Face it, Democrats, where you are at the start of 2017 is not where you thought you would be.
Just eight years ago you were looking at several decades of liberal governance under your very own Franklin D. Roosevelt, with united control of the federal government. Now, as they say, you can drive to Utah from Florida without passing through one state that is not under unified GOP governance. Your political leadership is now geriatric, and your candidate cupboard is bare. And what set of miscreants brought this upon you? Look no further than your most recent two-term-winning presidents, so glib, so winning, and so very persuasive that they lured you out on a limb that they sawed off behind you, and left you to fend for yourselves.
First is our man-of-the-world 44th president, whose superb education at all the best places failed to include fundamentals of power, such as that weakness abroad invites further predation, and that no domestic program can succeed and be stable unless it rests on a broad and bipartisan base.
In 2009, with healthcare stalled in Congress, and Scott Brown’s surprise win showing the range of disquiet, any president but President Obama would have pulled the bill back, called in both parties, and come up with something more modest that could have been passed.
Obama did not. Soothed by a press that called him a messiah, sure he was born to do things momentous, he muscled it through on a party-line vote plus what was seen as a dirty-trick measure. He was convinced that people would come in time to adore it, and that his own special brand of electoral magic would be able to pull his side through.
Suffice it to say that neither thing happened — and in the elections that followed when Obama was not on the ballot, issues that rose from the healthcare debacle mowed down line after line of Democratic incumbents like the Union artillery destroyed Pickett’s Charge. 2010 was the reaction to the bill’s passage, 2014 was the year people began losing their plans and their doctors, and 2016 was the year premiums rose by one-fourth just before the election, doing Hillary Clinton no good.
When the dust cleared, Democrats had lost 1,030 seats at the state and federal level and were at their lowest ebb since the late 1920s. And then, just when your party was hurting, you were dealt blow number two by old Bill.
With a candidate bench verging on practically nothing, the last thing you needed was someone to scare off potential contenders, but that happened to be what you got. Rolling in money since 2009 due to the pay-to-play system that had reigned while she held office, backed to the hilt by friends in high places, Clinton Inc. made it clear from the moment in 2013 that she stepped down from office that 2016 was Hillary’s Moment, and challenges to her would not be allowed.
No nasty surprises like 2008, when a hope-and-change tyro had zoomed out of nowhere; in fact, no surprises at all. The only surprise, if in fact there was one, was that once again Hillary the idea proved more impressive than Hillary the flesh and blood person. When this proved to be evident, it was too late for much to be done. Hauled over the primary finish line in June by institutional power, she went on in November to lose to the least popular winner in history, whose voters had huge reservations about him.
The Democrats’ saviors had done their side in.
Noemie Emery, a Washington Examiner columnist, is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and author of “Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families.”
