US Democrats are making the same mistake as Labour
IT WILL take a certain talent for the Democrats to lose the US Presidential race to an incumbent with the lowest approval ratings since Gerald Ford in 1976, but they seem more than capable of this dubious achievement.
If Donald Trump pulls off a second victory in November, his challengers may look back on this week as the moment their campaign was lost.
Trump was supposed to become the president who was removed from office after impeachment. And a frontrunner for the Democratic nomination was supposed to arise from the Iowa caucus.
Instead, the President has emerged Teflon-like from a failed impeachment and the Democrats showed themselves literally unable to count. The Iowa caucus turned into a farce, with a computer crash delaying the results by several days.
The excessive number of candidates still in the Democratic race has made the whole process look like a family squabble.
As for impeachment, why did the Democrats start a process they were doomed to lose?
They would have been better saying to the American people, given the election is only months away: You judge him.
NANCY Pelosi’s childish tearing-up of her copy of the President’s State of the Union address managed to achieve the virtually impossible: to make Trump look statesmanlike by comparison. Whatever she thinks of Trump, it was a speech that rightly gave prominence to America’s strong economic performance, observing that unemployment has fallen to 50-year lows.Was Pelosi saying a strong economy is an outrage?
As Speaker, she was chairing a major political event in the House of Representatives, not campaigning out on the street.
Of course, to liberals in the US and worldwide, a Trump victory would be an affront to all they value. More than that, it would be completely inexplicable.They do not, and have never tried to, understand the appeal of Trump to his core voters. To them, Trump is a rude throwback to an age of discrimination and repression of women.
In some senses they are right. Things Trump said during his campaign in 2016 and subsequently in office are, as liberals like to say, outside the accepted norms of political debate.
But a great number of Americans, used to far coarser bar-room talk, have managed to put that to one side. What they really care about is whether they have a job. On this, Trump has delivered as he promised.
True, you can argue the economy began to recover under Barack Obama, that Trump’s boom has been bought at the cost of soaring government debt, that asset prices are inflated by artificially low interest rates. But the Democrats aren’t making those arguments, or not effectively. They seem to expect to win by talking among themselves or by attacking Trump’s character.
A large part of middle and low-income America, on the other hand, is prepared to hold its nose and vote for the man who has put rocket boosters under the economy.
Trump’s success was years in the making.As in Britain, where the political class was shocked by the Brexit vote, elected politicians have grown too distant from the concerns of most voters. In Wisconsin, as in Blyth Valley, low income groups have reacted badly to being taken for granted by a Leftleaning political party.
Power and influence in the US has steadily drained to the east and west coasts, leaving many in the “flyover states” feeling disenfranchised. Like here, political debate has become dominated by issues such as gay marriage and the #MeToo movement which, to the population at large, come across as minor concerns compared with the health of the local economy.
YOU can judge Trump by his rhetoric or by results. His trade war with China looked like a petty, nationalistic reflex, but actually his negotiations with China have all along been ultimately directed at increasing trade.
Now, with tariffs eased, they are beginning to show success, with the US trade deficit falling.
Trump’s method – which he also showed on North Korea – is to throw everything in the air with provocative bluster before retracting, negotiating and compromising. It looks harsh but in some cases has proved effective.
If Trump does triumph in November, there will have been a precedent.
In 1972 the Democrat challenger George McGovern won only a single state against Richard Nixon, an incumbent President whom Americans did not really trust and who duly exploded in the Watergate scandal a couple of years later.
But still, it will stand out as a remarkable failure to bring down a flawed president.
‘Low income groups have been taken for granted by the Left’