin who had pledged to release the report in early 2025, reversed himself a few months later saying "it wasn't ready for prime time," then reversed himself again and released the report for "full transparency."

Transparency also reveals that this 192-page document includes a disclaimer noting "it reflects the views of the author, not the DNC." The author would be Paul Rivera, an "informal senior advisor" to the Democratic National Committee who, the Journal reporters carefully note, "was unpaid for his work." Thus the top guns at the DNC not only run away from the report they commissioned, they don't give Rivera a dime for his work, then dump a bucket of sewage on his head. (Not to be outdone, the online magazine Politico quoted a former Democratic press aide who worked with Rivera, saying "he stands out as the man behind the curtain. No one knew how he ever got there.")

The editorial, entitled "Requiem for a Campaign Nightmare," points out that Kamala Harris's 2024 loss in the presidential race had more to do with her campaign being "out of step with the general public" on key issues like immigration, climate, and boys playing on the girls’ soccer team, not because, as the DNC autopsy underscored, the Harris/Walz team "didn't attack Donald Trump enough." Moreover, and most important as the editorial points out, "to analyze Ms. Harrris's loss convincingly, the DNC would have to explain to its progressive base that they're the problem."

One thing the report detailing the mistakes by the Dems does not do is what the report sought out to do: drive the party back toward the center. All it does is piss off progressives. And they are in play big time. Columnist Kimberley Strassel runs through a lefty list of possible Democratic Congressional candidates, including Maureen Galindo in Texas who has pledged to turn an ICE Detention Center "into a prison for American Zionists and Ice officers." Maine's U. S. Senate candidate, Graham Platner, claimed he did not know his Nazi tattoo was a Nazi tattoo and posted on the internet some dicey ruminations about lewd acts in portable toilets along with explicit bathroom graffiti. Nonetheless, Platner is the "left's new national star," says Strassel.

The political autopsy from the losing side is a regular feature in American politics. It represents the flip side of another recurring feature: the campaign platforms rolled out by Republicans, Democrats and smaller parties every presidential election cycle. The platform is a pile of promises; the autopsy a pile of regrets.

What they share is more important, that is, both are exceedingly unimportant. Both keep activists busy doing their greatest love; political analysis. Nobody else gives a hoot. That's the general rule, which means there will always—but rarely—be an exception. In my lifetime the only exception to this rule took place in 1948 when I was in the second grade. At that age I had no clue that the demands spelled out in a political platform would shape the political world we live in today. It was drawn up by the Progressive Party in the 1948 election—one of those many third parties over the years on the fringes of electoral politics.

In 1948, Franklin D. Roosevelt's former Vice President, Henry Wallace, abandoned the Democratic Party, ran for president on the Progressive Party ticket, pulled in 2.4 percent of the vote against the victorious incumbent President Harry Truman, whom FDR had selected as his Veep in '44 after running Wallace over in his wheelchair. During his third term, FDR had judged Wallace too radical on some issues and too soft on the Soviet Union, so he dumped him for Truman on his fourth and final run. When he died shortly thereafter in the Spring of '45, Truman became president. During the '48 election Truman had to contend not only with his Republican opponent, Tom Dewey, but with two fringe parties, a racist party on his right from the South, and Wallace's progressives on the left. Most political observers thought Dewey would win, but Truman came through.

What I find of more interest than the race itself is the Progressive Party platform. As I have already noted, such platforms spat out quadrennially are boring, rather pointless, read only by the hard-core political animals who wrote them, as no doubt was the case with this one at the time it was stapled together.

However, in retrospect this long wish list in 1948 has all but been realized. This is a remarkable work of foresight and demonstration of political power from what we could call the Two Percent. It is this slightly over two percent on the left who voted for Wallace in '48 that have given us the country we have today.

