Former Democratic governor Steve Beshear sat inside a Kentucky diner and drawled a picture of Obamacare’s benefits to his state on Tuesday night. Meanwhile, minority congressional leaders Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer attacked President Donald Trump for being a corporate sellout despite his middle-class advocacy. The House lawmaker even called him a “populist”. Other members of her party settled on different terms: Trump pandered to his “right-wing base” in his speech to Congress, said Sen. Patty Murray, and he did so by offering a “wish list of conservative issues,” Sen. Dianne Feinstein observed. Then there was the guy who attacked the president for being un-conservative, a deficit-buster and negligent on entitlement reform: Virginia Democrat, believe it or not, Mark Warner.
Perhaps the stiffest challenge the minority party faces in its efforts to fight the president is that it doesn’t know what to fight. Is it everything? Cory Booker, a New Jersey senator and prospective White House contender in 2020, said amid Betsy Devos’s confirmation controversy that he didn’t “even want to be consenting to [Trump’s] government in any way right now.” A few weeks later and it seems like his colleagues can still relate.
Trump remains a confounding political opponent. Free of electoral concerns, he’s continued to message hazardously at a self-described “C+” level as president—not that doing so with an F-minus at times denied him the presidency. On policy, he’s equally scattered: As Mike Warren noted in his mourning roundup (that spelling being appropriate for conservatives), Trump made a Republican case for big government in his address. That includes “a pitch for more infrastructure spending, paid family leave, and ‘accessible and affordable’ childcare,” as well as an emerging curiosity with Medicaid expansion. Democrats ought to consider themselves fortunate to have Trump as a possible partner on such issues. They may not have had one with a different Republican in office.
Yet their reflexively partisan opposition to the White House has them uncoordinated. It’s not just Tuesday, when they deployed Beshear to give the party’s official rebuttal to Trump’s speech, while lawmakers in Washington found several acute angles to criticize the president. It’s their handling of Judge Neil Gorsuch, a man whom Oregon senator Jeff Merkley wanted to torpedo right away, and for whom Sen. Schumer created a new Supreme Court confirmation “standard“, and whom Sen. Feinstein, the Judiciary Committee’s ranking member, regards as a swell fellow. Don’t ask this trio to conduct a three-man weave, because they’ll bump into each other.
Members of Congress routinely frame their support or opposition to a matter using their home-state vernacular. It’s why a senator like New Mexico’s Tom Udall mentioned immigration and a border wall in his response to the president’s remarks on Tuesday. But the many messages Democrats had for Trump after the speech can’t be traced to just local or regional interests. It’s that they don’t like the man for several reasons, and they’re still trying to settle on the biggest ones as to why.
