The problem for Democrats

Ipropose a potentially useful exercise for Democrats. It is to watch a recording of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s confirmation hearing for Ketanji Brown Jackson. It is to behold the behavioral travesty of Ted Cruz, Tom Cotton, Josh Hawley and Marsha Blackburn.

It is take out a U.S. map and draw a line around the vast expanse of the combined states they represent: Texas, Arkansas, Tennessee and Missouri. Then try to figure how in the world you lose to those four people over that much American territory.

My insight into national Democratic Party ineptitude stems from lifelong residence and political contemplation in the white rural expanse of the nation where national Democrats squandered support years ago and to which they seem proudly indifferent now.

It comforted me to read in The New York Times last week a column detailing similar views from persons in elite academia and with highly placed national Democratic backgrounds.

To begin, let’s synopsize the position I’ve advanced in this space for months.

Joe Biden’s victory was achieved in swing states because he was not Donald Trump, whose behavior had left suburban and women voters aghast. The real political story was told in the loss of Democratic seats in the House of Representatives. Democrats were stronger than ever in the cities and more alienated than ever in the wide swaths between.

Democrats pulled to 50-50 in the Senate only with two accidental wins in Georgia, which at most is still only purple and where the swing suburban votes in greater Atlanta voted against Trump personally in November and against Trumpism in January runoffs after he refused to be a grownup about getting beat.

None of that mandated progressive policymaking. The mandate was to be uneventful.

Democrats actually stood more than ever in great peril. The presidency’s Electoral College places a premium on the Republicans’ vast swaths, as does the Senate’s twomembers-per-state makeup, as does the ever-more-gerrymandered House where incumbent districts get made stronger and competitive districts become fewer.

So, when Democrats engage in political ineptitude, they don’t harm their protected incumbents but only the ever-tinier element of their membership that has shown the ability to compete in swing districts. Thus, with each two-year cycle, Democrats become more insular and their broad electoral challenges become greater.

Progressives ridicule this position as that of an old Southern white guy who hasn’t evolved since the 1990s when Bill Clinton showed him the RepublicanLite way to Democratic success.

They’ve ridiculed their way to a failed agenda and likely calamity in November and probably beyond.

On Wednesday, The Times published an essay by Thomas Edsall, a professor of political journalism at Columbia, and headlined, “Democrats Are Making Life Too Easy for Republicans.”

The writer detailed emailed exchanges with elite academicians and others from elite standing, producing these insights, among others:

• John Lawrence, who served eight years as chief of staff to Nancy Pelosi, said, “I think a lot of voters will use 2022 to remind Biden (and Democrats, since they can’t vote against him) that their vote in 2020 was a vote to return to normalcy, not a blank check to build on the New Deal and Great Society. Once in office — albeit with ridiculously narrow margins — Democrats used the crisis to swing for the stands, ignoring the historical lesson of the Senate’s moderating role.

So, they have created the worst of all worlds: a failure to enact what the base demanded (but they did not have the votes to deliver) and the appearance of having over-reached.”

• Francis Lee, a political scientist at Princeton, said, “The structural problem here is that Democrats’ success in winning unified party control in the Georgia Senate runoffs in 2021 hugely inflated the expectations of Democratic base voters about what could be achieved,” resulting in both a disconnection to swing voters and a lack of motivation in the base.

Edsall’s essay asserts that Democrats err by treating every Fox News report as partisan nonsense having no consequence beyond feeding the conservative base. It is true that critical race theory is not being taught in schools and that historical fact must be taught. Still, there in fact may be legitimate parental concerns about new trends in instruction that shouldn’t be dismissed pre-emptively but looked into responsively and responsibly. The quickest solution to this Democratic ineptitude would have been a strong Democratic president leading his party rather than finessing it, accepting that an accidental tie in the Senate doesn’t make you FDR.

Ideally, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez would be railing against Biden while working people and rural conservatives would be starting to wonder if maybe he wasn’t all right.

Alas, it likely will be back to the minority after November for urban-packed Democrats. And it could well be back to Republican occupancy in the White House after November 2024.

Cruz, Cotton, Hawley and Blackburn would be fawning over Supreme Court nominees one of them might have made.