By Charles C. W. Cooke
Tuesday,
December 19, 2023
Much as
we might like to believe that every American election represents a lofty and
earnest battle of ideas, during which the candidates and their offerings are
considered anew by a sober, engaged, and consistent electorate, the harsh truth
of the matter is that the pendulum of time plays as considerable a role as
anything more didactic. Like the weather in New England, if you don’t like the
party running the White House or Congress, your best bet is to wait a while.
Perhaps that “while” will be four years. Perhaps it’ll be eight. On occasion,
it may even be twelve. But, in due course, the reins will be handed over to the
other team. American voters are an impatient bunch, and they grow tired of
seeing the same cast of characters year in, year out. Events matter, no doubt.
Often, the clock matters more.
At
present, this pendulum ought to be sitting firmly within the GOP’s hands. The
Democratic Party — which won the presidency in 2008, 2012, and 2020 — is weak,
crazy, and directionless. Their president is unusually unpopular, their economy is broadly loathed, the border is out of
control, and the world seems more dangerous than it has for years.
Meanwhile, thanks to an excellent run of elections between 2010 and 2014, the
Republicans have a large number of appealing candidates who are able to
make the case for the change. For the GOP, these ought to be salad days;
instead, it’s scraping by. It will come to regret it.
The
environment will not always be like this. The Obama years damaged the
Democrats’ bench so badly that the best the party could do in 2020 was nominate
a couple of second-string Dunning–Kruger cases who, in normal circumstances,
would have been laughed off the stage at the first hurdle (and previously were). Thanks to the GOP’s fecklessness, Joe Biden and
Kamala Harris managed to get themselves elected president and vice president,
but, because that elevation had no effect whatsoever on their political skills,
they have still managed to become deeply disliked. Despite this, Biden and
Harris remain the cream of a bad crop. At the time of writing, the Democratic
Party boasts no obvious political talents, and there are no obvious saviors on
the horizon.
But
there will be. Just eight years elapsed between the career of
Bill Clinton, a great political talent, and Barack Obama, another great
political talent. At some point — and maybe soon — there will be another
Clinton or Obama within the Democratic firmament. When that candidate arrives,
politics will become much tougher for the GOP — at which point, one suspects,
the Republicans might start to regret having spent most of the previous decade
subordinating every single one of their concerns to the maintenance of Donald Trump’s
ego. It is rare in competitive politics for a party to get the chance to run
against a series of figures as weak as Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden. It is
even rarer for that party to respond by repeatedly picking a guy whom a
supermajority of voters dislike.
Some
elections are not destined to be won: The Democrats were never going to beat
Dwight Eisenhower in 1952 or 1956, beat Richard Nixon in 1972, or beat Ronald
Reagan in 1984, just as the Republicans were never going to beat LBJ in 1964,
beat Bill Clinton in 1996, or beat Barack Obama in 2008. Most elections,
however, are there for the taking. In those contests, having a weak opponent
certainly helps, but it pales in comparison with having a strong candidate,
given that the extrinsic causes of an opponent’s weaknesses are liable to
change, and that truly weak adversaries can be swapped out for someone better.
Polling show that if the Republican Party were to choose a strong aspirant, it
could blow Joe Biden and his party out of the water. It beggars belief that,
for no intelligible reason, and with no end in sight, the GOP seems utterly
determined to ignore all that, throw its opportunities away, and play the game
on hard mode once again.
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