The Donkey In Decline

"Get With The Program" by Nancy Ohanian

-by Patrick Toomey

While the Dems have had more than their share of bad weeks since the watershed year of 1980, this week was an especially bad one. There are 3 developments, in particular, that are worthy of concern:

1. Joe Biden’s praise for Kevin McCarthy and Biden’s continued desire for "bipartisanship":

"Look at what the present leader of the Republican Party— a decent man, I think— McCarthy— look... look what he had to do. He had to make commitments that are just absolutely off the wall for a Speaker of the House to make in terms of being able to become the Leader… And there's enough Republicans in the House of Representatives now who, on very critical things, will vote with Democrats when they start talking about the really crazy stuff. But we can't take our eye off the ball. We can't take our eye off the ball."

I have no clue as to exactly who the remaining Good Germans are in the House GOP caucus “who will vote with Democrats.” Cheney and Kinzinger (both of whom routinely voted with Trump from 2017-20) are gone. So are the likes of Fred Upton and Peter Meijer. Hours after the J-6 riot, Biden’s “decent man” McCarthy voted against certifying results of an election that Biden won with over 300 EVs (and by several million popular votes). A sizeable majority of McCarthy’s GOP House Caucus did so, too. I’ve spent decades of my career negotiating. One basic rule of negotiation is that you can’t meaningfully negotiate with people who openly dispute the legitimacy of your attaining your current position.

2. The party’s decision, as an institution, to grease the skids for Biden’s re-nomination:

The Democratic National Committee has rolled out the blue carpet for Joe Biden at its winter meeting now underway in Philadelphia. Biden's decision to give a speech there Friday was based on the certainty that he would be greeted with fervent adulation, just as he feels sure he can count on the DNC to rubber-stamp his manipulation of next year's presidential primaries. Meanwhile, party officials lip-sync enthusiasm for a Biden '24 campaign. But if Biden were truly confident that Democratic voters want him to be the nominee next year, he wouldn't have intervened in the DNC's scheduling of early primaries.

The (nominally) Democratic Party, as an institution, visibly put its authority behind its ultimate presidential nominees in 2016 and 2020. It is doing so again now. Admittedly, no sitting president from either party has faced a serious intraparty challenge since 1980. Openly foreclosing a potential challenge this early in the process, however, is a de facto admission that the party mandarins question Biden’s ability to prevail in a contested primary process. Given the fact that his approval ratings are currently over 10 points underwater and given the fact that a lot can befall him between now and summer 2024, there are multiple reasons not to grease the skids.

3. A total of 109 House Dems (including the House Dem leadership) supporting the GOP “anti-socialism” resolution:

For decades now, the Right has rallied around more or less the same reductive and Manichean narrative of American politics. In one corner— or so successive generations of reactionaries from Ronald Reagan to Sarah Palin to Donald Trump have insisted— stand the forces of freedom and liberty; in the other, adherents to a creeping, tyrannical, and godless ideology bent on strangling the American way of life. In defining and identifying the latter, the right has never been especially discriminating. “Socialism,” at least in the hands of your average Republican politician, can in fact be applied to almost anything if partisan conservatives are opposed to it.

Other than the fact that the party establishment apparently enjoys attacking the left, there is no reason to join this GOP charade. Unless Dems agree to privatize Social Security and Medicare and agree to shut down the EPA, HHS, NLRB, and most any other federal agency that actually tries to help ordinary Americans, they’ll be tagged as socialists by the GOP. From 1993-2000, we had a Democratic White House that went out of its way to co-opt GOP memes. The end result of that process was, as Yeats would put it, Dems who lack all conviction and Goopers who are full of passionate intensity.

The worst thing about this week of capitulation is what looms on the horizon. Current odds appear to favor the GOP nominating my governor, who views the concepts of checks and balances and separation of powers with the same level of disdain with which ExxonMobil views Greta Thunberg. I have nothing to add to my comments to this DWT piece on the subject.

I will merely note that, based upon current information, any savvy bettor would put their chips on “red” in a prospective DeSantis-Biden 2024 matchup. While a lot can happen between now and then, there’s currently little rational reason to hope that these odds will improve. We avoided a crisis in the 2020 elections. We narrowly avoided one in 2022. We may not be so lucky in 2024.