By Kevin D. Williamson
Thursday, July 25, 2019
I am not in the business of predicting election outcomes,
but with all the usual caveats I will say this: If I were betting my own money
on the 2020 election — today — I would not bet against Donald Trump.
The Mueller circus offers us one lesson and one lesson
only: The Democrats still believe they can defeat the star of The Apprentice
in a reality-show election.
Ain’t nobody gonna beat Donald J. Trump in a goat rodeo.
The Democrats are running a scorched-earth, high-drama spectacle
campaign against President Trump, who specializes in scorched-earth, high-drama
spectacles and who today has the power of the presidential bully pulpit to
amplify the drama and magnify the spectacle. Put another way, the Democrats
apparently are intent on fighting Trump on his own ground, challenging him to a
duel in the one thing he’s actually pretty good at: putting on a show.
On Wednesday, Thomas B. Edsall published what seemed to
me a very useful column in the New York Times, headlined, “The Democratic
Party Is Actually Three Parties.” In it he notes that the Twitter-obsessed
white progressives who set the emotional and intellectual tone of the party are
well to the left of the largely black and Latino wing of the party, which takes
a less radical view of the most polarizing issues, and is instead focused on
old-fashioned concerns such as jobs and wages. Edwall writes:
Its most progressive wing, which is
supportive of contentious policies on immigration, health care and other
issues, is, in the context of the party’s electorate, disproportionately white.
So is the party’s middle group of “somewhat liberal” voters. Its more moderate
wing, which is pressing bread-and-butter concerns like jobs, taxes and a less
totalizing vision of health care reform, is majority nonwhite, with almost half
of its support coming from African-American and Hispanic voters.
Question: Does the Democratic party, just this moment,
seem to you like it is listening to “its more moderate wing,” or is it
advancing “contentious policies on immigration, health care, and other issues”?
The thing about the debates on those more contentious
policies is that they are not policy debates at all — they are theater.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other supporters of the so-called Green New Deal,
for example, have conceded as much. The purpose of that exercise, they admit,
is not to work out the nuts and bolts of new policies on greenhouse-gas
emissions or business taxes, but to plant a moral flag around which admirers of
figures such as Representative Ocasio-Cortez and her like-minded socialist partisans
might rally. There are a lot of Democrats who might beat Donald Trump in a
debate; there are none well-suited to defeating him in a pageant. He’s in the
pageant business.
Senator Elizabeth Warren, for example, might kick a fair
amount of sand in President Trump’s face in a one-on-one debate about the finer
points of entitlement reform, even though — because, really — President
Trump and Senator Warren have more or less the same goals when it comes to
entitlements: no reductions in benefits, no new tax burdens on the middle
class. But Professor Warren does not stand a chance in a Sturm und Drang
display. She is smart (perhaps not quite as smart as she thinks she is), but
she is a terrible campaigner, stiff and manifestly uncomfortable in crowds. To
hear Senator Warren speak is to see a picture of the future that is a trip to
the vice principal’s office — forever.
In the put-on-a-show department, the Mueller hearings
offered the Democrats their best shot. And to quote the political philosopher
Dee Snyder: “If that’s your best, your best won’t do.”
The Democrats, this go-round, would not even give a
second’s consideration to a figure such as Michael Bloomberg, an
up-and-down-the-line progressive with a pretty good actual record in office
who, as an added bonus, could also make jokes about how Donald Trump can’t
afford to buy a pair of pants. Relatively (relatively!) sensible figures
such as Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti are sitting this one out, while
Democratic governors — you know, the guys who actually have to do things
rather than tweet all day, such as John Hickenlooper, Steve Bullock, and Jay
Inslee — are, at last sighting, polling around 1 percent — combined. The ding
on Senator Kamala Harris among Democratic primary voters is that as a
prosecutor in California she was not enough of a left-wing moonbat.
The Mueller hearings presented a sad spectacle. They were
boring. You know who is good at spectacle? You know who isn’t boring?
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