By Rich Lowry
Tuesday, March 18, 2025
Even Will Rogers might be hard pressed to come up with an
appropriately harsh jibe about the current state of the Democrats.
“I am not a member of any organized political party,” the
20th-century humorist famously said. “I am a Democrat.”
Now, the problem isn’t a lack of organization per se, but
the hangover of their dogged, dishonest support for a comprehensively failed
presidency, joined to an irrational commitment to outlandish positions on
cultural issues.
The Democrats shouldn’t be shocked that after insisting
that Joe Biden was hale and hearty and fit to serve as commander in chief until
January 2029, the public has a dim view of their party. The Democrats attempted
to perpetrate one of the worst frauds on the American public in recent history,
and then followed it up with another lie — that Biden’s overmatched emergency
replacement, Kamala Harris, was joyful and impressive.
In a new CNN poll, the Democratic Party’s favorable
rating is 29 percent — a record low going back to 1992.
In a new NBC poll, the Democratic Party’s favorable
rating is 27 percent — a record low going back to 1990.
Detect a pattern?
Part of the reason for the dismal rating is that
Democrats themselves want their party to be more confrontational with Trump and
are dissatisfied. But the Democrats have taken a broader hit — in the NBC poll,
only 11 percent of independents have a favorable view of them, and 56 percent
unfavorable.
The agonized state of the party was encapsulated by its
psychodrama over the so-called continuing resolution that ten Senate Democrats,
including Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, voted to pass last week. Progressives
consider Schumer’s support a rank betrayal, and he’s had to postpone a book
tour amid “security concerns.”
The New Yorker, who warned conservative Supreme Court
justices a few years ago, “You have released the whirlwind and you will pay the
price,” is now paying one himself.
Schumer made the right tactical call. If Senate Democrats
had successfully filibustered the spending bill, they would have been blamed
for the resulting shutdown, further tanking the party’s image with the middle
of the electorate.
In the fierce backlash against Schumer for saving his
party another embarrassment, the left-wing congresswoman from New York,
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, is getting promoted as a potential primary challenger
to Schumer, and even a national leader for Democrats. In the CNN poll,
Democrats were asked which political figure best represents the “core values”
of their party, and AOC narrowly led.
She has as good a claim to this title as anyone — and
that’s the problem.
AOC is Kamala Harris, if the California Democratic hadn’t
flipped-flopped away from all the fringy things she said in 2019. She’s Bernie
Sanders, if the Vermont socialist were about 50 years younger and could
plausibly appear on the cover of Vanity Fair wearing the latest fashion.
She’s Mahmoud Khalil, if the Columbia University activist that the Trump
administration wants to deport somehow managed to get himself elected to
Congress.
AOC rejects the term “woke,” but there is no woke policy
that she doesn’t support. She loved the neologism Latinx (“gender is fluid,
language is fluid”) and still supports males competing in female sports (“trans
girls are girls”). She’s never met an immigration restriction that she likes.
The reason Joe Biden won in 2020 is he didn’t seem like a
progressive, and one reason that his party lost in 2024 is that he governed
like one. AOC’s brand is the 2024 Biden rather than the 2020 Biden, except even
more so. She’s charismatic and adept at social media, which easily could bring
her greater fame and influence, but she’s a cartoonish version of the
Democratic Party that the GOP hopes to run against.
Will Rogers once commented, “You’ve got to admit that
each party is worse than the other. The one that’s out always looks the best.”
If their fervor to oppose Trump throws Democrats into the arms of AOC, they
will test the accuracy of this proposition.
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