Democrats won the presidency and held the House by margins so slim they’d make Weight Watchers proud. And the betting is they’ll fail to capture the Senate from Republicans.
Why did they fall so far short of the landslide they expected? Polls were outlandishly inaccurate, but pointing at them is like blaming a faulty thermometer for a grim chilly day — which is especially obtuse when you learned it was broken four years ago. The real reason Democrats lost ground is that voters hate their policies on raising taxes, ending fracking, opening borders, and other matters, as pollster Mark Penn pointed out in the Wall Street Journal.
The nuanced vote of centrist citizens, cashiering President Trump while rejecting leftist policies, was a stinging rebuke of the blue party and an existential threat to socialists. In response, the Justice Democrats defiantly but also defensively cried, “Damn the torpedoes, full steam ahead,” and demanded that the party brass retain all the ugly extremist promises voters rejected. But Democratic politicians do not differ from other politicians in yearning for power, and, harebrained though some may be, they aren’t mad enough to expect different results if they do exactly the same thing next time. In fact, they’d probably do worse because voters don’t like being ignored, and, oh yes, Republicans may soon not have Trump weighing down their prospects.
Democrats say a reckoning is coming inside the GOP, and admittedly, there’s a short-term internecine battle among Republicans over how to deal with Trump amid the Senate runoff races in Georgia. But that’s a skirmish, and the war over the future direction of the GOP is essentially over. For better or worse, it will be the party of social conservatism, of nationalism, of lower and lower-middle-class interests, of law and order, and increasingly of racial minorities who recognize that their best chance lies in freedom rather than in radical egalitarianism. Trump, absent his abrasiveness, showed the party a way to win, and it isn’t going back to the status quo ante. That’s why burn-it-to-the-ground Never Trumpers agree with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on a McCarthyite blacklist to make sure that no one who supported the 45th president ever works in this town again.
Many who joined the administration will find that the revolving door doesn’t work for them, which will doubtless be disappointing. But it’s among Democrats that the real bloodletting is about to begin.
During an election postmortem among Nancy Pelosi’s tearful Capitol Hill caucus, Rep. Abigail Spanberger of Virginia told colleagues, “We need to not ever use the word ‘socialist’ or ‘socialism’ ever again.” But the truth of this, the fact that the public doesn’t want socialism, doesn’t mean that leftist war drums will fall silent. They are thumping, and the latest beat was, again, from the Justice Democrats, whose Executive Director Alexandra Rojas issued a statement condemning Joe Biden’s plan to hire his lobbyist friend, Steve Ricchhetti, as a senior Oval Office adviser and centrist Rep. Cedric Richmond to run outreach to racial minorities. “If Joe Biden continues making corporate-friendly appointments to his White House, he will risk quickly fracturing the hard-earned goodwill his team built with progressives to defeat Donald Trump,” said Rojas with menace aforethought.
Biden seems unlikely to heed these angry cries. He will adopt many left-wing policies that will be damaging, but he wants to muddy this for voters, especially by avoiding appointments that make radicalism clear and acknowledged. Hence the reports that he will freeze Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren out of his Cabinet, thereby excluding the two most effective left-wingers in the Democratic political constellation. No one likes to be out in the cold with his or her nose pressed up against the window, looking at everyone enjoying themselves in the cozy room within.
I’ve never much liked popcorn, but those who do should sit back with a bagful and watch the internecine Democratic show. It’s going to be spectacular. Biden’s tacking and veering from being centrist in the primary, to wooing the extreme Left in the general, then going back to the center as voters went to the polls, and now with jobs for the boys in transition, was cynical and effective. But he’s not as deft as his hero, former President Barack Obama, at convincing a roomful of people with divergent opinions that he agrees with each of them.
The Left understandably hates it and doesn’t like being played for a sap any more than the electorate does. And those two forces are 180 degrees opposed. Biden is about to learn the truth of Abraham Lincoln’s maxim that you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.
