Poor Richard Cohen. This dude infused with Trump Derangement Syndrome has finally realized that what the Democrats are running on doesn’t actually help in the focus on defeating Trump. And actually helps Trump win
Democrats, stop embracing losing issues and focus on getting rid of Trump
The bevy of Democrats running for president seems determined to test my silent vow never to vote Republican, especially for President Trump. The truth is that I cannot imagine that happening, but I can imagine entering the voting booth with about a colonoscopy level of enthusiasm. Please, can we get this over with?
At the moment, the party is squabbling over what is called forced busing to achieve school desegregation. It seems the party has forgotten that, with the possible exception of the Civil War draft, no program has been more hated by working-class Democrats — more whites than blacks, but plenty of blacks as well. In large U.S. cities, busing was seen as an effort by liberals to send white kids to schools they would not, for a moment, send their own kids to. In Boston, the spiritual home of the antibusing movement in the 1960s, the populace had not been as furious since King George III bivouacked his unwashed redcoats in the tidy homes of American patriots.
Yeah, that’s pretty much an issue that almost no one cares about, being 2019.
But the Democratic Party is on a tear. One by one, its candidates have embraced losing issue after losing issue. First came reparations for slavery, a noble idea lacking only popular support and practicality and possibly amounting to yet another attempt to right a wrong with money. Before that, the various candidates raised their hands in support of Medicare-for-all, which could strip millions of people of their private insurance plans. That is sure to be characterized by Trump as socialized medicine with the sick growing old and dying, covered in cobwebs while waiting to see the doctor. GOP strategists must be hyperventilating over all the goodies arrayed before them. This is a campaign even Trump could win.
The Democratic Party has a possibly fatal inability to prioritize. The urgent challenge is to rid the nation of Trump, not to mollify this or that identity group or wrestle over issues that could not be solved when they were relevant — such as busing. As it is, the candidates are campaigning in an America of their own imagination — a bit to the left of Sweden and as racially unified as one of those old Coke commercials. They pander to the extremes of the early caucus and primary states, thinking they can seduce the middle later on down the road or, in my case, giving me a choice of one of them or Trump. Sedate me first.
Cohen is not wrong. What Democrats are campaigning on panders to a small subset of America, the one that tends to be urban based and unhinged. This hyper-leftism might even drive average Democrats away. They probably won’t vote Trump, but, they won’t be voting Democrat. It won’t play well in swing states. And while many things might poll well in theory, in practice, not so much.
Of course, here’s the problem for Cohen: he offers no ideas for Democrats to defeat Trump. But, then, to do that would require that Democrats give up a goodly chunk of their beliefs set. They’d have to start loving America again, stop hating on the military, stop trying to control every citizen’s life at the federal level, stop trying to essentially control everything.
