We all know how difficult rejection can be. In any area of life, even the slightest of rebuffs can leave a sting that lingers. The emotional aftermath is tough to deal with. At some point, however, the rejection does have to be dealt with if one wants to move on and avoid repeating mistakes. Some people never do.
The Democrats are obviously struggling with coming to terms with the rejection they faced last November. They’re always bad at introspection and taking responsibility for anything, but this is like nothing I’ve seen in all of my years in politics. It’s gotten to the point where I have to read at least one or two of the 2024 post mortems in the mainstream media every day to get my fix. Yeah, it’s a blast watching them not get it. The real joy for me, however, is seeing the myriad ways that they are finding to not come to the proper conclusions about why they lost.
They’ve been so reluctant to face their Pandora’s boxful of problems that they didn’t even start making attempts until just before the second Trump term was underway. In days of yore, the Democratic National Committee would have called an all-hands-on-deck meeting for around 6 AM on the morning after the election to begin plotting how to win the next one. Not only that, the Dems would have some plans in their back pockets and some viable candidates for the future on their bench. That Democratic Party and political machine no longer exist.
The reason for that is one that they will probably never admit to themselves. The decimation of its candidate bench and the party’s long-term planning ability can be laid squarely at the feet of the man who they worship above all others: His High Holiness the Lightbringer Barack Obama.
Democrats had long been invested in identity politics but went all-in to the exclusion of anything else after Barack Obama won in 2008. As my friend Stephen Green mentioned a few times last year, the Dems sold an idea in 2008 rather than a candidate with a record. Of course, that was because Obama had no record to speak of at the time.
They got kinda hooked on that.
The party higher-ups and their media mouthpieces spent the next eight years hero worshiping and not attending to the mundane nuts and bolts of keeping a successful political machine running. While they were “oohing and aahing” over the emperor’s new clothes, the emperor was sucking the life out of the party’s future. Who needed a bench when all they had to do was anoint a candidate who checked off a “historic first” diversity box on his or her résumé?
They were so invested in the diversity route that the DNC gamed the 2016 primary to make it nigh on impossible for anyone to beat Hillary Clinton — the candidate they’d unceremoniously thrown on the trash heap eight years earlier in favor of Obama because he checked off a higher-priority diversity box.
None of the Democratic Party rules applied in 2020. The Dems went with Joe Biden because he was essentially an emotional support stuffed toy who made them feel better because he had a connection to Obama. Biden immediately got them back in the identity politics game by promising to pick a Black female running mate.
We know the rest of this story.
The real problem for the Democrats in 2024 wasn’t Joe Biden’s late exit or Kamala Harris’s short campaign — no combination of circumstances was going to enable either of them to beat Donald Trump. The Dems’ real problem is what the party is now about. Things like biological males competing in girls sports and hanging around in their locker rooms. Things like drag queen story hours in first-grade classrooms. Things like “Free Palestine” lunatics attacking synagogues.
Things that they really haven’t backed off of after getting shellacked last year.
An Opinion piece I read in The New York Times earlier this week was interesting because it got closer to the truth than any of the post mortems I’ve come across so far. It’s a transcript of a conversation between Times Opinion columnist Michelle Cottle and former Obama speechwriter Ben Rhodes. I was immediately interested in reading the whole thing after Rhode’s opening remarks:
I don’t really think I’ve ever seen anything quite like it, to tell you the truth, in terms of the mixture of despair and gloom and even desperation, really.
You felt a little bit like this as a Democrat after the 2004 election, to roll the clock way back. But after the 2004 election, there wasn’t the world’s richest man coming in and trying to dismantle huge swaths of the U.S. government, you know?
I think that the combination for Democrats that is so paralyzing is that sense of not just being despairing of what’s happening but really kind of flailing about and not having any kind of coherent, agreed-upon approach for how to deal with this emergency that is taking place around us.
The comparison to 2004 is ridiculous, but the rest of it caught my eye because it’s so starkly different than what elected Democratic officials are saying. Rhodes starts off with a dead-on description of the state of the party, which is new, then begins tiptoeing away from finding the truth when he says “this emergency that is taking place around us.” He’s talking about President Trump, of course.
There’s the giveaway: the Democrats aren’t putting any thought into ideas that can appeal to American voters in the long run — it’s all about reacting to ORANGE MAN BAD. Rhodes looked inward for the briefest of moments, then whipped his attention back to Trump.
There’s a lot of that in this article. Cottle and Rhodes flirt with the reality of the Democrats’ situation, then retreat to habits that brought about that reality. Just when it looks like they’re really about to get it, Cottle comes up with this:
So with the Democrats, my sense is that yes, you talk about issues, yes, you make clear what your core values are. But a lot of it comes down to the fact that they don’t know how to talk to normal people and not sound like they’re running some kind of freshman seminar at some pointy-headed college.
We just need to learn how to communicate with the rubes.
In every one of these kinds of articles, it always comes down to the message packaging being the problem, never the message itself. The merely come up with new ways to say, “Why won’t these idiots like us?!?!?”
The Democrats’ biggest problem is that “normal people” don’t hate President Trump, and “You should hate President Trump,” is the only real message that they have these days.
Long after Trump is gone from Washington, “normal people” still aren’t going to like seeing dudes line up against girls at a track meet, and will continue to pass along that message via the ballot box.
Click the button below to get the Morning Briefing emailed to you every weekday. Have your coffee with me, people. It’s free and it supports conservative media!
Punditry on the Rocks: Because we’re on the side that doesn’t want to be angry all the time, Stephen Green and I like to share our thoughts once or twice a week with our VIP family on the soon-to-be-legendary live video chat “Five O’Clock Somewhere.” What started off as a diversion to entertain our cherished VIPs for a few weeks during lockdown is coming up on its five-year anniversary. VodkaPundit and I would love to have more people join us in our quest to prove that insightful political commentary can, in fact, be a lot of fun. You can punch your ticket to the virtual party bus by subscribing here and using the promo code FIGHT to receive a welcome discount of 60%.
