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| Biden and McAuliffe |
Otto von Bismarck, a very successful German politician in the Romantic Period, roughly from 1800 to 1850, used to say, "Only a fool learns from his own mistakes. The wise man learns from the mistakes of others."
Bismarck
was able to cobble Germany together from a medieval assortment of German and
Prussian city-states, no small accomplishment. Along the way, he bumped into
and moved aside politicians who were, there is no other way to put it,
prisoners of their own past successes.
In
the aftermath of elections won by Republicans across the nation and in
Connecticut, the question arises: Are Democrats capable of learning from the
mistakes of others?
Terry
McAuliffe lost a gubernatorial race in Virginia to Glen Youngkin, principally
for two reasons: 1) McAuliffe’s campaign shtick – run against former President
Donald Trump rather than his political opponent -- did not stick with voters,
particularly soccer moms and unaffiliateds; 2 McAuliffe insulted a good many
voters by claiming that Critical Race Theory, which some have questioned as
structurally racist, was a dog whistle for Republican racists; 3) McAuliffe fatally
misread the times, which had changed.
Just
as you begin to wring your hands in despair at the political misjudgments of
reporters and analysts, you run across these lines, shimmering like a beckoning
beacon in the gathering gloom.
“For
five years,” The New York Times
noted, “the
[Democrat] party [in Virginia] rode record-breaking turnouts to victory, fueled
by voters with a passion for ousting a president they viewed as incompetent,
divisive or worse. Tuesday’s results showed the limitations of such resistance
politics when the object of resistance is out of power, the failure of
Democrats to fulfill many of their biggest campaign promises, and the
still-simmering rage over a pandemic that transformed schools into some of the
country’s most divisive political battlegrounds… For Democrats, the results on
the nation’s single biggest day of voting until the midterms next year raised
alarms that the wave of anti-Trump energy that carried them into power has
curdled into apathy in a base that is tired of protesting and is largely
back at brunch. Or, in what would be even more politically perilous, that the
party’s motivation has been replaced by a sense of dissatisfaction with the
state of a country that has, despite all of Mr. Biden’s campaign promises, not
yet returned to a pre-Covid sense of normalcy.”
Masterful
politicians may easily make the obvious disappear behind clouds of perfumed
verbiage. But the obvious in the two cases analyzed by the Times is simply
too obvious and will not vanished on command.
Democrats had often tainted Republicans in off year state elections with fanciful associations with Trump -- even after Trunp had left the White House. The McAuliffe-Youngkin race showed that these unsavory McCarthyite tactics were no longer ineffective.
The
Times put the point, very gently, this way: “Even before the race was
officially called for Mr. Youngkin, Democratic strategists were calling for
their party to examine whether continuing to focus on Mr. Trump remained the
best strategy, particularly after an election in which Mr. Biden promised his
supporters that they would no longer have to worry about — or even think about
— the round-the-clock drama of the previous administration.
“’The
Democrats need to take a serious look at how we choose to engage with the Trump
narrative,’ said Dan Sena, a Democratic strategist who helped the
party win the House in 2018. ‘This was an election where the
Democrats did not lean into their accomplishments either in Virginia or
nationally. And as we look to 2022, we’re going to have to ask some hard
questions about whether that’s the right strategy.’”
The
Times analysis does not confront the dread possibility that President Joe Biden
may be fast becoming the new Trump, a foil that may be used widely by the
opposition in every election to “keep
the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless
series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary," the “whole aim,” Henry Menken wrote, “of
practical politics.”
What accomplishments of the nearly year old Biden administration
do Democrats wish to celebrate in the coming 2022 elections -- a southern border
in disarray; a country surrendered to Taliban terrorists; hikes in energy
prices owing to the shutdown of fracking and a viable oil transmission
pipeline; raging inflation; spikes in the cost of labor; ships loaded with cargo
laying idle off California’s coast; the delivery of a once moderate Democrat
Party to socialists Bernie Sanders and a far left Democrat Squad of
malcontents? Perhaps more importantly, can Republicans successfully use Biden
as a spook-sick with which to frighten wavering voters?
Is
Biden the new Trump?
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