Douglas E. Schoen is a political consultant who helped turn around Bill Clinton’s presidency after the Slick One was thoroughly repudiated in the 1994 elections. He seems to enjoy the challenge of trying to revive the fortunes of doomed Democrats, as he worked on Michael Bloomberg’s ludicrous 2020 presidential campaign, and took to The Hill Sunday to give Old Joe Biden’s handlers a few suggestions about how they could prevent the Delaware Dim Bulb from being remembered as one of the worst, if not the absolute worst, president in American history. Democrat leaders, however, are unlikely to take Schoen’s advice, because it would involve repudiating who they are: big-government socialist internationalists.
With admirable understatement, Schoen begins by noting that “the Democratic Party with Joe Biden at the helm has lost sight of how to connect with Americans, and as a result, is finding itself in an increasingly unelectable position.” Yeah, and the Titanic lost sight of how to stay afloat. Schoen points out the worst of the bad news: Even with all their pandering, “Independents and Latinos — two key swing-voting groups — have turned against the administration, as majorities of both deem the first year of the Biden presidency a failure.” In other words, both have open eyes.
Schoen insists, improbably, that “many of Americans’ frustrations — including the pervasive pandemic and skyrocketing inflation — are not fully and completely within the president’s control. Yet, voters blame him for these crises, as is the case with most presidents.” There is a reason for that, although Schoen doesn’t mention it: Old Joe came into office after promising repeatedly that he had a plan to get the pandemic under control. All he has offered is authoritarianism and confusion. And as for inflation, he touched it off when he sent gas prices soaring by closing the Keystone Pipeline. He broke both these things, and they’re his to fix, which means that they will stay broken.
But Schoen thinks that Biden’s handlers can turn things around. The problem, he says, is that “Americans simply don’t feel that Biden’s and Democrats’ priorities align with their own.” Well, yes, because most Americans don’t want to see war with Russia, or economic ruin, or a fictional Southern border. Schoen thinks the Democrats can turn all this around by focusing on “advancing centrist legislation that improves Americans’ quality of life and addresses their top concerns.” The obvious objection to this is that if the Democrats had any interest in improving Americans’ quality of life, they wouldn’t have done so much to ruin it in the first place. The magic bullet, as far as Schoen is concerned, is for Democrats to start acting like Republicans.
He even wants the party of intransigence and unilateralism to start working with the party it has spent the last year calling insurrectionists and Nazis: “Democrats should make a meaningful effort to work with Republicans on issues where compromise is possible, and push back on pressure from the far-left, whose policy positions alienate large swaths of the electorate.” No. The far-Left owns the Democrat Party now, and that isn’t going to change. It likely won’t even change if the anticipated 2022 blowout really materializes: as in 1972, when George McGovern lost 49 states by being too far to the Left, the far Left will use the opportunity of the party’s disarray to consolidate its control all the more completely.
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But Schoen sees a different possibility. Democrats “need to make a sincere commitment to fiscal discipline and prudence that involves ruling out any tax increases or new spending initiatives that lack broad bipartisan support.” Fiscal discipline? The Democrats? The party of the pork-laden, socialist Build Back Better bill is suddenly going to discover fiscal discipline? Sure, and Joe Rogan will be the Democrats’ nominee in 2024.
Schoen calls for “fundamentally altering the Democratic Party’s current theory on tax policy, which centers on a misguided notion that the redistribution of wealth by taxing the rich is politically valuable, and will not cause any electoral backlash. Indeed, my own experience along with past history suggests that this theory is problematic.” You can say that again. But electoral disaster has never stopped the far Left before; why should it do so now?
Then there is the border. “Republicans,” Schoen says, and I wonder about the sanity of a man who could write this with a straight face, “have worked somewhat successfully to tie the migrant crisis at the border to Biden’s failed policies.” Well, yes. That’s because the migrant crisis at the border is the direct result of Biden’s failed policies. And here again, Democrats have shown no sign of being interested in turning back. Schoen wants them to “work with Republicans on an immigration package that…secures the border,” but once AOC drops by and takes some photos of herself weeping by a fence, that border security will be out the window again.
Schoen’s article is noteworthy in presenting the spectacle of a longtime Democrat strategist arguing that the only way his party can head off the looming disaster is to cast off its most cherished principles and become Republicans. It’s not going to happen, but it shows just how deep the crisis on the Left really is.
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