President Barack Obama.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev.
These are the leaders of the Democratic Party, and immediately behind them stand Reps. Barney Frank, D-Mass., and Henry Waxman, D-Calif., Sens. Al Franken, D-Minn., and Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., Sens. John Conyers, D-Mich., and George Miller, D-Calif., Sens. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., and John Kerry, D-Mass.; the SEIU and whatever name ACORN goes by these days; the NEA and AFT so accurately portrayed in “Waiting for ‘Superman’ “; MoveOn.org, MSNBC and Media Matters; George Soros and his puppets across the country.
Where are the “Truman Democrats”? The “JFK Democrats”? Even though former President Clinton is out dutifully stumping for endangered incumbents across the country, where are his troops in the leadership of what became a radical party imposing radical change on America?
A shattering defeat of the Democrats — from top to bottom, east to west, and not just in congressional contests but in state house and state legislature elections as well — is necessary for the country.
But it is also necessary for the Democrats, currently almost wholly within the grip of a combination of hard-left special interests and national leadership from coastal elites and, astonishingly, from great wealth. Vice President Biden recently and hilariously warned that the GOP was not “your father’s Republican Party,” but rather was a “whole new breed of cat.”
He should have spared us the mirth and instead asked himself and his party what had happened to it that it had become so far removed from working men and women and middle-class Americans that it thought nothing of spending a trillion dollars on a stimulus that produced nothing, and jamming through Obamacare which is serially altering, if not ending, health care plans of employees and retirees as it rolls out across the country.
This isn’t my grandfather’s Democratic Party, which he loyally supported for all of his adult life, nor is it the Democratic Party of the Ohio I grew up in, with its standard bearers John Glenn and John Gilligan.
The Democratic Party is now an agent of European soft socialism — not the sort that wishes to own the means of production, but the model that wants taxes very high, and to make public benefits ubiquitous, if not very satisfactory. It is run by an elite with more than enough personal assets to enjoy comfort and ease despite the double-digit unemployment their policies have brought about, and to avoid the lines that Obamacare imposes while accessing whatever drugs and surgeries aren’t available on the non-Cadillac health care plans they have mandated.
This is the Democratic Party of anti-Israel gestures and pro-ground zero mosque declarations. Its enemies are the Fox News Channel, Catholic bishops who believe in their catechism, entrepreneurs who want to reinvest their profits, and parents who want their kids out of the classrooms of lousy teachers and out of the schools of lousy principals.
The only way for Democrats of traditional Democratic policies and approaches to get their party back is for the same sort of shock to be delivered Democratic elites as Republican elites suffered in 2006 and 2008.
The defeat on Nov. 2 will have to be so large as to mock the president’s “foreign money” narrative and to silence Pelosi’s already wild ramblings.
It will have to be so large and so threatening that the Senate Democrats look past both Obama’s agent Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., and the hard-left Schumer to a new face, voice and approach even as House Democrats push aside all the remnants of the gang that led them back into the political wilderness after four short years because they imposed San Francisco economics on an unwilling nation.
The country needs to deliver a crushing blow to the Democrats, and many Democrats will be cheering that very thing on the night of 11/2.
Examiner Columnist Hugh Hewitt is a law professor at Chapman University Law School and a nationally syndicated radio talk show host who blogs daily at HughHewitt.com.
