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The Democrat Party Fire

“I think Democrats prefer losing and being morally right to winning. Me, I’m not into moral victory speeches. I’m into winning” -- Rahm Emanuel

 

No one has yet cried fire in the crowded theatre, but there is no question that mainstream Democrats smell smoke.

 

Fire alarms have been pulled by legacy Democrats whose cries are becoming both desperate and shrill. Not only did President Donald Trump win his election by a majority that, he boasted, was “too big to fix,” he scooped up large chunks of what had been for decades the Democrat Party’s mainstay voting blocks.

 

Pretty much everybody – including Democrats who wish their party well – appear to agree that national and state Democrat Parties need to redraft what used to be called in the old days their “platform”, the manner in which national and state parties present themselves to voters. The well-worn Democrat Party “legacy” had not served the party well in the recently concluded national elections.

 

A president’s legacy is not complete until all the real-world consequences of his presentations and policies have come home to roost. All things, good and bad, must come to an end at some point. “To become perfect,” Ralph Waldo Emerson reminds us, “is to have changed often.”

 

In a recent opinion piece – The Democrats’ Obama Dilemma: They need a new leader, but he won’t go, and no one has stepped up-- the Washington Examiner (WE), a reliable political pilot fish, argues that the Barack Obama/Joe Biden legacy has now come to a thumping end.

 

“President Donald Trump,” The Examiner notes, “returned to the White House, this time with a national plurality behind him many Democratic operatives believed was impossible. The Obama coalition lay in tatters, with Hispanic men especially joining the white working class in deserting Democrats in droves. Florida and Ohio, once battleground states that voted for Obama, went for Trump by double digits.

 

“Obama might have, in another time, called it a ‘shellacking.’”

 

While Trump had anchored his campaign in positive but occasional hyperbolic policy proposals, the Obama-Biden-Harris campaign relied heavily on past sweeping denunciations of Trump.

 

Under the creative hands of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton during the Obama administration, Trump, early in his first term, was impeached on dubious grounds. Democrats relied on a document that on close inspection proved to be fraudulent, though the claims in it had been accepted by an important Foreign Intelligence Surveillance (FISA) court as genuine.

 

The current White House occupant is – no hyperbole here – the most publically vilified president in U.S. history. He was twice impeached, once at the beginning of his first term in office and again at its end. The impeachment failed in the U.S. Senate and Trump was not removed from office, the sole punishment of an impeachment conviction. Then Speaker of the U.S. House Nance Pelosi, we were told, was a genius at vote counting. She must have known that in the absence of an affirming vote in the U.S. Senate any presentation of charges brought in the House must fall to the ground.

 

Trump was subjected to numerous and lengthy court trials, only one of which matured into an appealable conviction, before those bringing the charges hoisted flags of surrender and disappeared back into a highly charged partisan judicial woodwork. Two unsuccessful Trump assassination attempts followed, the first two days before 2024 Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and the second nine weeks after the July assassination attempt.

 

Trump was reelected to the presidential office as the Democrats persisted in self-destructive political immolation – tossing a primary-selected candidate, Joe Biden, off the political stage and substituting in his place a non-primary presidential candidate, Kamala Harris, who quickly demonstrated that she was no student of Emerson. Harris refused on multiple occasions to say what changes her administration would unveil should she become president.

 

Final presidential vote counts demonstrated that none of it worked, and some Democrat Party anchorites have concluded correctly that the politics of personal destruction is not nearly enough to assure election victories, though harsh condemnations have played a significant role in party politics since the first significant appearance of parties during the tumultuous John Adams-Thomas Jefferson race in 1796.

 

Students of history will recall that it was Scottish journalist James Thomson Callender (1758 – July 17, 1803) who planted the rumor that Adams, Jefferson’s opponent, was a bit fey -- “marked by an otherworldly air or attitude”; in Scottish, “marked by a foreboding of death or calamity” – and later, when Jefferson had become president, it was Callender who broke the story that Jefferson had an illicit affair with one of his slaves, Sally Hemmings. Jefferson had refused to adorn Callender with a lucrative payback as Postmaster of Richmond, Virginia. Still later, Callender’s drowned body was found floating in the James River. Everyone supposed that he had stumbled into the river after a bout of heavy drinking.

 

Callender’s position in American journalism is now under review. Some of his more sympathetic post-modern biographers hold that Callender, a superb satirist, was most interested in exposing political chicanery and what moderns would call “hypocrisy.”

 

The lesson we may take from all this is summed up in the French proverb “plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose” -- the more things change, the more they stay the same.

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