Democrats need a mudfight

It is just six months until the midterms, and Democrats are still trying to figure out what to tell voters. Brace yourselves, Republicans. Because the last hope of drowning politicos everywhere is fear and loathing, and we’re already seeing the signs that that’s where the Democrats are headed.

Midterm elections are normally a referendum on the party in power, but that’s the last thing Democrats wan. President Joe Biden promised to bring back a less confrontational politics after the daily chaotic tornado that was the Trump presidency. Instead, baiting and switching, he attempted to become the most transformational president since Lyndon B. Johnson, proposing trillions of dollars in new domestic spending and a panoply of new programs. That’s just not what moderate swing voters thought they voted for, and thus it’s no surprise that Biden’s job approval ratings started to slide even before the shambolic withdrawal from Afghanistan.

That cataclysmic event showcased what would become a defining feature of the past year: Biden’s inability to manage events. The administration’s false or self-delusional reassurances that the Taliban would not, could not, conquer Afghanistan in a matter of days showed its utter inability to predict or react to things it could not fully control. Similarly, for months, Biden’s economic team ignored, then pooh-poohed, the risk of sustained inflation. Now it is left fatuously blaming Vladimir Putin, corporate greed and supply-chain problems.

These examples of incompetence are supplemented by the inability of Democratic leaders to even come close to satisfying their own voters’ demands. Time and again, Biden, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) and Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (N.Y.) said something, anything, had to happen on the long list of bills that were supposedly critical to America’s future. Yet, they still cannot get the party’s moderates and progressives on the same page.

Expect increasingly shrill rhetoric from the president and his minions as Election Day comes near. People with nothing left to say on their own behalf will try to switch the subject to something else.

And right on cue, Biden is ramping up his attacks on the GOP, saying on a recent West Coast swing that Republicans are the “MAGA party now,” while other Democrats increasingly look to revelations from the House Jan. 6 committee to help them convince voters that Republicans are opposed to democracy.

Expect, too, to hear Florida Sen. Rick Scott’s name a lot in the months ahead. In February, Scott, who chairs the National Republican Senatorial Committee, made the impolitic suggestion that every American should pay some income taxes. The idea has gained no traction with other Republicans, but that hasn’t stopped Biden from using it to claim that Republicans want to raise taxes on the middle class.

The playwright George Bernard Shaw famously warned: “Never wrestle with pigs. You both get dirty and the pig likes it.” In the upcoming midterms, mud is all the Democrats have. Republicans had better get ready.