By Kevin D. Williamson
Wednesday, July 27, 2022
Why don’t the Democrats have better leaders?
We know why the Republicans don’t have better leaders:
The GOP turned itself into a Donald Trump personality cult, and would-be
alternatives such as Ron DeSantis of Florida haven’t figured out how to get out
from under the considerable shadow of the former president. Republicans may
find some focus if, as expected, they have a good election in November. William
Munny might have made a good political analyst: “Deserve’s got nothin’ to do
with it.”
But you’d think the Democratic Party would at least throw
up some interesting leaders, if not necessarily good ones.
Young voters have soured on Joe Biden — for the obvious reason that the more
future you have the more irritating it is when someone devalues it — but they
still back Democrats decisively, as evidenced by their
generic-congressional-ballot preferences. College-educated people, women, and the most-affluent communities all lean Democratic.
Immigrants in Texas, California, Florida, Massachusetts, and New Jersey lean a lot more Democratic than Republican. Two of
the political indicators you would think would go hand-in-hand with being a
Democrat — not being especially proud of your country and enthusiasm for butchering unborn children — are at or
near all-time highs.
That’s not to say that America-hating well-off educated
young women from immigrant backgrounds with an unseemly passion for abortion
can’t be boring mediocrities — Ilhan Omar exists — but you’d
think that a party with those characteristics would produce some interesting
cultural churn.
Instead, you get Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, and Chuck
Schumer — the Senate majority leader who, at a spry 71 years of age, is the
youngest member of that group by almost a decade.
What do they have in their second tier? The Squad, who
are basically campus Democrats who somehow ended up sitting at the grown-ups’
table. Elizabeth Warren, another grim septuagenarian who has been trying to
become a celebrity since she was writing dopey self-help books. Dick Blumenthal
of Greenwich and not of Dien Bien Phu.
In a very amusing (seriously — what’s got into Ben Mathis-Lilley?)
piece at Slate, possible post-Biden contenders are given due
consideration. They are not an inspiring bunch. Roy Cooper, the North Carolina
governor whose great boast is that he gets elected in a state where Democrats
generally have a hard time of it these days. Governor Gretchen Whitmer of
Michigan, one of those sad wretches who has been running for office practically
all of her life. John Fetterman, the son of a wealthy insurance executive, who
went to grad school at Harvard and then spent his days pretending to be a
blue-collar guy in Braddock, Pa., serving as mayor while living on an allowance
from his parents. Jared “Who?” Polis. Connecticut barnacle Chris Murphy,
another scion of suburban wealth (his father was managing partner at Shipman
& Goodwin) who has never done anything except hang around politics. Kirsten
Gillibrand, last heard describing herself as a “young mom” at 52 years of age.
Gavin Newsom.
Maybe it’s a class thing, with so many prominent
Democrats hailing from that very strange parochial class of upper-upper-middle-income
to genuinely rich-adjacent politically connected families. Gillibrand’s father
was a lobbyist crony of Al D’Amato’s. Pelosi’s father was mayor of Baltimore
(so was her brother) and a member of the House of which she currently is
speaker. Newsom has exactly the biography you’d expect of someone named
“Gavin.” (He started a wine business with the help of some Getty money.)
Whitmer’s father was the CEO of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan and a minor
political figure. Roy Asberry Cooper III, a former Young Democrats president
born during the Eisenhower administration, is a Chi Psi and a lawyer; his
father was a lawyer and a tobacco farmer, a fact that must have amused the heck
out of him when his state accepted that multi-million-dollar vaping settlement.
Jared Polis, who was Jared Schutz before he got into politics, is a graduate of
La Jolla Country Day School (he would have just missed Tucker Carlson there), a
true child of the 1990s whose Princeton thesis was titled “Paradigm Shift” and
whose family earned the better part of a billion dollars selling its
online-greeting-card business back when you could get mad money for a company
with “dot-com” in its name.
The Republicans at least have some genuine plebs in their
ranks: Q-Anon kook Lauren Boebert was a knocked-up high-school dropout who
started a Hooters knockoff that eventually went bust after losing its lease —
because there is nothing that screams “Real America!” like fake Hooters. Her
foundational political document is the Rifle Rodeo food-poisoning-outbreak report. Marjorie Taylor
Greene, a different Q-Anon kook, was a CrossFit instructor until she became
obsessed with conspiracy websites, which are now the road to Congress for
Republicans. Not going to get prolier-than-thou with that bunch. There are
still some classic Republicans out there, like the Trump-endorsed nut in Michigan who got canned by his law firm
when his employers accused him of padding his billing, which is some
old-school, Alex P. Keaton-type Republican stuff.
So, maybe it’s class. Maybe it’s something in the water.
Maybe it’s just bad luck.
Or maybe it is evolution in reverse: Consider the Senate
seat from New York currently held by Kirsten Gillibrand. Before Gillibrand, the
seat was held by Hillary Rodham Clinton, who is not exactly Cincinnatus, but
before Clinton, it was held by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a genuinely interesting
and intelligent contributor to American life; trace it back from Moynihan and
you get James Buckley (“the sainted junior senator from New York”), Bobby
Kennedy, and, if you go far enough, Gouverneur Morris. Some scoundrels and rat-bastards in that bunch, to be sure, but many
welcome breaks from the insipidity of Senator Gillibrand. Kyrsten Sinema’s seat
once was held by Barry Goldwater. Senator Warren’s predecessors include John
Kennedy, Henry Cabot Lodge, Charles Sumner, Daniel Webster, and John Quincy
Adams — Hyperions to a Birkenstock. The Impossible Burger guys could whip up a
more convincing senator in their mad-vegan-scientist lab.
Elections are binary, they tell us. So is testicular
cancer, if you’re lucky.
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