As soon as it became clear on election night last November that the Democrats were going to retake the House, I mentioned on the PJ Media Live Blog that it might be one of the greatest things that could happen for President Trump’s re-election.
Let’s face it, the Democrats had already been rather unhinged since Trump’s election, and they didn’t even have any ditzy bartenders from the Bronx in the mix yet. Bringing all of that crazy into the leadership forefront was going to make it difficult for even the MSM to ignore.
My thought at the time was that they would do little more than caterwaul about impeachment, which would leave the party without anything positive to run on in 2020 and do double duty by steeling Trump’s base. During the transition — before she’d been re-elected Speaker — Nancy Pelosi was trying to warn her colleagues about being the one-note impeachment party.
My expectations for the House Democrats to overplay their hand with partisan nonsense have been exceeded by something I hadn’t expected at all: internal strife.
Speaker Pelosi 1.0 was a powerful, iron-fisted ruler of her charges. That was the woman who got Democrats to fall on their swords to help Obamacare along, knowing full well they would probably lose their re-elections by doing so. As the first female speaker of the House, she was a media darling throughout her tenure.
Speaker Pelosi 2.0 inherited some newly-minted and unruly media darlings who don’t seem to have packed their respect for older Democrats in whatever they brought to Washington with them.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was crowned queen of the Democratic Party by the media before she was even sworn in. She does have one accomplishment that explains her popularity with the MSM: of the four candidates the media couldn’t shut up about during the 2018 campaign (herself, Stacey Abrams, Andrew Gillum, and Beto O’Rourke), AOC is the only one who actually won.
Arriving in the House with a media-granted sense of entitlement and an almost pathological inability to stop talking, AOC has become the gaffe gift that keeps on giving to her detractors. The MSM, bless their ignorant and biased hearts, just can’t help reporting every inane thing that comes out of AOC’s mouth, even when she’s speaking around the foot she just stuck in it.
Last week was the best yet by far in this new Democratic majority debacle, and I am looking forward to many more like it. I almost felt as if I were ordering on-demand entertainment all week.
Apparently jealous of AOC’s firm status as number one on the list of problem children for Democratic leadership, Minnesota freshman Democrat Ilhan Omar began by upping her already strong anti-Israel (and anti-Semitic) rhetoric.
Omar’s behavior was so odious that her own party had to craft a formal condemnation of it, even though they eventually watered it down to pretend that half of America is as awful as she is.
Raging anti-Semitism wasn’t enough to keep Omar happy last week. As the weekend neared, she decided to disparage the Democrats’ most sacred living icon — Barack Obama. She quickly backtracked — The Lightbringer shall not be disparaged — but she’d managed to firmly out-gaffe her colleague from New York for a few news cycles.
Pelosi and the other Democrat adults are continually being asked to clean up the messes their new kids are making on aisle Tweets Too Much, and it’s already visibly starting to wear on them. By last Friday, Pelosi was just exhausted and flailing for creative ways to say that Omar didn’t know what the hell she was talking about:
Pelosi defends Rep. Omar: she “has a different experience in the use of words”https://t.co/DgxoNPgc3g pic.twitter.com/lAzIBHEtpM
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) March 8, 2019
Reiterating, Nancy Pelosi is the Iron Lady of the 21st-century Democrats. Watching her continually lost at sea whilst attempting to corral the various media impulses of her new charges is both entertaining and shocking.
Back in early December, I wrote that Trump might benefit from the enormity of the 2020 Democratic presidential field. What I hadn’t counted on was the extended family driving the narrative to this extent.
The beauty of it all thus far is watching the 2020 contenders having to answer for AOC and Omar, which serves Trump’s re-election in a couple of ways.
First, whenever the candidates agree with the rambunctious new blood, it reinforces the fact that the Democrats have truly become a far-left, coastal progressive party.
Good luck winning back the disaffected Rust Belt voters who abandoned the party for Trump in 2016 with that look.
Secondly, the eventual 2020 Democratic nominee will want to spend the campaign for the general election defending his or her own policy positions, not the attention-seeking bursts of narcissism from AOC or Omar that happen to be grabbing headlines that week. For that not to play out, Pelosi will have to regain control and/or the MSM will need to end their fascination with the two.
While the former is far more likely to happen, there does seem to be a generational struggle playing out among the Democrats these days, especially in the House majority.
That’s even weirder when one considers that the party has no problem serving up older candidates for the White House. Crazy Joe the Wonder Veep is still teasing that he may run. Should he enter the race, watching his legendary no-filter tongue deal with the impertinent youngsters will almost be worth paying for.
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