Just watched the Sunday morning shows and I got that same old sinking feeling. The Democrats are gonna blow it again.
I’m disgusted to the point of wanting to switch from the Democratic Party back to being an Independent, a political preference I held for many years before moving back to Maryland, which has an antiquated closed primary – meaning you must declare for a party if you want to vote for their candidate. So I had to become a Democrat to vote for Bernie in the last election. Closed primaries. What nonsense. In the end it only discourages people from taking part in the political process. But back to the matter at hand. The dysfunctional self-immolating Democrats.
One of the highest compliments I was ever paid came from a colleague who said, “If I’m ever in an alley fight, I’d trust you to cover my back.” The Democratic Party is currently in the alley fight of their lives. Not only are they terrible fighters, they can’t even cover their colleague’s backs by getting on the same page.
Meantime, their opponents are on the same page, fully funded, well organized and ruthless, using a deadly political schematic developed over many years and with only one goal. Winning. The Republicans are out for political blood while the Dems are once again coming off like a debating society, filled with book-learning but with no street smarts at all.
First comes Chuck Schumer of New York, that smiling gentleman of the Senate, sounding more like a member of a Harvard debate club than the loyal opposition. He sounds like Barack Obama all over again, not a street fighter, but polite, measured and trying so hard to be civil. It didn’t work for Obama and it won’t work for Schumer and the Democrats now. The Republicans are uncompromising. They are going to steal his lunch money, kick him to the ground and then laugh about it over cigars and congnac.
Nice and civil does not work with these cutthroats. You have got to go over their heads and take your political truth about Trump directly to the people.
At least Nancy Pelosi had the gaul to issue the opinion that Donald Trump is unfit for the Presidency, which is pretty obvious to anybody whose been paying attention. Well, good for her, considering what the Republicans would be doing to Hillary, were she in the White House instead of Trump. My God, they’d be dreaming up all kinds of insane allegations against Mrs. Clinton, before sending their followers into the streets screaming for her blood. Or at least her incarceration. It would be the nonsense of her emails and Benghazi and Vince Foster all over again. And so, Minority Leader of the House, Nancy Pelosi, stating the obvious, at least made me feel a little bit better. Good for her. At least it was something. Something more than I’ve come to expect.
And then came Dianne Feinstein. Democratic war-horse of California, who incredibly refused to back Pelosi’s play in calling Trump unfit. She isn’t ready to “go that far” she said. Well, when will she be ready? When the Republican machine has spent its billions to recapture the House and Senate and Russia’s best friend on the world stage, Donald J. Trump, is on his way to winning a second term as President?
Think it can’t happen? This is the country that elected George W. Bush twice and then followed up with Trump, the delusional man-child from New York. A man who, by his own admissions and actions, seems to prefer dictators and autocrats to democratically elected leaders. This guy is clearly dangerous.
And what are the Democrats doing? They are in a street fight with an outlaw gang that cares nothing for rules and regulations or what’s best for the country. Backed by billionaire investors, their only rule is doing whatever they must to win. They continue to be as uncompromising as they were as the “party of no” when, for more than seven years, President Obama kept making the same mistake, over and over again. He kept trying to compromise with a party that has no interest in a compromising on anything. Their only interest is in winning and kicking their opposition to the ground in the process.
With Schumer, Pelosi and Feinstein, we are getting more of the same old Democratic Party line. It did not work for Obama and it didn’t work for Hillary when both she and Michelle Obama tried to take the high ground proclaiming, “When they go low, we go high!” It bombed and so did Mrs. Clinton. And now the party that couldn’t win a political street fight in the past refuses to change its losing ways, putting politeness and civility ahead of bare knuckles politics.
They need to turn the reigns of their party over to Bernie Sanders and Liz Warren, the tough twosome from the good old DFL up in Minnesota, Amy Klobuchar and Al Franken, Ted Lieu from California and Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, and then get the hell out of the way. This current post-Wasserman Schultz leadership has nothing to offer other than more of the same, a formula that failed in the past and will fail in the future. The Dems need to get back to being Democrats rather than neo-Liberals like Pelosi, Schumer and Feinstein who come off more like moderate Republicans than the true progressives their party once represented and needs to get back to representing once again.