Is it just me or does it seem like everything the Democrats touch turns into a disaster? Democrat-run cities are plagued by crime and poverty. The once world-class city of San Francisco has been turned into a giant toilet. States run by Democrats tend to bleed residents who flee to other states. Barack Obama inherited a stable Iraq, only to see it descend into chaos, allowing for the rise of ISIS. Obama’s presidency saw the loss of over 1,000 seats nationwide for the Democratic Party.
The truth is, the Democratic Party is responsible for some epic disasters throughout history—slavery and segregation being prime examples—but in the wake of the Iowa caucuses, I got to thinking about their more recent epic failures, and I decided to pick the top five. Have more? Let me know in the comments!
5. Obama loses Iraq
When Obama took over as commander in chief, things were looking up for Iraq. The country was relatively stable, thanks to the hard fighting of both American and Iraqi forces and the troop surge then-Senator Obama opposed in 2007. Radical Islamist groups inside were in retreat, and the level of violence was down to a place where Iraqi forces, backed up at need by American troops, could secure the peace. The war was over and America won. All Obama had to do was to maintain U.S. support for Iraq and things would be fine. But, Obama royally dropped the ball. In his desire to follow through on his anti-Bush campaign promises, he announced a full withdrawal of troops by the end of 2011. Violence levels rose, and Obama’s withdrawal enabled the rise of ISIS, which ended up taking control of many areas of the country previously liberated by American forces. By the end of Obama’s presidency, terror attacks had risen significantly, and ISIS had control of 40 percent of Iraqi territory, and they’d spread. ISIS carried out terror attacks worldwide, including within the United States.
Obama’s epic failure to secure the peace in Iraq created a new enemy, which was responsible for over thirty thousand deaths worldwide… all because Obama failed to consider America’s security over politics. It took Donald Trump to clean up his mess.
4. The Obamacare rollout
The highly-anticipated launch of Obamacare was a total disaster. When millions of Americans tried to shop for their new “affordable” government-approved healthcare plans by visiting HealthCare.gov or their state’s insurance exchange sites, they simply couldn’t handle the load. The sites crashed and mere six people succeeded in signing up for Obamacare on launch day. According to the nonpartisan research firm Millward Brown Digital, less than half of 1 percent of the visitors to the federal healthcare website were able to complete enrollment in the first week.
Making matters worse, the Obama administration knew the site couldn’t handle the load because they had been given “stark warnings just one month before launch that the federal healthcare site was not ready to go live.” The site was rife with security flaws, putting the private information of millions of Americans at risk of being stolen, and yet the Obama administration did nothing. It’s hard to understand why they ignored the warnings, or how the site could have been an incompetent mess—at least until you learn that the site was built by CGI Federal, which received a $678 million no-bid contract despite there being several companies as, if not more, qualified to build the site. How did CGI Federal get a no-bid contract, you ask? Perhaps it was because a Princeton classmate of Michelle Obama’s was a top executive at the company.
Obamacare itself didn’t exactly work as advertised either. Premiums and deductibles all skyrocketed, and healthcare is more expensive today than it was before Obamacare passed.
3. The Impeachment of Donald Trump
No one expected that a Republican Senate would convict Donald Trump, which is why it’s obvious Nancy Pelosi didn’t want to impeach him in the first place, but pressure from the AOC wing of the party made it impossible for her not to. After having supported Trump’s impeachment from the beginning of his presidency, impatient Democrats settled on a flimsy allegation of an illegal quid pro quo with Ukraine to make their case that Trump needed to be removed from office. Even their star witnesses undermined their own case, and by the time they voted on impeachment, the public had turned against impeachment and Trump was outperforming all of his potential 2020 rivals in national surveys.
They nevertheless claimed a rock-solid case, voted to impeach, then demanded more witnesses because apparently they realized they actually hadn’t adequately made the case for impeachment. Their rushed and politicized process enabled them to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory on the issue of witnesses, and it is expected that they won’t get any moderate Republicans to vote with them to remove him from office, while at least one Democrat, if not a couple more may end up voting for acquittal.
As I said before, Trump wasn’t going to be removed from office, but they lost the battle over witnesses because of their overzealous partisanship. Had they conducted a fair process from the beginning things might have worked out to support their narrative and damage Trump.
2. The 2020 Iowa caucuses
We’re still trying to diagnose exactly what happened during the 2020 Iowa Democratic caucuses. Was it app failure? Was it a cover-up to stop Bernie Sanders? Whatever the cause, the morning after the caucuses no results had been reported yet, and there’s a party full of angry voters suspecting corrupt motives, and a country wondering just how incompetent Democrats must be.
According to the Des Moines Register, seven of ten Democrats who won the Iowa caucuses have gone on to be their party’s nominee in the general election. That demonstrates just how important the caucuses are to the candidates, and just how devastating the debacle that became of them Monday night was for the party. It’s still too early to see just how much this will damage the party going forward, but you can be sure it will.
1. The Hillary Clinton 2016 campaign
For all intents and purposes, Hillary Clinton was handed the 2016 election on a silver platter, and she still managed to blow it. The Democratic primary was rigged to deliver her a victory and polls consistently showed her ahead of Trump, both nationally and in swing states. Some polls even suggested that Hillary could win in Texas. Virtually everyone, including myself, predicted Hillary’s victory. Trump’s poll numbers looked terrible. Hillary may point fingers at James Comey for her defeat, but even on the eve of the election, “experts” were predicting Hillary had a 99 percent chance of victory.
The surprise victory of Donald Trump sent Democrats into shock and pushed them into a radical state of Trump Derangement Syndrome, which has yet to subside and may very well ensure his victory in 2020.
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Matt Margolis is the author of Trumping Obama: How President Trump Saved Us From Barack Obama’s Legacy and the bestselling book The Worst President in History: The Legacy of Barack Obama. You can follow Matt on Twitter @MattMargolis
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