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July 22, 2024 - 7:00am
Had Joe Biden remained the Democrats’ presidential candidate, the party would have faced the prospect of a loss, even a drubbing, in November’s election. But with the President’s withdrawal from the race today, Democratic grandees have been left — most likely, if Biden’s endorsement is anything to go off — with the similarly unpopular Vice President, Kamala Harris.
While she may inject some youth into the ticket, she has a poor track record appealing to voters outside the one-party state of California. But if a second Donald Trump presidency is inevitable, perhaps the Democrats should see defeat not as “the end of democracy”, as is too often asserted, but instead as the spark for a much-needed political makeover.
Here’s the scenario that could soon unfold. Dependent on the black American caucus and the progressive Left, Harris will surely cling to Biden’s largely unpopular agenda. If anything, she is more eager than the President to embrace California-style craziness. She will push for a ban on new gas leases and propose mandates for electrical vehicles, while imposing national rent control, forgiveness of college debt, and initiatives for slavery reparations.
This could be bad news for Democrats in the long run. Given that only 15% of their voters see themselves as “very liberal”, many would exit the party in disgust. A loss to Trump, however, could force a necessary internal reevaluation — one that could lead to the kind of revival that brought the New Democrats and Bill Clinton to office three decades ago on a pro-growth, culturally moderate platform.
In contrast, one may have some pity for Trump if he inherits the throne. Unlike Biden, who came to power as the economy was rebounding from the Covid-19 pandemic, Trump will gain control as the economy starts slowing down. Indeed, JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon, once seen as the Democrats’ favourite banker, has warned that inflation and interest rates will remain high, which will hamper the incoming president.
Voters tend to blame the current officeholder rather than those actually most responsible for hard times. Even our most skilled politicians — Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama — suffered early defeats as their policies failed to turn around in time before they left office. The Democrats won big in 1982, two years after the Reagan landslide, gaining 26 House seats. Similarly, Republicans trounced the Democrats in the 1994 midterms, two years after Clinton’s first victory, while in 2010 Obama suffered a similar rejection.
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Subscribe“By using the loss as a chance to vanquish the Left”
Yes, but this will mean pointing fingers at non-white radical, racist, leftists. It will mean accusing them of hate and racism – Impossible, given the total defeat liberals have suffered on the left.
Left liberals who notice are moving out of the Democratic party, they have no choice.
This is evidenced by the spectacle of most Democratic lawmakers falling over themselves to support Kamala Harris. To anyone with a rational mind, she’s no better, perhaps worse, than Biden in the popularity stakes – the polling proves this. It’s simply illogical to endorse her. But, of course, the Democratic party can’t help itself, either through woke capture or fear. They are paralysed by the identitarian corner they’ve backed themselves into, so appear blithely content to commit political suicide. For many of these people, they’d rather maintain their ‘progressive’ credentials than win an election. It tells you a lot about the modern Democrats, which is why sensible people are abandoning them in droves.
Political suicide is their one redeeming feature.
The cognitively challenged Donald Trump is the oldest ever major party nominee for President of the United States. But against him, does Joe Biden even know that he has pulled out? In 2020, Genocide Joe was drafted only because the machine’s preferred candidate had won no delegates whatever, having failed to carry even her own state. Yet while Trump merely tried to stage a coup, she has pulled it off.
Herewith, a mosaic of Kamala Harris, for it is she, made up of the faces of some of the black men whom, when she was Attorney General of California, she kept in prison after their release dates as Thirteenth Amendment “penal servitude” (slavery) for the State of California and for her corporate donors, thereby establishing her credentials as surely as did her blocking of the evidence that would have freed a man from death row, and as surely as did her fight to retain cash bail. Trump donated to her at least twice. Keir Starmer wants to be her.
I’m struggling to follow. What’s your main point?
I think it’s that she is an unprincipled and disgusting person.
This is what Tulsi Gabbard revealed about Kamala Harris in a primary debate. Kamala dropped out of the race as she no longer appeared in polls. Hillary Clinton vilified Tulsi Gabbard by stating she was an asset of B. Assad. The stupidity of Kamala is only surpassed by the evil of Hillary. The D Part is a group of harpies and nutters.
