Democrats Should Fight Both Trump And The Establishment That Empowers Him
But now, a warning ..
Many Democrats see former President Joe Biden’s age and now his unfortunate cancer diagnosis as an easy exit ramp. They can state that upon careful reflection in the hindsight of electoral defeat that Biden probably shouldn’t have run for re-election. It’s like the classic “Now, a warning?” line from Death Becomes Her: Now, you think it’s not a good idea for an octogenarian incumbent with dismal approval ratings to run for a second term? (Watch below.)
Former Cabinet member Pete Buttigieg told reporters last week that “most people would agree” it was a mistake for Biden to run for re-election, and Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna told This Week co-anchor Jonathan Karl he’d made a mistake when he supported Biden’s re-election campaign.
Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy went even further on Meet the Press: “By 2024, the American people had decided that they wanted somebody new,” Murphy said. “They wanted somebody younger. And it was a mistake for Democrats to not listen to the voters earlier and set up a process that would have gotten us in a position where we could have been more competitive that fall.”
Murphy’s remarks are revealing of a larger issue. He doesn’t offer any concrete policy failing that turned off voters. Instead, he suggests that a younger Democrat, free of Biden’s chief liability, could effectively campaign on what was otherwise a successful presidency. It’s an appealing fantasy, one I personally shared when Kamala Harris replaced Biden as the nominee, but the harsh reality of exit polls should have confirmed it was a delusion.
It’s not as if Democrats aren’t blaming perceived policy failures for 2024, but it’s usually isolated at the margins: Harris was viewed as too far left on trans issues or too far right on Gaza. Neither truly explains why 73 percent of voters in 2024 were “dissatisfied or angry” with the direction of the country (35 percent of those voters were Democrats).
Right now, Democrats have embraced a “fire the CEO but don’t change the product” strategy. It’s why Democrats are debating language — don’t say “oligarchy,” the focus groups think voters will respond better to “doo doo heads” — and messaging, but the situation is more complicated than Burger King realizing it could probably sell more Whoppers if they stopped airing those creepy Eyes Wide Shut-style ads. (Watch below.)
Biden’s approval first collapsed and never recovered after his “annus horribilis” crammed into the summer of 2021: There was the Delta variant (coupled with overall Covid fatigue), the botched Afghanistan withdrawal, and the very real impact of inflation. Democrats are more likely to publicly state that Biden shouldn’t have run for re-election rather than suggest the American Rescue Plan went too far or the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill didn’t do enough right away. They are very deliberately running against the man but not his policies, which is weird because the latter isn’t sick with cancer.
Romney wasn’t right
Many liberal pundits have argued that Democrats should focus entirely on Donald Trump, who’s the current president and active threat to the free world. This isn’t the time for recriminations over the 2024 election. There is some truth to that. However, I do think it’s important to consider the circumstances of the 2016 election and how Trump rose to power in the first place.
After the 2012 election, there was a sense among mainstream Republicans and center-right pundits that Mitt Romney was wronged — a good man done in by an unfair, biased media (sound familiar?) — and that the past four years had proven him right, specifically regarding foreign policy. The post-2012 campaign autopsy called for better inclusion efforts without significant policy changes (that should sound very familiar).
During the 2016 Republican primary, all the average, normal terrible candidates were united in bashing Barack Obama and inevitable nominee Hillary Clinton. Marco Rubio’s infamous New Hampshire debate malfunction happened because he kept repeating the same scripted attack line: “And let’s dispel once and for all with this fiction that Barack Obama doesn’t know what he’s doing. He knows exactly what he’s doing.”
Rubio’s stump speech contained nostalgic appeals to Reaganism, and Jeb Bush’s 2015 campaign ad casts Clinton as a socialist bogeyman to be slayed. (Watch below.)
The problem was Republican voters no longer trusted the establishment to advance their interests. Worse, they didn’t believe they were truly capable of fighting what they considered an existential threat. A primary voter in South Carolina famously asked Bush, “Can you be — excuse me for saying in the vernacular — a son-of-a-bitch?” Jeb! could only respond with rejected campaign bumper sticker slogans: “I will be tough. I will be resolute. I will be firm. I will be determined.”
Too many Democrats are running Jeb! campaigns right now. They’re writing strongly worded letters to the Trump administration or trying to find ways to work constructively with the fascist regime. Some are just cowering in the corner until 2026 and saying, “Please don’t hurt me.”
Trump ran against the GOP establishment in 2016. He attacked long-held Republican policy positions and shrugged off arguments that this made him insufficiently conservative. Before Trump came down that escalator, Republicans considered immigration a political third rail — a hardline against illegal immigration might appeal to conservative primary voters but alienate Latinos in the general. You could lose Florida and possibly even Texas. Trump based his entire campaign around a debate establishment Republicans wanted to avoid, and he proved them wrong.
Trump shredded former party nominees Mitt Romney and John McCain as losers who failed to beat Obama. It was obvious that Republicans had distanced themselves from the unpopular George W. Bush, but Trump openly called the Iraq War a “big fat mistake” and said that Bush had lied that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. He reminded Jeb! and Republican voters that 9/11 happened on George W. Bush’s watch.
Jeb! tried to remain on message, steering his response back to the reviled Obama, but that was no longer sufficient for a Republican primary electorate.
Of course, Democrats don’t have to model themselves after someone as morally grotesque as Trump. Barack Obama ran against the Democratic establishment in 2008, distinguishing himself from his primary rivals with his consistent opposition to the Iraq War. Bill Clinton ran as a “New Democrat,” offering very clear differences in policy from the existing liberal establishment. They weren’t simply new coats of paint over an existing edifice.
Democrats should move forward but that doesn’t mean carrying yesterday’s baggage on the journey. The party has become too inured to institutions that have failed us all. The next true leader will defy convention and forge a new path. The ones bold enough to try will soon discover they aren’t alone.
I dunno, looked at from across the pond (UK), I’d kill to have someone in charge as competent as Biden, or as genuinely radical as Biden.
Maybe I have had my expectations lowered, dropped my standards to much, but when all politicians have to offer is ‘austerity’ or ‘austerity lite’ I’d kill to have a leader who invested in the country, who dared publically support unions, who didn’t keep the economy flatlining by sucking up tax payers money and feeding it to any grifter with a private company and a good story.
That said, I agree the future of democracy shouldn’t have come down to an election. If the U.S. ever wants to be taken seriously as a country on the world stage, it needs to prove more than just a few thousand swing state voters stand between the U.S. becoming a madman’s playground.
If the Dems are going to save the U.S that means tackling the Supreme Court - and also the inequalities laid bare within the legal system, the rich can delay justice indefinitely, the poor are jailed for profit. That’s going to take some radical thinking.
I thought Biden made the right decision to run for reelection, but clearly I was wrong. However, I am not throwing him under the bus for making the wrong decision, like elected Dems are doing. They all supported him then, or SAID that they did. They can admit to being wrong, but without throwing him under the bus, as they seem to be doing now. They were in a better position than I to have known if Biden was up to campaigning and running the country at the same time. One thing that they can do is admit that Dems suck at messaging, and that was one of Biden's problems. I'm not saying that his age wouldn't have been an issue, but Dems should have, and could have countered that by pointing out Biden's record, which repubs and the media distorted. Establishment Dems rely too much upon paid political consultants, who constantly get things wrong, and focus groups (who are in those focus groups? Friends and family of the paid political consultants?)
When JFK was inaugurated, I was 3 days old, so of course I don't remember it, but I know one of his remarks was "...the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans." It's time to pass the torch to a new generation of Democrats.