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The Party of the Living Dead, Part Two
Here are the headlines in The Daily Mail:
Clinton leaves leaderless, rudderless and talentless Democratic Party in crisis – with only pensioners Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders to turn to
- Defeated Democrats are in crisis after humiliating defeat of Hillary Clinton and a Republican clean sweep in both houses
- Senior figures admit they have no shining new talent to step into the breach
- Only stars are Elizabeth Warren, 67, and Bernie Sanders, 75, while leaders in Senate and House of Representatives are both pensioners too
- Chairs of the Democratic National Committee have either quit in disgrace or been branded ‘disgusting’ for unethical conduct
- Hawaii senator Brian Schatz warns navel-gazing got party into mess and says: ‘We need to open our minds and expand our Rolodexes.’
Need I say more?
Published in Politics
If only! We’ve seen obituaries for the Democrat and Republican parties every time a wave election hits.
After 2012 that was it for Republicans, they were done!
After 2006 & 2008 they were similarly DOA. Same for the Dems in 2004 and I’m sure people were in a panic in 1980 and 1984 about Democratic dreams for the White House.
Oh, I wasn’t supposed to laugh out loud?
The Democrats will not be dead for long. I can easily see Nancy Pelosi becoming Speaker of the House by January 2019.
American voters are fickle.
If Trump has shown us anything it’s that above all the working class wants respect. The Democrats’ contempt for the non-minority poor is no longer hidden, and their contempt for minorities is barely under the surface. They think they can distract the working class by offering more free stuff, but no amount of free stuff can disguise the fact that the Democrats openly hate white people and take minorities for granted. If they want to survive they have to realize this simple fact.
Fortunately for the Democrats, whoever emerges from the shadows will be turned into an instant star by a fawning media (see BHO). It’s sort of like skipping grades in school. If you’re a Democrat, can put together a coherent sentence, and “present” well in a suit, you just went from 7th grade to college graduation in a flash.
Come on down, George Clooney and your most presentable cause-driven spouse.
I thought the only people who still had Rolodexes were Republicans. It’s good to learn that it’s not true.
That is what they were saying about the dems until obama came out of nowhere.
This meme again? Remember when Republicans were the party that would never win anything ever again?
How long did it take for Barack Obama to rise from obscurity to become the Presidential nominee?
From an Illinois state senator in 1997 to President of the USA in 2008.
Eight years is plenty of time for some dashing young politico to be plucked from obscurity and groomed to become the next great crusader.
You better believe they’ve got a short-list of candidates to be their next wunderkind.
The only way to truly kill a political party is to bankrupt them. Up here in the Great White North we almost managed to do it with the Liberal Party (by banning all corporate and union donations, and limiting individual donations to C$1,000 per year), but the decentralized nature of American political parties makes it virtually impossible.
No raises for federal workers for the next 30 years.
I remember that. After the 2008 election, the Republicans were supposedly going the way of the whigs. But in January 2010, Scott Brown, a Republican, won the special election in Massachusetts to fill the vacancy in the US Senate. In November 2010, Republicans won back the US House of Representatives.
Now that Republicans are responsible for governing the country, every thing that goes wrong in the country can be construed to be the fault of Donald Trump and the Republicans. If Trump makes good on his campaign promise to start a trade war with Mexico, Mexico’s economy will be hurt and this will result in more illegal Mexican immigrants coming to the US, wall or no wall. It will also hurt the US economy.
Is Trump as ignorant as he sounded on the campaign trail? Let’s hope it was all just a show, to rile people up.
I agree with the comments that an obituary for the Democrats is premature. Like statements that I read all this year about the death of the GOP, liberals will need someplace to go.
That being said, while the Democrat Party isn’t broke, it’s certainly badly bent. The lack of an identifiable talent pool is a structural problem (which can be remedied).
But the article also points out that they are still not willing to deal with fundamental problems that led to this wipe-out:
“Jaime Harrison, the South Carolina party chairman, downplayed the idea that Trump’s nationalistic populism should necessarily push the Democratic Party leftward. ‘That might be overthinking what happened,’ he said.”
“Harrison argued it’s more about finding the right messengers to take the Democratic platform to the pockets of the electorate that have drifted away from the party, naming New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand and New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker among others as potential role models for other Democrats.”
Accordng to this they have nothing to learn. It’s the right message; they just had the wrong messenger (including the thousand state-level legislators they’ve lost this decade).
They can bounce back, but my guess is that they could be in the wildreness for a long time.
I forgot about Booker. Booker’s got game, yo.
