The Establishments war on Donald Trump
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Title: "The Democrats Are Suffering Through a Drought of Generational Talent"
Source:
National Review
URL Source: https://www.nationalreview.com/2025 ... rought-of-generational-talent/
Published: Feb 26, 2025
Author: CHARLES C. W. COOKE
Post Date: 2025-02-26 11:33:09 by Mudboy Slim
Keywords: None
Views: 452
Comments: 4
Without an Obama or a Clinton or a JFK to attract attention, the mediocrities run rampant. If it seems to you as if the Democratic Party is hopelessly leaderless at present, rest assured that this is because it is. Does that seem odd? If one uses the Republican Party as a yardstick, it might. This is the tenth year of Trump’s domination of the GOP, and, if he survives to the end of his second term, he will have been its undisputed head for nearly a decade and a half. Relative to that, the lack of an obvious head honcho on the other side is jarring. Trump, though, is not normal. Typically, even the most charismatic figures hold sway over their party for six or seven years at the most, and, once their grip has been loosened, they leave a vacuum in their wake. The Democrats were so fortunate to have Bill Clinton and Barack Obama come along within eight years of one another that one can forgive them for having concluded that being handed generational talent after generational talent was simply how contemporary politics worked. It isn’t. They were spoiled, and now they are suffering through the downswing. That the Democratic Party was in the midst of an ongoing personnel crisis should probably have been obvious when, in 2020, it had to pull out all the stops to install Joe Biden — a senile, talentless, midwit hack — as its presidential candidate. Likewise, its devotees should have heard alarm bells last year when, after the conspiracy to cover up Joe Biden’s infirmity had finally been exposed, the party’s best alternative was Kamala Harris. If one wishes, one can explain both of these decisions away as the products of panic and necessity. In 2020, the Democrats were obliged to stop Bernie, and, in 2024, they had no choice but to swap Biden out for his VP. But this is not a persuasive line. In the interest of self-aggrandizement, Donald Trump likes to pretend that the Republicans “never won” prior to his arriving on the scene, but that claim is not even close to being true. While Barack Obama was president, the Republicans won and won and won — taking more than 1,000 legislative seats at the federal, state, and local levels — and, in the process, they did incalculable damage to the Democrats’ once and future bench. That Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were ever in a position to be made their party’s nominees serves as a testament to the scale of the destruction that was wrought. This problem is being underestimated by analysts. There is no doubt that the party has chronic ideological problems, and that, having now lost twice to Donald Trump, it has been exhausted by its strategy of impotent rage. In attempting to prevent a second Trump presidency, the Democrats tried everything except political moderation, and, as is common, they will need to complete a period of reflection, renewal, and reform before they are able to fight back. But, looking around, one cannot help but wonder at the sheer inadequacy of the current crop of representatives. Lionel Trilling once accused of conservatives of dealing in “irritable mental gestures” rather than ideas. In 2025, this is a perfect description of the Democratic Party, which, in its anguish and frustration, has come to mistake protest for argument, profanity for passion, and oppositional defiant disorder for advancing its voters’ agenda. To watch Senators Chris Murphy or Chuck Schumer fulminate and catastrophize and predict that the eschaton is around every last corner is to remember that politics, like nature, abhors a vacuum. Without an Obama or a Clinton or a JFK to attract attention, the mediocrities run rampant. At a push, an army can tolerate an Elizabeth Warren or a Brian Schatz or a David Hogg, but it cannot put them atop the general’s horse without inspiring disarray, defeat, and embarrassment in the face of its peers. The good news for the Democrats is that they have been here before. They were in this position in the 1920s, the 1950s, the 1970s, the 1980s, and the 2000s. They have suffered through George McGovern, Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis, Al Gore, and John Kerry. There was even a period, in early 2004, when the party looked as if it might nominate Howard Dean to run for president. This, too, will pass. Donald Trump will not remain in the honeymoon phase forever. The ennui that has engulfed his critics will dissipate, piece by piece. And, eventually, from some corner of our politics that nobody is currently searching, an appealing character will emerge to consolidate the troops. Until then, the Democratic Party will remain hopelessly lost — and, in these early stages of disorientation and angst, hilarious, too.
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Heh heh heh...MUD
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Regards...MUD
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