Meanwhile, at the Democratic Ranch

There was an unusual amount of attention paid to the race for the chairmanship for the Democratic National Party in the press, and all of our Democrat friends could hardly talk about anything else. Given the currently sorry state of the party, which now finds itself out power in the White House and both chambers of Congress and any minute now in the Supreme Court and much of the rest of the federal judiciary, not to mention in the governor’s mansions and legislatures and county commissions of most states, we can well understand the interest in what’s usually a back page story about someone whose only the politically obsessed sorts would usually recognize.

As the sorts of politically obsessed and retrograde Republicans who are as distressed as ever about the state of our own party, we’re not encouraged by how the race played out. From our old-fashioned right-wing perspective it came down to the far-left Tom Perez, President Barack Obama’s former Secretary of Labor and head of the Justice Department’s civil rights division, and the even farther-left Minnesota Rep. Keith Ellison, who is best known as the party’s left-most member and the only Muslim ever elected to Congress. Perez was naturally backed by both Obama and failed party presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and the rest of what can charitably be called the Democratic establishment, so naturally all of our Democratic friends were avidly for Ellison. All of our Democratic friends are in the same anti-establishment mood that overwhelmed so much of the Republican Party last election it wound up with President Donald Trump, and we try in vain to tell them that no good ever comes of it.

All of our Democratic friends were big for self-described socialist and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders in the past primaries, who was big backer of Ellison, and they all either enthusiastically voted for Green Party nominee Jill Stein or reluctantly for Clinton in the general election, and none of them have much more regard for Clinton than we do. They all regard her as dishonest and corrupt, which causes us to respect their political integrity, and they also find her insufficiently liberal, which causes us to question their sanity. As far as we can remember any party that loses power to a more conservative or liberal platform figures that it lost because it wasn’t sufficiently conservative or liberal enough, and all our Democrat friends are repeating the pattern. Having lost a winnable presidential race to a Republican who promised a Muslim ban and an immigration crackdown had an undeniable appeal to the sorts of white working class voters who once voted for Democrats, they figure the shrewd move was to pick a black and Muslim and formerly Black Muslim and still race-baiting and left-most-in-the-party kook to head up the party apparatus.

Any honest Republican should recognize the impulse. After it lost a winnable election against Obama in ’16 a huge chunk of the Grand Old Party was hating on failed nominee Mitt Romney, convinced that he’d been far too dignified and reasonable and otherwise establishment to prevail against those hated Democrats, and after Trump’s electoral victory we’re disappointed but not at all surprised our Democrat friends have concluded that she was just too damned dignified and reasonable and otherwise establishment to beat Trump. All of our Democratic buddies are convinced that Sanders’ unabashed socialism would have won the day, especially if it had been fused to the racial identity politics that Ellsion represents, and given the eight years of darkness the Republicans endured during the Obama years it’s altogether too plausible, but we still think the Democrats would have done better last time around with those relatively moderate candidates that were the first to drop out of the primaries.

If we were inclined to offer advice to adversaries, we would remind our Democrat friends that they just went six-for-seven in the last popular presidential votes, their last redoubts are the most populous and influential states, the states that made up the electoral majority were decided by razor-thing margins, and that nothing ever lasts forever in politics. In politics as in chess the center is usually the best space to occupy, and its not as if the victorious Perez isn’t far enough to the queen side. His establishment credentials suggest he might even be more effective in spreading Democratic nonsense than Ellison would have been, which alarms all our Republican friends, but at this point we were hoping at least one party will remain relatively sane.

— Bud Norman

The Democrats’ Dilemma, Not Ours

These are the times that try our traditional Republican souls, but we suppose it’s even harder on a Democratic.

A mere eight years ago the Democrats won the White House back with the most hyped candidate in the history of presidential, along with a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, clear control of the House of Representatives, and had enough votes on the Supreme Court to get away with its most grandiose ambitions. Those congressional majorities quickly vanished, now the White House has also been lost, and it seems likely that a conservative Supreme Court will be getting in the way of Democrats for another ten to twenty years no matter how future elections play out. Republicans control most of the state and local governments, too, with the Democrats’ dominance confined to the west coast and the upper northeast and a few big but shrinking cities in between.