I think the activism of younger people on the Left has reached a critical mass that will result in street violence across America. It will be blamed on Trump the way the Second Intifada was blamed on Netanyahu, but those are convenient ploys to obscure the organization and planning involved.
There’s a very important interview up at Legal Insurrection. It’s with branding research expert Anne Sorock of an outfit called Frontier Lab. At CPAC in 2015 she told William A. Jacobson of LI that not only would Trump run, but he would win. She explains why in the interview. She conludes:
There are also links to Frontier Lab papers on BLM and Occupy Wall Street, both of which warrant study (as do Frontier’s other papers.)
Just get ready for the new Senator from California, Kamala Harris, who has the perfect gender/ethnic/race mix and is a reliable Democratic hack – in her role as California AG she tried to force non-profits that she disagreed with politically to divulge their contributors so that they could be intimidated; at least until the courts intervened to shut her down. You will be hearing a lot about her.
In January 2019 Pelosi will be 2 months from her 80th birthday, let’s hope Nancy is there to provide the (D)’s with all the energy one would expect of an octogenarian.
Many of the promising newcomers were sent home by GOP challengers during the midterms due to Obama’s policy failures, leaving mostly entrenched senior members in safe districts. It’s no mystery that the Democrats now have a talent deficit.
Economic growth. It’s all about economic growth. Get the economy consistently growing 3% or more, so that
allmost* of those college grads can get jobs and start living their lives, and the Republicans will rule for 30 years.Otherwise, they’re out in four.
It’s also noteworthy that improved economic growth is the only way the economy will ever throw off enough tax revenue to service the debt.
*Not much we can do for the womyn studies majors.
The Clinton/Obama years have not been kind to the party.
When Bill Clinton was inaugurated in 1993 he could rally support from 30 Democratic governors. When Barack Obama leaves office in January there will be 15.
Stories like this were somewhat prevalent during the midterms two years ago. A number of lefty pundits pointed out then that the Obama “machine” never shared its blueprints. They’re starting from scratch, so expect more Soros. The first step is explaining the election away, as they already are (cause: racism).
The Dead are their most loyal demographic.
As a couple of others have said, I expect to hear a lot about Cory Booker, Senator from NJ. He spoke at my daughter’s graduation from Fairleigh Dickinson University a few years ago when he was mayor of Newark, and while I cannot stand his politics, he is very personable, and would win a lot of public speaking contests. I expect him to eventually be a presidential candidate, and he could be tough. Needs to have greater name recognition, but the media will take care of that :-(
This is the larger point. Nobody is saying that the Dems are finished, but they have a very weak farm system, and those take time to build. Sure, they’ll trot someone out for 2020, but even if they can get zir elected, there won’t be much talented support in Congress. Thanks Obama!
This looks like a good bet. People forget that Obama didn’t arise out of nowhere. I recall reading a WSJ front page write-up on this mysterious rising star who was then running for state office in Illinois. By 2004 he was a big enough deal to be given a convention keynote slot. Kamala Harris is probably more accomplished today than Obama was then, and she’s been seen as a rising star for quite some time. Corey Booker is another name tossed around a lot.
I think he was supposed to be the first black president but Obama moved first. Booker is still under 50, so he’s got time as well as game.
I’m sure T Bone will vote for him..
Interesting thought experiment: will there be as much passion to elect the second black president as there was with the first?
Also, I am seeing conflicting stories about the GOP ground game. The Trump campaign didn’t have one, so now we seem to be dismissing the importance of a get-out-the-vote operation. Others are saying the RNC and state organizations ran the ground game independent of the campaign. If true, we have to be wary of allowing the first impression to become myth.
I’m also kind of curious: Especially since 2012 there has been a lot of focus on the focus and detail of the Obama campaign’s ground game and how to emulate it. Given how Democrat turn-out collapsed among a segment of the electorate that didn’t seem to give a rat’s rear end over the scandals, what if the success of the Democrat turn-out machine is unique to the that side of the electorate? That the tools and messaging is more effective with certain characteristics of liberal voters and would be less effective with conservative voters for a variety of reasons having to do with lifestyle, motivation, sense of community, etc.
Hah! I had forgotten all about that one. We’ll have to bookmark it for 2020.
Yes. The argument will be that Obama wasn’t really black because his roots wouldn’t have qualified him for reparations.
@thereticulator Maybe the Dems have binders full of Rolodexes?
As my hero Instapundit might say, Heh.
PS My number one hero post Reagan is Brian Lamb, founder of C-Span. He changed the world of American political junkies.