While the media may be focusing on crises real or perceived within the Trump administration, the Democrats are involved in a real struggle that gets almost no mention. This is because the MSM are advocates for the Dems and are loathe to acknowledge that the party was slaughtered electorally during the Obama years and has a bench for 2020 that’s thinner than Bill Clinton’s claims to marital fidelity.
At the moment, the biggest players for the Democrats are on its far-left fringe. Kamala Harris, Bernie Sanders (who will once again be a Democrat if he runs for president), and Elizabeth Warren are grabbing all of the headlines these days.
Now New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio wants to get in on the “left and more left” tug-of-war.
After spectacularly failing at getting non-progressives in America’s heartland to vote for them in 2016, Sen. Warren wants the party to double-down and lurch leftward:
In a speech delivered at the Netroots Nation conference on Saturday, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren suggested that the key to reinvigorating the Democratic party was listening to progressives and the left wing. The sentiment was the opposite of what others in her party, who have suggested reproductive rights and universal health care policy can be compromised on, have previously suggested would best move the party forward.
“If we’re going to be the people who lead the Democratic Party back from the wilderness and lead our country out of this dark time, then we can’t waste energy arguing about whose issue matters more or who in our alliance should be voted off the island,” Warren said, adding, “We are not a wing of today’s Democratic Party. We are the heart and soul of today’s Democratic Party.”
This could best be described as a “Coastal Strategy” for the Democrats. The members of the party who are in blue states on the coasts truly believe that most Americans are on board with progressive ideals despite all election evidence to the contrary since 2010 (2012 being the one anomaly).
If there were any lessons to be learned from their failure to deliver the presidency to Hillary Clinton in 2016, Fauxcahontas doesn’t seem to have been in class that day. When a party loses voters it has been able to rely upon for decades because those voters are upset about jobs that aren’t there anymore, maybe it should focus on that.
In April, I taped a show for Japanese television that brought together Americans from across the political spectrum to discuss the 2016 election. Some of the pro-Trump people were lifelong Democrats from middle America who had never voted for a Republican in their lives until last year. All said the same thing: they were tired of the Democrats blathering about working Americans and never delivering on their promises. A nanny-state pitch about green energy and single-payer health care probably isn’t going to resonate with these people.
Many will probably say that those of us on the right should take comfort in the fact that the Democrats want to remain clueless. There would be some comfort in that if the Republicans were firmly staking out ground on the other side of the aisle. Sadly, when the Democrats move more to the left, the GOP tends to get pulled in that direction.
Conservatives are largely left out in the cold in this equation, and that’s why there isn’t any real cause for celebration.
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