Blame Barack Obama and both of the Clintons for the pain that their party now feels.
Both won two terms without much trouble. Both projected a moderate vibe whatever their policies. Both lured independents and centrists into their coalitions. But the sum of their efforts, when taken together, was to leave the party they had served up a tree.
Before 2006, after George W. Bush had won reelection, Democrats embraced a “50 state strategy,” whose aim was to expand the map. The party’s leaders — Rahm Emanuel, Chuck Schumer, Howard Dean — recruited candidates who fit with the districts and states they ran in. They freed them up on issues like guns and abortion, which were an obstacle to Democratic victory in many locations.
Aided by Republican errors like Iraq and Katrina, they won. Two years later, Iraq had been pacified, but a financial collapse ended the dreams of the president’s party. The first black president swept into office, winning the House and (eventually) a filibuster-proof Senate, amid claims of the press that he was the newest Franklin D. Roosevelt.
But the Obama-era dream of a new progressive era fell apart in his first year in office. He fixed upon healthcare as his signature issue, choosing a big sweeping bill over more modest measures, and, when the bill hit a wall of intense opposition, he chose to muscle it through and not bend.
The critical month that defined his entire eight years was January 2010. In a stunning rebuke, bright blue Massachusetts chose a Republican to replace the late Sen. Ted Kennedy. It was a flashing red signal that the president drove through without looking when he pushed the Senate-passed bill back through the House using a technical loophole.
In the midterm elections that year, the voters took 63 seats away from Democrats in the House and six in the Senate, in addition to six governorships. In 2014, just after the healthcare bill went into effect, the pattern repeated itself: Republicans gained thirteen seats in the House, a stunning nine seats in the Senate, and two more governorships. These bench-clearing massacres, coming in such close succession, set the Democrats up for their party’s modern nadir after 2016.
How many of these senators and governors lost to Obama and healthcare would have been able to beat Donald Trump in 2016, had they only been in office and positioned to run?
And let’s not forget Bill and Hillary Clinton, who made sure that their party would limp into the 2016 elections in something other than maximum shape. Still seething at Hillary’s loss in 2008 to the Illinois upstart, they began early on to make more than certain that no credible figures would rise from the rubble. They successfully avoided any nasty surprises. People whose talents might have been greater than Hillary’s were scared away at the start by their ironclad grip on officials and donors.
This is how you end up with the 2020 field (at the start) of 20-odd people, including two socialists, a billionaire hippie, a very large cohort of gender/race warriors, and one geriatric former vice president, who says odd things at moments but seems like the only one in touch with regular people. It’s like they’re starting out all over again.
If you’re looking for why the Trump presidency happened, look no further than Obama and both of Clintons. They wiped out the field and then shot the wounded.
