"Depend upon it, sir, when a woman loses an election to one of the least-loved men in America, it concentrates the mind wonderfully." —Samuel Johnson, possibly.
Jeet Heer is the latest — and certainly not the last — lefty to perform an autopsy on the corpse of the Harris-Walz campaign, complaining in The Nation today that "the great foe of serenity is listening to interviews with Democratic Party strategists" who ran "a vacuous campaign that would involve no concrete commitment to real politics."
"The Democratic Party needs a fundamental shake-up if it is to recover from the failure of 2024, Heer writes, but instead is treated to "excuses and blaming others" by losers who insist they ran a "flawless" campaign for Kamala Harris.
"The party needs to come to terms with the fact the loss to Trump was not an accident that befell the party—but the result of bad decisions made by Joe Biden and his staff," Heer notes, "which left Harris in an almost impossible position." Harris, however, "proceeded to make this bad situation even worse by hiring Biden’s staffers and following their advice to run a no-content campaign."
I'd argue that the only thing worse than Harris running a content-free campaign would be Harris running a campaign chock full of content. It took a Herculean effort by the Trump campaign to remind voters of the seemingly vacuous veep's radical record, but thanks to smart advertising and the return of free speech to Elon Musk's X, they got the job done.
Voters largely knew the content of Harris's character despite her content-free campaign and thoroughly rejected it.
But it wasn't just Harris that voters rejected last month. Democrats lost four Senate seats and would have given the Republicans a bigger lead in Congress had California not gotten away with stealing four House seats in broad daylight.
There's much else wrong with Heer's column, including gems like calling Liz Cheney a "far-right Republican." Man, those progressive blinders sure are thick. But he's correct that "self-satisfaction and complacency" will lead to more Democrat losses in the future.
When Mike Dukakis lost 41 states to George Bush in 1988, Democrats first exiled Dukakis back to Massachusetts, never to embarrass them again. Then, they did some true soul-searching and committed to a serious course correction back toward the center.
Today's Democrats? Not so much.
The democrats still haven’t course corrected away from absolute insanity. They’re not tired of losing. https://t.co/GMaFF0GRjV
— Buck Sexton (@BuckSexton) December 10, 2024
The Democrat Young Turks who came of age during Barack Obama's ascendence sincerely believe that Harris was electable and that Tim Walz was masculine. They are both radical and out of touch with regular Americans.
Obama was able to veil his radicalism under a veneer of "One America" moderation and almost zero accomplishments for critics to point out. Obama's camouflage is so complete that a majority of Americans still look back fondly on his years in the Oval Office — even as the booby traps he planted (Obamacare, the Iran Deal, etc.) explode all around us years later.
Obama's intellectual heirs — if you'll allow me to stretch the word "intellectual" completely out of shape — like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, have no talent or perhaps desire to mask their radicalism. While I have no problem with Democrats doing nothing but losing from now until the end of time, that won't happen. So the next time they do manage to win (or steal) an election, a moderate would be better for the country than another radical.
So where is today's equivalent of the 1980s-1990s Democratic Leadership Council or the charismatic young moderate like Bill Clinton to steer the party closer to the center?
The Democrat Party needs more than the "fundamental shake-up" Heer wants. It needs new Democrats.
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