Seems to me that the impact the president has on the economy is overstated. Inflation and interest rates are often world wide or Western phenomena. Policies of central banks are very important as well as the impact of various advisors, lobby groups and oligarchs. One of the biggest changes ever achieved were during the postwar economy, and this was based on people sitting down at Bretton Woods to make some sensible international agreements that would actually benefit most people. It’s only in rare cases presidents (or their advisors) actually come up with something new and radical, I feel. More often its the president’s job to simply sell the policies that have already been decided. Sometimes consciously against the interests of most voters. It takes a bit of rhetorical gymnastics to sell the idea of austerity while giving presents to the rich and still increasing the deficit. This seems very obvious in the case of Reagan.
‘Progressivism’ ? Something youve made up rather than anything actually out there.
Well Candidate
Would you prefer to renounce the left /BLM/Trans/ etc extremists and become president -or do you prefer to support them and lose ?
The argument that being defeated will cause the scales to fall from their eyes is in my view mistaken. Being defeated will enable to rail against their opponents all the more. After all did Brexit cause the chateratti to see the error of their ways ?
Of course, as a voter the Party’s efforts toward “recovering political power” mean less than nothing to me. I’d rather be rid of the lot of them and start with something completely new.
I’m looking to hire someone to represent my interests. These characters, and most of the pundits and hacks, imagine that they’re competing for power over me and my fellow Americans. They can take that power and shove it.
Political parties don’t welcome a defeat as a chance to “revitalise” themselves by having philosophical debates about their principles. Achieving and staying in power are the only considerations that enter into their calculations.
I’m not holding my breath. There’s a difference between the Democrats and Republicans. The Republicans have always been a fractious, disunited party made up of identifiable factions with different agendas and that hasn’t changed. They’ve tended to succeed or fail based on the competency of the individual leader, as was the case with Reagan/Eisenhower, or benefited greatly from circumstance, as with Nixon and the Bushes. The Democrats have traditionally been more organized, more unified, and more apt to be controlled by powerful back room figures who set the agenda and then expect their public facing politicians to present a united outward front.
In the age of smart phones, this has come back to haunt them. No doubt Hillary’s deplorables comment and the Democratic sabotage of Sanders’ candidacy would likely have never been revealed in earlier eras. It’s not that a reformer/change candidate can’t get elected as a Democrat. Let’s not forget that Obama’s successful campaign was based on hope and change. Let’s also not forget that he was initially not supposed to run against the elite favored Hillary Clinton and opposed by the party leaders. He promised hope and change. He campaigned on ending the forever wars. He won easily. He then failed to deliver on his promises. Either his campaign message was so much fluff and lies or he was undermined by powerful donors and elites who set the agenda and lacked the courage and/or will to defy them and go directly to the people. I prefer to believe the latter but the record is what it is. The reasons are academic. What we need is a Democrat like Trump who will just ignore the elites and donor class. We need a candidate who talks like Obama but can actually deliver the goods. We actually got that in Bernie Sanders, but the Democrat elite and donor class were successful where the Republicans weren’t, owing largely to the nature of the two parties. The Democratic party is a well oiled machine. The Republican party is a composite beast of spare parts cobbled together for the sake of expedience. Their discontent and internal conflict started the day after Lincoln was shot and has continued mostly unabated ever since. They only succeed when the people like the driver, or they don’t like the alternative even more.
The really interesting thing is that this might be changing. Trump has created a unified movement that will be hard to dislodge. If he wins in November, it will cement his control of the party and the direction the party is going in a probably permanent way, leading to a more cohesive party where there is a clearer unified agenda. It just won’t be one globalists, Democrats, or the urban enclaves they inhabit will like very much. On the other hand, the Democrats are showing their division. The woke cultural progressives are asserting their own defiance in the Israel/Gaza conflict. The climate change doomers believe that the coming apocalypse eclipses all other issues. The California technocrats have basically created their own one party state which is increasingly disconnected from the rest of the US. There are still socialist types like Sanders. There are still rural moderates like Beshear and Manchin. The globalist elite who control the party are themselves a faction with their own agenda and they are trying to appease all these constituencies while maintaining the Democratic party’s traditional unity. The balancing act is getting awfully tough. There’s a decent chance a serious defeat, perhaps this year or sometime in the next decade, sees all the plates crashing to the floor.