Democrats
are paying heavily for their political failures — and for ditching the working
stiff.
By
Dick Tuck, the legendary political prankster and wit, once ran
for local office in San Francisco and lost. His concession speech, in its
entirety: “The people have spoken — the bastards.”
Now, you know me — I wouldn’t say anything like that about the
recent elections. It’s vulgar and I’m couth.
However, if the shoe fits…
Perhaps it’s safer to quote the Sage of Baltimore, H.L. Mencken,
who said: “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want,
and deserve to get it good and hard.”
The 2014 midterms were a Mencken moment.
It was a disaster for the Democratic Party, of course. They lost
every election that was possible to lose and a few that weren’t. But it was an
even greater disaster for the American people.
Burdened with a reverse Robin Hood tax structure that robs the
poor to give to the rich, voters elected the people who are most adamant that
the rich, the richer, and (most of all) the richest be taxed lightly (if at
all) lest they cease creating jobs.
Whether they create jobs or not.
Angered by the political gridlock in Washington, Americans not
only reelected the leaders of the Republican obstructionist caucus, they
substantially increased its numbers.
Frustrated by President Barack Obama’s inability to clear up the
mess in the Middle East (Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, and all that), they backed
the party that made the mess in the first place and has yet to so much as
apologize for it.
The result is that We the People find ourselves at the mercy of
cynical manipulators joined at the hip with true-believing ignoramuses.
How did we get here?
I blame the Democrats for having lost their identity as a
progressive party of the working stiff. The Democratic Party is instead…nothing
at all. It’s a collection of political strands that pull in one direction and
push in the other.
Moreover, it’s leaderless. Obama has his virtues — he’s bright
and reasonable — but he’s an awful politician. He makes Jimmy Carter look like
Lyndon Johnson.
Nothing makes this clearer than his treatment of the Affordable
Care Act, also known as Obamacare. Essentially, he made a speech and let his
crack federal bureaucracy handle the details.
To make a long story short, it didn’t work. The rollout was
horrendously inept, and Obama did next to nothing to sell the plan to a
confused public until it was too late.
Into the resulting vacuum the Republicans injected a
never-ending barrage of vitriol. Without being very specific, they
characterized the plan as an unparalleled disaster. And they did it on a daily
basis.
For two years or more, Republicans could hardly broach any subject — the
war, the economy, the weather — without including a rant on the evils of making
health care more widely available.
Regrettably, this demonization of health care carried the day,
even though the plan overcame its early problems to become a success. Its flaws
were exaggerated. Its virtues became secrets.
That’s a failure of political leadership, which Democrats paid
for heavily.
There’s talk now in Washington of a new spirit of cooperation
between the two major parties. This talk is generally between people who start
drinking before noon.
For the past six years Republicans in Congress have done
everything in their power to delegitimize President Obama. They’ve questioned
his citizenship, his patriotism, his intelligence, and his religion. They did
that while narrowly controlling one house of Congress.
To think that giving them full control of both chambers will
make them kinder, gentler, and more amenable to compromise requires a leap of
faith available only to saints and fools.
May God help the United States the next time we have to raise
the debt limit.
OtherWords columnist
Donald Kaul lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan. OtherWords.org