Whipped into a rhetorical frenzy at a rally on Friday, the leader of the Democratic Party told his audience that the president of the United States and the speaker of the House of Representatives “don’t give a shit about people.”
Exhibiting all the class of a defiant eighth grader, DNC Chair Tom Perez slammed President Trump and Paul Ryan to a raucous crowd of rally goers in Newark, hollering his insults from behind a wooden podium and onto the Facebook Live stream of the sponsoring organization.
This after his party spent months decrying Trump’s off-color language and temperament.
As David Weigel of the Washington Post noted on Sunday, “[Democrats] new, harsher tone came after Clinton and the entire Democratic Party tried, and failed, to brand Trump as too crude to serve in the White House.” Weigel resurfaced the Clinton campaign’s “Role Models” television advertisement that showed children watching Trump make crude comments, juxtaposed with Clinton gently reminding viewers, “Our children and grandchildren will look back at this time, the choices we are about to make, the goals we’ll strive for, the principles we will live by, and we need to make sure they can be proud of us.”
Whatever happened to leading by example? I guess that sentiment is out the window now that Clinton has been relegated to the woods of Chappaqua. (Or not?)
On the campaign trail last year, Perez dinged Trump’s “temperament” and praised Clinton’s message of “optimism” and “inclusion.” In February he said of the Democratic Party, “We need a chair who cannot only take the fight to Donald Trump but make sure that we talk about our positive message of inclusion and opportunity and talk to that big tent of the Democratic Party.”
In fact, during the primaries Perez criticized Trump’s rhetoric, declaring, “This is a nation in which the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards those who seek to expand opportunity, not toward those who substitute cynicism for optimism.”
Given Democrats’ new insistence that we take everything our leaders say literally, Perez’s literal belief that the president of the United States “doesn’t give a shit about people” seems awfully cynical.
Which direction is the arc bending in now?
Emily Jashinsky is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
