With infinite reluctance and lingering disbelief, what calls itself the progressive media is starting to concede the outlines of the overwhelming rejection the Democrats, the Biden administration, and Congress have earned and are likely to sustain next week.
Progressive for these purposes is a bedraggled coalition of elements that are no longer comfortable with each other: the militantly anti-white African Americans, the “woke” pseudo-academic America-haters, and what’s left of the tired old Joe Biden-style Democratic machine establishment.
These are the detritus of organized industrial labor, unionized public servants, the old liberal academic community that still professes to be capable of loving America again if it mutates into a self-hating socialist society, and the remnants of the old voting blocks, including Roman Catholics who disapprove of almost all the tenets of their Church and ethnic traditionalists who remember that they once got the short straw and were raised in homes where Franklin D. Roosevelt’s picture was on the wall in gratitude for the New Deal.
It’s all coming to a catastrophically undignified end. President Biden is the overaged middleweight, now just a punching bag for his enemies—one campaign later than the Last Hurrah, still patriotic in his way, and believing that “America can (still) do anything,” but so addicted to public approval that he thinks that any move to the left is for the best and assists in gaining for him an honored place in the pantheon of American reformers.
Instead of taking the credit that all of America deserves for the great progress of civil rights, the Biden Democrats appease critical race theory myth-makers who think that improvement in the lot of African Americans has had nothing to do with ideals and was just opportunism, tokenism, hypocrisy, and concealed racism.
The Democrats have become so permanently intoxicated and collectively brain-damaged by Trump hate that they’re a one-trick pony, and the public is jeering. The four main issues are inflation, the economy generally, crime, and the open southern border. None was a problem when Trump left office, and there’s almost no mention of these problems by Democrats, nor anything visible to deal with them.
Biden has been so hog-tied, gagged, and blindfolded by the far left of his party, to pursue the green nonsense, that he endures humiliations from the Saudis and is depleting the country’s petroleum reserves to try to moderate gas prices. That’s even as his policies have generated increases in the price of oil that Russian leader Vladimir Putin is utilizing to pay for his aggressive war in Ukraine, while the United States (rightly) foots the bill for 70 percent of the armaments costs of the defenders.
Such is the dominance of the far left within the Democratic Party that it has intimidated Biden from making the course correction that would alleviate his greatest political problem, impoverish Putin, and restore relations with the Arab powers so that the containment of Iran could be concerted with them.
Because of his implausibility, Democratic candidates don’t want Biden campaigning with them. There’s some demand for Barack Obama on the hustings, but he, for obvious reasons, has been reluctant. His appearances in Georgia on the weekend were pitiful: vapid, histrionic, and full of untruths.
It’s impossible to defend the Biden administration, and Obama has nothing whatsoever to speak of admiringly in his own eight years as president: His entire program consisted of the Green Terror, prostration before the nuclear ambitions of Iran, and his poorly considered and disruptively implemented Obamacare. Since he could neither defend the existing regime nor be very persuasive in praise of his own record, the former president was reduced to wild denunciations of Trump, the entire raison d'être of the contemporary Democrats.
Obama can at least be faux-eloquent at his best, but in Georgia, he seemed an African American Beto O'Rourke: a slender man in his shirtsleeves, flailing his arms about as a distracting substitute for substantive content.
Since abortion hasn’t been banned and 72 percent of Americans oppose unconditional abortions, repeal of Roe v. Wade, which isn’t really a partisan issue anyway, has had little political value for the Democrats. It has been refreshing to scores of millions of people to see the militant feminists, who in this case aren’t so much pro-choice as evangelical advocates of the innumerable virtues of abortion, completely outmaneuvered and reduced to harassing Supreme Court justices in their homes.
All that’s left to the Democrats is the threadbare, worm-eaten bunk about the threat to democracy, the flimsy euphemism for the Trump menace. This one has been a loser also.
The Democrats, in their proposed legislation for the national takeover of elections from the state legislatures, sought to ban any form of voter verification and to make recourse to easily forged harvested ballots obligatory. They and their useful idiots in the business, entertainment, and media industries represented the Georgia election reforms, which made a serious effort to encourage voting while making voting fraud much more difficult, as an assault upon African Americans’ right to vote. It was Jim Crow—back almost to slavery.
That isn’t what the supposed victims of the measure believe, and in the runup to the elections, they’ve turned out in greater numbers than ever in Georgia and with no controversy over authenticity.
And the Democratic candidates, in the image of their federal leader, suddenly seem worn out, passé, overburdened with the feeble anti-Trump mudslinging of the past six years, made more tedious and irrelevant after these two years of almost complete mismanagement of every serious aspect of federal public and foreign policy.
The Republicans put up a much larger number of articulate, persuasive candidates from minorities, as well as very formidable candidates from the traditional white middle-class matrix of Republican leaders. The contests between Kari Lake and Katie Hobbs (governor of Arizona) or Tiffany Smiley and Patty Murray (U.S. senator, Washington) are typical of the energy and relevance gap that separates the parties’ candidates all around the country.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-Ky.) pompous humbug about “candidate quality” and the inferiority of those candidates championed by Donald Trump has evaporated as the mindless snobbery that it was, and almost all of Trump’s endorsees are likely to win.
If, as appears likely, the Republican senators will include many pro-Trump individuals, perhaps including new Republican senators in Alaska and Nebraska, replacing anti-Trump incumbents, it may be time for McConnell to consider his position. He has little feel for what happens outside the Senate chamber, and has been insidiously anti-Trump since Trump first appeared; he misled the then-president about the repeal of Obamacare, and apart from Trump’s tax cuts, Supreme Court nominees, and the first spurious impeachment, McConnell was no use to him at all.
It was obvious on Inauguration Day that McConnell preferred former Sens. Biden and Kamala Harris to Trump, and he has frequently been irresponsible in his dispensation of Senate election funds, opposing the official Republican candidate in Alaska and being very miserly with some other Trump-favored candidates. McConnell deserves and could have a very bumpy ride from a pro-Trump Republican Senate delegation, with a miraculously restored majority.
That’s the luxury of victory; on Nov. 9, the Democratic Party will be a boneyard, deservedly, and none too soon.
