For decades, Republicans have been stuck with the epithet “the stupid party,” and they’ve often deserved it. But there’s been a switch in the Trump era. Democrats now are the stupid party.
They’ve adopted several of the foolhardy habits of Republicans—for instance, the government shutdown. It’s an act of political masochism. History is consistent on this. Those who shut Washington down fail to achieve their goals.
Despite this losing streak, Democrats decided on a shutdown to force President Trump and congressional Republicans to let immigrant “dreamers” stay in this country. The shutdown featured hours of Democratic handwringing.
It flopped, as every Republican shutdown had. Chuck Schumer, the Senate Democratic leader, called it off after a single day, upon realizing its chances of succeeding were zilch. Pro-shutdown Democrats wanted to hang on and picketed Schumer’s residence.
Schumer was wise to cut his losses. He balked at doing the same in the fight against the Trump tax cut, just as Republicans had been foolish to prolong the agony of trying to kill Obama-care. In both cases, the outcome was clear.
But not to House minority leader Nancy Pelosi, who proved in an eight-hour speech to be a know-nothing on taxes. That the tax cut would boost the economy and leave most Americans with more money was very likely. When the cuts showed up in paychecks last month, she dismissed them as “crumbs.” Now they’re popular and still she won’t let go. She’s blindly loyal to the party line she helped to create. Her party is embarrassed.
Democrats surely knew better from watching Republicans stumble on Obamacare. But they ignored the lesson: When things go disastrously, stop and wait for a better day.
Republicans thought that day had come in 2010 with the arrival of the Tea Party. Its adherents flooded the primaries as candidates. Republicans won the House and should have captured the Senate—but didn’t. The reason: Too many poor candidates won primaries. GOP leaders didn’t intervene to promote better, more experienced candidates.
This year, the Resistance will dominate the Democratic primaries. The average number of candidates per primary is five. With the party drifting left, this could mean more far-left candidates with little chance of winning the general election. Democrats are flirting with danger.
But there’s more to Democrats’ emergence as the stupid party than emulating Republicans. What they’ve left undone has hurt, especially the lack of generational change in their leaders. They’re still the geezer party.
Representative Tim Ryan, 44, challenged Pelosi, 77, for House minority leader but lost by roughly 2-1. That represents the division between the geriatric caucus and the youth brigade.
And Democrats have tied themselves to two risky issues, gun control and immigration. Their desperation to discover a strategy to foster gun control was revealed when they enlisted high-school kids as their spokesmen post-Parkland. Teenagers versus the NRA? The odds favor the NRA.
On immigration, Democrats started out behind and have made matters worse in the past year by moving to what amounts to an open-borders position. That’s a loser and increasingly so. Trump will feast on it in 2020.
In negotiating with Trump on immigration, Democrats have given themselves little flexibility. An incident reported by the Washington Post demonstrates this. As we all know, Trump had nasty words for Third World countries at a bipartisan meeting on immigration at the White House. And Democrats couldn’t resist leaking that he’d called them “s—holes.”
It was, the Post said, “an outburst that made it politically impossible for Democrats to accede to Trump’s demands to terminate a diversity visa lottery program.” That’s affirmative action for countries who send few immigrants here.
The Democratic blunder was refusing to compromise on taxes. This gave Republicans a free hand to kill the individual mandate imposed by Obamacare, open up Arctic oil drilling, and limit the deduction on state and local taxes. Schumer could have kept all three out of the tax bill. It was fear of a backlash from the Resistance for cooperating with Trump that prevented him from doing so.
These self-imposed problems don’t mean a weak performance in November. Democrats have structural advantages. The non-White House party almost invariably gains seats. That three dozen Republican seats are open helps enormously. Trump will be an albatross in some states.
Democrats envision the entire country voting as Virginia did last November in its governor’s race. It was a wave election spurred by deep dislike of Trump. But that mood is less intense today. And the rule of thumb is that if Republicans are less than 10 percentage points behind in the poll question of who voters favor in the midterm election, they hold onto the House. They currently trail by six points or so.
This question arises: Why didn’t Democrats enact immigration reform that includes legal status for dreamers in Obama’s first two years, when they had super-majorities in both houses of Congress? Having passed Obamacare, they figured that would be too much, too soon. That was before they became the stupid party.