Last Thursday’s debate was supposed to be a boon for Democrats, but there are signs and signals everywhere that this is a party in trouble at the top — and maybe everywhere else, too.
Presidential contender Marianne Williamson was locked out of the most recent debate, after appearing in the first two rounds, for not meeting the DNC’s entry requirements. But she did watch, and concluded that “We might be in trouble here,” based on what she saw — or rather, didn’t see. On MSNBC she said, “This president is not just a politician, he is a phenomenon. The Democrats are sharpening their knives and he will be bringing a gun to this battle.”
I’m not sure Williamson and I watched the same debate, the debate in which the term “white supremacist” was freely thrown down at Trump by Joe Biden, the supposed moderate in the Dems’ crowded field. Trump, who not only has Jewish grandkids but has worked closely with Don King and even with Al Sharpton, was called just about the worst possible thing in American politics, with zero evidence. And the rest of the candidates joined in the Bizarro World accusation. It isn’t so much that the Democrats are bringing a knives to a gunfight; it’s more like they’re bringing kazoos to the symphony.
Jonathan Chait, another left-leaning writer, also noticed his party’s predicament in his latest for New York magazine. Chait worries that Biden is the only candidate who might not be “too radical” to win in 2020, but that he might be “too old.” Chait notes that “general election voters tend to punish more ideologically extreme candidates,” but that the Democratic candidates are mistaken in their belief that primary voters are “ready to embrace socialism, or at least something close to it.” The part of Chait’s article that really caught my eye, however, is when he describes nearly two-dozen presidential contenders as “racing left, treating the consensus on progressive Twitter as though it were a simulacrum of the real Democratic Party.”
It’s one thing for Donald Trump to use Twitter to blast through the veil of political correctness that shades everything the Mainstream Media publishes. For Republican voters, and more than a few frustrated moderates and centrists Democrats, it’s liberating. It’s quite another thing when Democratic presidential candidates use Twitter to “embrace and extend” the political correctness (and the progressive radicalism) that infests left-wing Twitter — and that the rest of the country has rightly tired of.
Meanwhile, the New York Times launched another assault on Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh on Saturday night. The whole thing was so ill-fated, poorly-sourced, and just plain wrong that it’s already backfiring. Right-leaning Twitter favorite John Ekdahl tweeted that this latest smear job was “the most politically clarifying event in my life, and it is why, as the New York Times seems intent on reminding us, I will crawl over broken glass to vote for a guy I don’t particularly like next year.” He voted for Libertarian Gary Johnson in 2016. Reading through the replies, the NYT‘s effort is backfiring so badly that it has people excited to give money and time to moderate GOP Senator Susan Collins, who usually generates less excitement than a prom punch bowl spiked with Demerol.
There’s infighting on the Dem side, too. POLITICO’s Sarah Ferris reported last night that moderate House Democrats are worried that the leadership might move ahead with impeachment — and destroy their majority next year. Democratic Rep. Anthony Brindisi (N.Y.-22) warned, “It’s very frustrating for me — someone coming from a district that was one of the districts that helped get us into the majority — having so much focus on things like impeachment or other issues that are divisive.” Rep. Stephanie Murphy (D-Fla.) took a look at an alarming internal poll showing that voters think the party is “prioritizing impeachment over other issues.”
ASIDE: The one place where the Democrats are playing it smart is the Senate. They’re making solid plays to flip Colorado and Arizona, and maybe enough seats to take control. Keep an eye on your local race if you have one this year, and maybe commit to doing some volunteer work.
And as we’ve seen over the last couple of months, Democratic presidential candidates are prioritizing racial division, socialized medicine, open borders, and health benefits for illegals over… well, pretty much every issue Americans actually care about.
Not that I want this to happen, but Trump ought to be beatable next year. The GOP is still in turmoil as its Great Realignment continues, and the vocal minority of NeverTrumpers have never been more vocal or Never-Trumpy. And even a Trump supporter like me must admit from time to time than his antics can just be exhausting sometimes. But as Victor Davis Hanson pointed out this weekend, the modern Democratic Party has become a “revolutionary Jacobin movement that believes socialism is our salvation, that identity politics is our creed, that gun confiscation is our duty, that the abrupt end of fossil fuels is coming very soon, that open borders is our new demography, and that the archetypical unmarried, childless, urban hipster is our model woke citizen.”
The question voters must ask themselves is this: Do I want a president who has made strides on restoring economic and wage growth, who is confronting China on trade, standing up to the mullahs, wiping out ISIS, hitting back against stultifying political correctness, standing out of the way of American’s unprecedented energy boom, securing the southern border, cutting taxes and regulations… but whose tweets annoy me sometimes. Or do I want a president who promises to undo literally all of that — and more?
I keep saying that with the 24/7 air cover provided to them by the media, the schools, and our cultural “betters” in Hollywood and New York, all the Democrats have to do is not act crazy.
But they just can’t help themselves, can they?
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