After Democrats lost 64 seats in the 2010 midterm congressional elections, Barack Obama admitted that his party got “shellacked.” A dozen years later, with Obama’s vice president in charge and his public approval stuck in unelectable territory, many similar verbs and adjectives are being used to describe the midterm prospects for Democrats over these last months – words like dismal, grim, even horrific. But the description of one (obviously unnamed) Democrat strategist may have most effectively placed in perspective how precipitously the Democrats have fallen.
Biblical disaster.
Yes, that was how the anonymous high-level operative described it recently to The Hill, presumably as a wake-up call to his fellow travelers on the left. Can you blame him?
The party’s sickening and unrelenting wokeness has transformed even Mickey Mouse into another mindless progressive. The disastrous surrender of Afghanistan has become forever attached to Joe Biden’s legacy, and the president’s handling of the Ukraine crisis has been panned by voters (28% approval on the issue in the latest poll by liberal-leaning Harvard/Harris). The ongoing urban crime wave in Democrat-run cities continues to drive people out. An already bad border crisis is about to get far worse with the lifting of Title 42 COVID-related restrictions. Worst of all, spiraling inflation has caused the cost of the basics – food and fuel – to skyrocket, and voters are reminded of the rising cost of living with their every financial transaction.
The enduring question between now and November 8, when voters cast their ballots in more than 450 House and Senate races, is whether Democrats have the capacity to recover to any significant degree, or if an electoral disaster has already been baked in the cake.
When a party is in trouble, it ordinarily attempts to tack to the middle, to the broad mass of voters not obsessed by politics who just want to believe their elected leaders are serving their actual interests. This usually involves, among other things, promises or concrete legislation to lower taxes on the middle class, reducing particularly unpopular and burdensome regulations, and embracing generally popular policies that are reflective of broadly-held societal values.
But what this administration and Congress have done in the face of a universally predicted electoral nightmare is essentially the opposite.
Joe Biden (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)
Far from lowering taxes, they have not only tried to raise them from the moment they controlled Congress and the White House, succeeding whenever Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) allowed it, but Biden has now submitted a budget that would raise income tax rates to the highest level in the entire developed world. And oh, by the way, Democrats are now trying futilely to get the courts to reverse the Trump-era limitations on deducting state and local taxes (SALT) to serve their almost exclusively blue state constituencies while raising the tax burden everywhere else.
When it comes to regulations, instead of embracing the recent court-ordered termination of the most prominent and controversial edict of our times, those dreaded mask mandates, Biden reflexively opposed it and will appeal it, behaving not as though millions have now regained an essential freedom, but as if those who choose to continue wearing a mask will somehow be prohibited from doing so. On the left, you know, everything must be either forbidden or mandatory – nuance, or your personal view, is not to be considered.
When it comes to the widely held family values that have long defined this country, the very embodiment of such, the Walt Disney Company, emboldened by the Democrats’ embrace of cultural Marxism masquerading as social justice, publicly goes on the warpath about a law that likely the vast majority of the country supports: prohibiting teachers from schooling young children about sex in all its LGBTQIA+ splendor. Only in Democrats’ woke-world is that a controversial idea.
No, Democrats are not acting at all like they understand – or care – what they must do to try and at least create a soft landing instead of a wicked thud come November. They are not doing everything they can in an election year to change the perception of themselves before voters cast their ballots. They are not doing the things a party on the ropes does to try to find its way back into the ring. So then, what are they doing – or thinking?
Well, it’s actually quite clear when you stop to look. They seem to be fully resigned to the reality of the tidal wave headed their way and are trying to cram everything on the progressive agenda into desperate, last-chance measures they believe will be difficult for Republicans to reverse. If they’re going down, the thinking apparently goes, they’re going to employ every trick in the book to leave an indelible progressive watermark from the two years following their takedown of Donald Trump. That is what the Rube Goldberg-style monstrosity known as Build Back Better, blessedly rejected thanks to the only two level-headed senators remaining in the Democratic Party, sought to do in true leftist fashion: Cram all their most insane progressive ideas in right next to the few popular ideas in their always-favored massive omnibus legislation – one size fits all. And it is genuinely frightening how close they came to busting the budget and placing the welfare state on steroids. They still managed to pass a wildly inflationary $2 trillion behemoth of a COVID recovery bill, and what that did was cause huge schisms in the job market while contributing mightily to inflation, making it a live issue for the first time since – gasp – the Jimmy Carter era. That’s almost 50 years ago.
Democrats appear not only unwilling but utterly incapable of allowing people to employ their own common sense. They insist on forcing us to pay ever-higher taxes to a government which has long since lost the confidence of the people. They can’t quit their obsession with controlling the lives of ordinary Americans, nor their need to signal false virtue through the particularly ignominious prisms of race and gender. So instead of trying to argue that they deserve more time to enact their agenda, they are grabbing as much loot from the candy store as they can fit in their pockets, realizing they are going to get kicked off the premises rudely, but hoping they can still escape with a few goodies to show for it.
Indeed, if the Democrats are actually trying to convince midterm voters that they are not really as woke, reckless, irresponsible – and downright incompetent – as they have demonstrated over these last 15 months, they sure are doing a terrific job of hiding it.
