I see that Democrats are still trying to blame everyone but themselves
for Trump’s election. And they are still apparently unable to connect Clinton’s
loss this fall with the party’s disastrous performance nationally over the
Obama administration’s years. Over Obama’s almost 8 years, Democrats have lost
63 House seats, 10 Senate seats, and 12 state governorships, losing control of the
House in 2010 and the Senate in 2014.
Anyone not blinded by ideology would see that whatever
message Democrats have been trying to sell over the past decade just isn’t
selling – nationally or locally. So far the noisiest of the talking heads in
the press and among the Democratic elite are still sticking to their identity
politics approach, even though the post-election statistics are showing that it
didn’t work.
A few of the Midwest Democratic operatives have been
pointing out that they warned the Clinton campaign team way back in early summer
that they needed to pay more attention to the economic plight of the
traditionally Democratic working class, but the East Coast Democratic elites in
their arrogance thought they knew better, and ignored these warnings. The success of the
Sander’s campaign might have alerted them if they had been paying attention,
but it didn’t. Even Bill Clinton himself couldn’t get his warning through Hillary’s
inner circle.
But the Democrat’s problems run far deeper than Hillary’s
flawed candidacy, or than the Clinton machine’s ability to hijack the Democrat’s
nomination process so thoroughly. It is rooted in the fundamental fact that
they have lost contact with much of their traditional base – they have gotten
so focused on the social concerns of the urban privileged classes that they
have forgotten about the middle class workers they used to represent. As someone pointed out in a post today, the
fact that a billionaire with gold-plated toilets would appeal to them more than
the Democratic candidate is an indictment of how far out of touch they have
gotten. .
So it will be interesting to see if the Democrats can learn
from this election loss. The message is
clear, and unchanged from when Bill Clinton first enunciated it in 1992: “It’s the economy, stupid!”.
Of course the Republicans, having won, will learn nothing.
And they too have lost their way in recent decades. So their chickens will come
home to roost in a while too.
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