The Dems Lost and It’s Not Their Fault - Daniel Greenfield

by Daniel Greenfield


The Democrats lost and no one is resigning. Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi intend to stay on even after overseeing the largest political catastrophe for their party in decades. In six years, Pelosi went from a House majority of 257 seats to a current running total in the 180s. Harry Reid took a Senate majority and turned it into a minority and all he has to show for it are a lot of donations from out-of-state law firms.

Not only aren’t Harry and Nancy resigning, but they aren’t even taking any responsibility. Irresponsibility is the Democratic word of the day and the decade. Harry is blaming Barry. Barry is blaming Harry. No one is even paying attention to Nancy ever since she became irrelevant four years ago.

The Democrats don’t just preach irresponsibility and pander to the irresponsible. They are irresponsible.

Democrats often point to Congress’s low approval ratings as proof that the public doesn’t support the Republicans. They neglect to mention that its present low approval rating of 14 matches its low point of 14 under Pelosi and Reid’s Democratic majority. The last time Congress had an approval rating above 40, there were Republican majorities in the House and Senate.

It isn’t Republican obstructionism that keeps the approval ratings low. That’s just the narrative that the real Democratic obstructionists used once they lost their majority in order to give Obama sanction for unilateral rule. Now Senate and House Democrats have paid the price for the damage that they inflicted on their party by allowing Obama’s unilateral and incoherent policymaking to define them.

Obama “won” by locking in an opposition Congress that leaves him as the only significant elected member of his party. He has achieved what he sought all along by reducing his entire party to him. By completely isolating himself politically, Obama has eliminated any dissent from within his own party.

He has become a “Party of One.”

It’s not much of a victory for any politician who isn’t a wannabe dictator or a hopeless narcissist.

Like his congressional leaders, Obama refuses to concede that the election had anything to do with him, despite claiming beforehand that it was all about his policies. During the election, his inner narcissist wanted to make the election about him, even though his own party begged him not to.

But now that the election is lost, he isn’t responsible and is blaming the “map” which is his way of saying that he didn’t lose the game. The game was unfair.

The most powerful man in the world is making the same excuse as a little boy losing at Monopoly. But he has a point. There was no way to win on his terms by maximizing the turnout of the base with ugly polarizing identity politics. The closest thing to that effort came from “Senator Uterus” and his off-putting “War on Women” rhetoric and it failed. If Obama can’t win with identity politics, then the election is unfair… and the only way to fix it is with illegal alien amnesty for demographic change.

Illegal alien amnesty is the adult political equivalent of overturning the board of the United States, tossing all the American voters on the floor, and remaking the country with new majorities.

That way identity politics will always be a winning move.

That’s why Obama isn’t offering any actual compromises. Instead he came out and threatened executive action on illegal alien amnesty. Then he offered the possibility that he might consider giving the Republicans some of what they want if they give him everything he wants. That’s not how he negotiates with Iran, but he obviously has warmer feelings for the Ayatollahs than he does for the Republican Party.

It’s not as if there are any adults in the room.

Joe Biden prepped for the election by getting blonde hair plugs so he can seem younger than Hillary when he runs against her. He’s polling at 21% among Dems 18 to 29, the only age group in whose support for Hillary he has managed to make a serious dent.  Biden may be four years older than Hillary, but with enough caps, implants and procedures, he can appear young enough for a mid-life crisis.

Biden predicted that the Dems would hold the Senate. Had he spent less time looking in the mirror and styling the new scalp that he had gotten stapled to his skull and more time looking at the polls, he might have had been able to prepare his party for the actual outcome.

On the party side, Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz will launch a review to see what went wrong. It’s a safe bet that the thing that went wrong won’t involve her. But maybe Debbie should have paid more attention to what the voters thought of her party instead of trying to find new arguments to get it to pay for her dresses.

At least Biden wasn’t sending the DNC the bill for his hair plugs. Or so we hope.

Barry and Harry, Nancy and Debbie have one real skill between them and that’s raising money. All of them are good at parting billionaires from big checks in exchange for specified and unspecified favors. None of them are any good at actually running things or at accepting responsibility when they go wrong.

And then there are the Clintons, the 2016 frontrunners whose fundraising skills are unparalleled, but who couldn’t stop Arkansas or West Virginia from going GOP and whose aggressive campaign strategy fizzled. Like Harry and Nancy, Hillary isn’t about to step back. Like Obama, she isn’t accepting responsibility for the defeat; instead her backers say she’ll benefit from a Republican House and Senate.

It’s not bad enough that the Dems torched their own legislative majority to make it easier for Obama to blame Republicans, but now they’re celebrating losing the Senate because that makes it even easier for Hillary Clinton to blame Republicans.

And if Hillary loses in 2016, think how easy it will be for the Dems to finally be able to blame Republicans for everything.

This isn’t how serious political leaders act. This is how children behave.

The winning Dem strategy is to have the most power and the least responsibility. They want to rule unilaterally and blame the Republicans for everything that goes wrong. They want to nuke the filibuster, the power of the legislature and then claim that their man is acting like a dictator because of the GOP.

They need the Republican Party as a scapegoat for their policymaking failures, but they can’t blame it for their political failures. That’s too much like admitting defeat.

If the Democrats didn’t lose because the Republicans offered a compelling vision or because of their own incompetence, then why did they lose? The only remaining excuse is racism. The Democrats have taught a chunk of their base to blame their own failures on racism. Now they want to do the same.

Harry and Barry, Nancy and Debbie can stay in their old jobs and ride their party off the cliff. And it won’t be their fault. No one will have to be fired. No policies will have to be rethought.

It will be because the map was unfair. Because America is racist. Because the dog ate their homework and the Koch Brothers unfairly ran the same attack ads that they had been running and it was raining outside and some states had Voter ID and there wasn’t enough early voting and the lines were too long and their shoelaces broke and everything out of their control conspired unfairly to make them lose.

The only thing that can save the Dems is responsibility. But after so many years of preaching irresponsibility, the irresponsible party has poisoned itself with its own product.


Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam. He is completing a book on the international challenges America faces in the 21st century.

Source: http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/the-dems-lost-and-its-not-their-fault/

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