Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Time to Start Thinking Democratic Shake-Up?
With two week to go until Election Day, it may be premature to start tap-dancing on a grave. That said, there’s the question of what the Democrats’ next move (or moves) should be if the November vote doesn’t go their way.
Translation: losing control of the Senate, losing further ground in the House, no decisive gains at the state and local levels to distract from the story on Capitol Hill.
Under such a scenario, here are four candidates for a job change:
1) Debbie Wasserman Schultz. The Democratic National Committee chair has taken hits from within Democratic circles that she’s using her national position to advance her fortunes more so than the party’s (asking DNC staffers to work on your projects and trying to get the committee to pay for your clothes will create that kind of bad blood). In the 2014 election, here’s what we know of Wasserman Schultz’s performance: she’s a first-rate lightning rod (remember what she said — then had to take back — about Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker?) and a third-rate spin doctor (voters are going to flock to Democrats because they’ll ask “who has my back?” was her line this past weekend). Wasserman Schultz has vowed to serve out all of her four-year term, which would take her to the 2017 presidential inaugural. Maybe the White House wants to revisit the Big Book of Ambassadorial Vacancies.
2) Harry Reid. If Republicans pick up at least six seats and Reid’s relegated to minority status, will the current Senate Majority Leader willingly hand over the reins to Illinois Sen. Richard Durbin (that’s assuming Durbin’s re-elected). Why push Reid aside? Simple: just check the Senate races across the South where, to the disdain of incumbent Democrats, Reid’s become the biggest relationship third-wheel since Princess Diana dragged Camilla Parker Bowles into her marriage. The bottom line: Reid is combative, grim-faced, a practitioner of scorched-earth politics and hardly an ambassador of cheer — not whom you want in charge if you’re trying to make the Republicans the black-hat gang. Let’s see if party donors — the same ones who have problems with Wasserman Schultz — will put pressure on the Leader to step down.
3) Nancy Pelosi. You’re probably wondering why it took this long to get to the artist formerly known as Madame Speaker. We already know that she’s a political albatross: Republican strategists working on the March special election in Florida’s 13th CD told reporters that the thought of Pelosi moving one step closer to the Speakership was a powerful motivator for independent voters in that swing district — more so than Obamacare. Here’s the question for House Democrats moving forward, assuming they’re down to 195 or fewer seats post-election: Pelosi will turn 75 next March; she’s skippered her side of the aisle for over a decade now; it will take at least two cycles to get back the House and she’s a proven outside-the-beltway lightning rod. Would it be the right time to replace the current leadership with some younger blood?
4) 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. As one prominent Democratic strategist recently told The Hill, President Obama “should take a flamethrower to his office.” The question, assuming a less violent form of dismissal: who gets the boot? Is it Chief of Staff Denis McDonough, National Security Advisor Susan Rice, Communications Director Jennifer Palmieri? Or is the solution something other than surrounding the President with new faces (only Education Secretary Arne Duncan and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack remain from the original Obama cabinet) — i.e., a change (of mindset) higher than the staff level? As Brookings’ Stephen Hess recently surmised: “The problems are Obama’s, not his chief of staff’s. When you bring in somebody of a lesser stature, you’re just moving chairs around on the deck of the Titanic.”
Aye-aye.
To receive emailed updates from Bill’s campaign blog, “A Day at the Races”, go to the ”Sign Up” space on the upper righthand side of this page.
Published in General
Amazing how many Dear Leaders there are in the Democratic Party.
You used “scorched-earth” only once in your descriptions, but whoever stays or goes, this will be the constant in all these positions.
So it would seem this discussion is a bit “inside baseball.” I think we can look forward to more Paul Ryan pushing Granny off a cliff, more “Republicans want you to Die Quickly!,”, anyone who doesn’t vote Democrat wants women to die in coat-hanger abortions and conservatives just want to stop minorities from voting, etc, etc.
Are you suggesting the possibility there might be a change in emphasis or strategy on the part of Dems?
After the 1972 debacle, the Dems kicked out Jean Westwood; after 1964, the GOP ousted Goldwater-picked (more or less) RNC chair Dean Burch, so there’s plenty of precedent for using a leadership change to broadly hint at a tactical shift.
The fading of the effectiveness of the War on Women strategy won’t entirely change the Dems, but I’ll bet that as that party becomes more explicitly minority-based at the voting booths, the defense of affirmative action will become the Selma, the Ferguson of the next decade. Democrats can trim their sails on a lot of things–they did during Clinton–but the Holy Church of Affirmative Action can’t be touched.
Sandra Day O’Connor got surprisingly little kickback from mainstream media for saying that AA could be tolerated for about 25 years more, that is 2028; a battle over affirmative action can be “Demo-gogged” endlessly. They’ll pay little price for being anti-war (let’s face it, plenty of even we Pubs are sick of it at this point), and they’ll crank back the outside rhetoric about capitalism while cranking up the base about it.
They’ll remain the party of the cultural left, but that may be, surprisingly, played out. 2024 may not be an extension of 2014. The easy votes for their side have been gotten; there aren’t bushels of polygamist, age-of-consent-abolishing, heroin-legalizing ballots out there, so for the time being they’re beached at the edge of what’s electorally possible.