True, the money-making fat cats of capitalism that make up what we now call the One Percent also have clout. But check out the following list of demands from the Progressive Party platform to see who, in the wrangling over political policy between the One and Two Percent, has real power today:


We demand full equality for the Negro people, the Jewish people, Spanish-speaking Americans, Italian Americans, Japanese Americans, and all other nationality groups. We call for a Presidential proclamation ending segregation and all forms of discrimination in the armed services and Federal employment.

We demand Federal anti-lynch, anti-discrimination, and fair employment practices legislation, and legislation abolishing segregation in interstate travel.

We demand that Indians, the earliest Americans, be given full citizenship rights without loss of reservation rights and be permitted to administer their own affairs.

We call for a Constitutional amendment which will effectively prohibit every form of discrimination against women—economic, educational, legal, and political. We propose to raise women to first-class citizens by removing all restrictions—social, economic, political—without jeopardizing the existing protective legislation vital to women as mothers or future mothers. We propose to guarantee medical care for mother and child prior to, during, and after birth, through a national system of health insurance. We propose a program of Federal assistance for the establishment of day care centers for all children.

We advocate for the repeal of discriminatory immigration laws based upon race, national origin, religion, or political beliefs. We recognize the just claims of the Japanese Americans for indemnity for the losses suffered during their wartime internment, which was an outrageous violation of our fundamental concepts of justice.

We demand the enactment of a minimum wage of $1 an hour, extension of the Fair Labor Standards Act to cover all workers, enforcement of equal pay for equal work regardless of age or sex, and the elimination any regional wage differences.

We demand a Federal emergency housing program to build within the next two years four million low-rent and low-cost dwellings for homeless and doubled-up families, with priority to veterans. We pledge to attack the chronic housing shortage and the slums through a long-range program to build 25 million new homes during the next ten years. This program will include public subsidized housing for low-income families. We pledge the abolition of discrimination and segregation in housing.

We call for a Federal program of adequate disability and sickness benefits and increased unemployment benefits, protecting all workers and their standards of living.



Whew! Talk about the total package, including a payout to Japanese Americans only three years after the war ended. Still, the expansion of social welfare benefits and the emphasis on civil rights churned out by this left wing dream machine left one matter aside, one matter where of even the progressives dare not speak: gay rights. For Henry Wallace supporters the Japanese were no longer Japs, but homosexuals were still fairies. Ironically, the same year the Progressive Party Platform remained silent, some provocative stirrings from the fairies slipped into the public arena. James Kirchnick, author of the acclaimed history of gay life in Washington, DC, Secret City, cites 1948 as the "groundbreaking" year for homosexuality in America for three reasons. First, the publication of Alfred Kinsey's Sexual Behavior of the Human Male, wherein the famous researcher argued same-sex attraction was normal and harmless behavior. Second, he notes "the very same week Kinsey's alarming revelations struck a national chord, Gore Vidal's novel, The City and the Pillar, arrived in bookstores."

Featuring a gay protaganist, Vidal's book "captured a very real sense that gay men and women, long relegated to the shadows, had become increasingly visible in postwar America." Third, and less bookish than Kirchnick, "gay visibility reached a new milestone with the opening of the Lafayette Chicken Hut, one of the city's first gay bars, at 1720 H Street."

I would add the Progressive Party's long-shot bid for the White House as a fourth breakthrough. While the platform remained silent, a tiny lavender ribbon floated down on the campaign trail. Some gays still saw promise in this third party's presidential campaign, including Harry Hay, who a few years later was among the founders of the Mattachine Society, the country's first gay rights organization. Hay gathered together about two dozen men "of the persuasion" he encountered at a fundraising event for the Wallace campaign. At one point they staged a demonstration on a Los Angeles street corner where they held up a sign that read: BACHELORS FOR WALLACE.


Bob Armstrong is a freelance journalist and the author of a new memoir, No Exit From Vietnam, available on Amazon.

Related Thursday Review articles:

A Political Autopsy With Few Surprises; R. Alan Clanton; Thursday Review; February 25, 2026.

A book review of 2024: How Trump Retook the White House and the Democrats Lost America; R. Alan Clanton; Thursday Review editor; February 25, 2026.