The latest election results don’t represent a clear victory for the Republican party we once knew or the conservatism it once represented, but there’s no way to read them but as a resounding defeat for the Democrats and the liberalism is has come to represent. Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton won the popular vote due to running up the score in the west coast and the upper northeast and those few big but shrinking cities in between, and her party also won most of the Senate votes thanks to two Democratic candidates in California and no one running in Texas, but pretty much everywhere else the Democrats and their ideology were overwhelmingly rejected. Obamacare and the Iran deal and all those executive actions on immigration and everything else the Democrats have accomplished in the past years has been found wanting and will soon be erased, the noisy and angry race-class-gender sort of identity politics that the Democrats have peddled to ascendant minority-majority for the past many years has been beaten by an equally noisy and angry identity politics among a still mostly white and working class and almost entirely male or female population that doesn’t feel the need apologize for its race or class or gender, and at the moment the Democrats seem out of any other ideas. Whatever they get in the way of infrastructure spending or protectionist trade barriers or isolationist foreign policy will come courtesy of the reviled Republican president-elect Donald Trump, and none of it is likely to help the Democrats’ future electoral prospects, or anything else for that matter.

This has prompted some long overdue soul-searching within the Democratic Party, along with the usual finger-pointing and squabbling, but so far the results have not been promising. Rep. Nancy Pelosi of California, who was Speaker of the House back in the good old days of six years ago but has been consigned to minority leader status ever since, has somehow retained her leadership position despite losing 63 of her caucus’ votes to challenger Rep. Tim Ryan of Ohio, and think the Democrats missed a chance there. Seventy-six-year-old Pelosi represents a district in San Francisco, a sanctuary city for illegal immigrants and every sort of race and class and gender identity refugee you can think of, and was the one who made sure that Obamacare passed so that we could as see what was in it and pushed that trillion dollar infrastructure spending “stimulus” boondoggle and pretty much everything else that voters have now soundly rejected. Ryan seems a rather middle-of-the-road to Democrat to our old-fashioned Republican eyes, but he’s only 43 years old and represents a district in Youngstown, a hard luck town chock full of the sorts of disgruntled white folks who used to vote for Democrats but are lately responsible for the Republicans’ monopoly of political power, so he might have been able to drag the party at least slightly closer to where most of the country is.

The Democrats are also forced to choose a new National Chairman or Chairwoman or Chairperson of Indeterminate Gender, the last two women who held the post having been forced out by scandals of collusion with Clinton, and thus far the leading contender seems to be Rep. Keith Ellison of Minnesota. He’s also gone by Keith Hakim, Keith X, Keith X Ellison, Keith Muhammad and other variations during his long career from the virulently anti-white Nation of Islam to a more mainstream form of Islam that is merely anti-western to his current status as America’s first Muslim congressman, and although his views on all those newfangled gender issues seems more in keeping with Democratic scripture than the Koran and he’s right on all the minimum wage and corporate taxes stuff he’s got all sorts of ties to some some unsavory segments of the Muslim world. At a time when a relatively recent Republican is winning a majority of the electoral votes by stoking the public’s very rational fears of radical Islamist terrorists, Ellison seems an odd choice as the chairman of a major American political party.