How the heck do you remember this stuff, Gary?
Thank you, Bill Whalen, thank you. Thinking of firing or relegating to obscurity such entirely deserving parties has put me in such a good mood it’ll last all day.
Next question–although I know that, after enjoying such a lovely high, I’m risking a downer by posing it: What happens here in California after the election? (The answer I fear: Nothing. Democrats will have swept every important election so soundly that the only difference will be they feel even more smug. Tell me I’m wrong about that, Bill–please.)
Peter: We would welcome you to Texas. Really. Anytime you want to move here, let us know.
Seawriter
Thanks, Peter!
A Peter Robinson compliment on historical memory is like having Frank Sinatra say, “Kid, you can sing”.
The Dems have two major demographic problems they will need to address:
If the Repubs are smart (insert joke here) they could capitalize well in the areas above. For the Dems to change course at this point, in this administration especially, would be to repudiate the lies they have been screaming for the last 20 years. They have built a coalition by turning demographic groups against each other, and they either have to keep that boiling or backtrack. The danger they face is that this rhetoric will likely cause it all to boil over out of their control.
I have only one bet to make — that, whoever gets the book (and Wasserman-Schultz will) — Valerie Jarrett will remain where she is . . . and next to nothing will change in the manner in which the anointed One operates.
Giving Jarrett the boot is the only way that Obama can have any chance at redeeming his presidency. Alas, you are likely correct. Jarrett is the Obama administration.
That would be true if the cultural left was stagnant. But it is growing and expanding its message to crowd out all else. The Common Core elite are creating a K-12 (even K-16) curriculum along their RaceClassGender agenda. American History is to begin during Reconstruction (i.e. the Jim Crow era). The only hint from the Founding period is Washington’s Farewell Address. WWII is only “We interned the Japanese and used nuclear weapons against them.” (Rob confirmed this from his godchild.)
There is a major movement to teach “Social Justice through math”
College is a place where whites are officially encouraged to renounce their “privilege.”
And on and on. Maybe polygamy, et. al., will dim as electoral issues, but the boundaries of culture have more edges to push, more new issues on which leftist cultural purity will be demanded.
Good point about the cultural left agenda being largely played out. Democrats will now shift their focus to the blocking and tackling needed for consolidating those “gains” throughout the country. But that doesn’t mean that progressives will pause in their push for more “progress.”
What we are seeing at the leading edge of the progressive movement is what I like to call “post-progressive socialism.” Blue cities like Seattle are not waiting for everyone else to catch up. With “cultural” issues firmly in hand the Seattle Left has turned its attention to economic issues.Everyone knows about the $15 minimum wage. Now they’re calling for $20. Witnessing a much-loved and respected old-style enviro-liberal politician being drummed out of office in favor of an inexperienced immigrant socialist has intimidated all Seattle politicians to the right of Rep. Jim (Baghdad Jim) McDermott.
Of course, nationally we already have “income inequality” and spokeswoman Elizabeth Warren pushing similar themes in an abstract sense. Local “success” stories will only enhance her standing as a visionary in the Democrat party.
I agree. Both of these approaches are numerically self-limiting.
It’s also likely that most Americans are tiring of those political themes even while harboring sympathy for some of the underlying issues.
With ever-increasing inter-racial marriage and as the subsequent ever-increasing multi-racial offspring reach voting age, the farce that is the racial grievance industry is living on borrowed time.
Eeyore, the cultural left keeps wants more, sure, but my point was more narrowly political: like it or not, the risks the Democrats took have paid off so far. The 2012 Democratic National Convention was such an abort-o-thon that even I, an admitted non-SoCon, was sure it was going to cost them, especially in Latino and other Catholic-rich areas.
Zip. Nuthin’. Nada. The cultural stuff didn’t propel them to victory, but it didn’t cost them either. There’s an equilibrium: people don’t much like abortion, but they want it around for the hardest cases; people are queasy about homosexuality, but they no longer regard it as perverted or evil.
There was once a balance on race: most whites were not too wild about the civil rights movement and its tactics, but there was broad admission that some kind of justice demanded an end to Jim Crow. The balance vanished when Democrats became so pussified on race matters (whoo, did I just blow past the C-of-C? Shame on me) that they began losing all the time, until Clinton changed that perception in the Nineties. We might be seeing something like that in the near future.
Peter:
Glad you enjoyed the thought of a Democratic purge.
As you know, California is a complicated story. I’ll have a piece in the Sacramento Bee on Sunday discussing, imo, the biggest changed reality for the California GOP in 2014 — and that’s paying scant attention to top-of-the-tickets that Republicans can’t win — the demographics won’t allow it — and focusing instead on legislative races (just as your friend Kevin McCarthy is trying to pick up three or four Republican congressional seats in California). Realpolitik.
Two reasons why legislative races matter: (1) to prevent the Democrats from a supermajority (this ties into maybe the biggest fight of Jerry Brown’s second term — amending Proposition 13, plus whatever other nitwit ideas that liberals wants to put on the ballot); (2) building a farm system of young talent that can blossom into credible statewide challengers.
Unfortunately, that’s not exactly immediate gratification. But we have to break this cycle of wildly hit-or-miss first-time gubernatorial candidates. So consider this election the first step in a multi-step rehab program.