By Jim Geraghty
Monday, January 20, 2020
Weird things happen during Democratic presidential
primaries.
Most conservatives have no interest in a highly
functional Democratic National Committee, and perhaps some spotlighted the
actions of the DNC in 2016 entirely out of cynical motives, in order to
exacerbate divisions within the party. But I suspect some conservatives
genuinely think it’s unjust for a party committee to turn over its financial
decision-making to the front-runner’s campaign, as the DNC did for the Clinton
campaign in the 2016 cycle. You don’t have to agree with Sanders’s decisions or
even like him to believe that it is fundamentally unfair for the organization
running the nomination process to effectively be a secret financial subsidiary
of one candidate.
You don’t have to love Pete Buttigieg to believe that the
charge from New York Times reporter Binyamin Appelbaum that he’s “been
on the front lines of corporate price fixing” is unfair guilt-by-association.
In late 2017, Canadian grocery chain Loblaws admitted to price-fixing on bread
from 2001 to 2014. Buttigieg worked at McKinsey consulting, and for six months
in 2008 he worked for Loblaws as a client. He described the work in his
autobiography, “spending my weekdays in a small, glass-walled conference room
with three colleagues in a suburban office park, building models to compute how
much it could cost to cut prices on various combinations of tens of thousands
of items across hundreds of stores, in every part of the country.” Loblaws said
that Buttigieg’s consulting work had nothing to do with the scandal. If you
want to oppose Buttigieg because you simply don’t trust any business
consultants, fine, but don’t blame Buttigieg for a scandal that started well
before he arrived, lasted long after he left, and where there’s no evidence he
knew about any of it.
Hillary Clinton jumped into the Democratic primary to
declare that Tulsi Gabbard is “ the favorite of the Russians.” Conservatives
have wondered just what the heck Andrew Yang has to do to get more questions
during the nationally televised Democratic debates. Elizabeth Warren claimed
that Bernie Sanders had told her that a woman couldn’t beat Trump, and a CNN
moderator acted as if it was a proven fact during the debate, even after
Sanders vehemently denied it.
Many conservatives and many Republicans believe that the
political world is unfair and slanted against them in a million different ways,
large and small. Party establishments build high barriers to get on the ballot,
and then take action to protect incumbents who already enjoy significant
advantages. The media plays favorites, treats their preferred candidates with
kid gloves, and deliberately misconstrues innocuous comments to demonize the
candidates they don’t like. When their preferred candidates mess up, members of
the press mobilize to explain that the criticisms is overblown, that
Republicans are pouncing, and that the real question is whether the GOP is in
danger of overreaching. Post-primary endorsements are withheld by spoilsport
losing candidates.
During Democratic presidential primary season, we see
every bad habit, conscious and subconscious bias, unfair written and unwritten
rule, and unjust instinct that always exist, except that during this period,
all of these are factors in fights of Democrats against other Democrats.
But the progressives who see unfair advantages of a
center-left establishment rarely come away with the realization that maybe all
those conservatives had a fair point in their past complaints. And the many on
the right largely see a giant indistinguishable glob of “the Left” even though
the Bernie Bros, the Warren feminists, the Biden establishmentarians, and the
Mayor Pete wine-cave donor class all have pretty disparate outlooks and
priorities.
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