Both Pelosi’s and Ellison’s races are a result of the predictable divide in the party between those who feel that its liberalism is at fault for their predicament and those who blame it for not being liberal enough. There’s a sizable segment of the party that believes that should have gone with the self-described socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, and although that’s based on some polling from ages ago and doesn’t take into consideration that incredible amount of opposition research any Republican could have unleashed on that unkempt nutcase it’s at least theoretically possible. Another segment blames Sanders’ insurgent primary challenge to Clinton for making her unpopular among the most idealistic sorts of Democrats who’d prefer someone less indebted to Wall Street and corporate boardrooms, as if Clinton’s appalling record of dishonesty and corruption was already obvious, and as if such idealistic Democrats were a significant voting bloc, but we suppose that’s also theoretically possible. The 70-year-old Clinton will probably still have some sway in the party, although she not only but she lost to the reviled Trump, and 67 year old Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts is probably the most prominent high-cheekboned face of the Democrats, but a party of scolding old white women will have a hard time going up against a party of angry old white men, and we’ve seen enough of those arguments to know that it won’t do anyone any good.

Not being Democrats, we’ll leave to them to sort it out. We used to be Republicans, and we’ve got our own worries.

— Bud Norman

Doing Injury to Insult

Rep. Keith Ellison, a Democrat from Minnesota, recently used an internet account to feature one of his supporters calling Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney a very vulgar name.

The epithet doesn’t bear repeating here, so the curious will have to follow the link, but suffice to say that we found the incident troubling. It’s not that the offending word is especially obscene by today’s lowered standards, although it’s bad enough that it doesn’t bear repeating here. Nor is it the blatant hypocrisy of the word be bandied about by a man who recently was demanding civility of his political opponents, although that also rankles. What’s most worrisome, rather, is that the insult is so lame. It’s the sort of thing that the more inarticulate sixth-graders say to one another on a playground, or that you might hear a drunken redneck shouting at passersby in a Denny’s parking lot after the bars have closed.

Politics ain’t bean bag, as the old saying puts it, and the vituperative political insult is by no means a recent phenomenon, but it used to be that politicians would at least put some effort into casting aspersions. Indeed, there was a time not so long ago when citizens of the democratic countries could expect that their tax dollars were funding only the most carefully-phrased, lovingly rendered put-downs.

When Henry Clay famously remarked that “I’d rather be right than president,” his nemesis Thomas Reed famously replied that “The gentleman need not trouble himself. He’ll never be either.” We doubt that Reed would have earned himself such an honorable footnote in history if he’d replied, ala Ellison, “Yeah? Well, so’s your momma.” Better that Ellison should emulate such eloquent insulters as James G. Blaine, who described Benjamin Franklin Butler as “A lamentably successful cross between a fox and a hog,” or Ulysses S. Grant, who took care to be taxonomically specific when he said that successor James Garfield “has shown that he is not possessed of the backbone of angleworm.” The well-crafted insult can nick even the most admirable targets, such as Alice Roosevelt Longworth’s observation that Thomas Dewey “looked like the little man on the wedding cake,” or William Cobbett’s description of Benjamin Franklin as “A crafty and lecherous old hypocrite whose very statue seems to gloat on the wenches as they walk the States House yard.”

Our English cousins have long been masters of the political insult, honing their barbs to a politely elegant edge rarely achieved on this side of the pond. Lord Eversley was a mere child when he pointed to Charles James Fox orating on the floor of the House of Commons and asked “What is that fat man in such a passion about?” The epic political battles between William Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli were peppered with an anthology’s worth of memorable insults, such as the latter’s remark that the former “was essentially a prig, and among prigs there is a freemasonry which never fails. All the prigs spoke of him as the coming man.” Winston Churchill could have supplied several more anthologies with his quotable insults, and was so prolifically insulting that F.E. Smith was reported to say “Winston has devoted the best years of his life to preparing his impromptu speeches.” John Montagu tried to insult John Wilkes by alleging that “I do not know whether your will die on the gallows or of the pox,” and found himself hit back by Wilkes’ “That will depend, my Lord, on whether I embrace your principles or your wife.”

Ah, but those were the good old days. Today’s political culture has become so thoroughly degraded that sitting congressmen are reduced to schoolyard taunts when attacking an opponent. That’s bad enough by itself, but it also explains a great deal about the bad policies that Washington is making when our leaders can’t even come up with better put-downs than Ellison employs.

Then again, Ellison is an ass.

— Bud Norman