The Democrats Are in Trouble
The party’s riskiest bet is now its likeliest.
I’ve been enthusiastic about Mike Bloomberg’s race for president
from its inception, partly on the theory that he was best positioned to
rescue and represent the Democratic Party’s moderate wing. After
Wednesday night’s debate debacle in Las Vegas, I’m starting to fear his
candidacy might inadvertently destroy that wing — while wrecking the
party’s chances in November.
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It was a debacle in three parts.
The
first part was Bloomberg’s performance, the only virtue of which was
its real-time reminder of all the things money can’t buy. Everything
about it was bad.
Bloomberg was
ill-advised to go onstage. He was ill-prepared to be on it. He showed
ill grace toward the people with whom he had signed nondisclosure
agreements. He showed ill will toward Bernie Sanders for the sin of
owning homes whose aggregate value probably doesn’t exceed that of a
maid’s room in a Bloomberg mansion. His suggestion that Sanders’s
political program amounted to communism turned critique into parody. His
apologies for stop-and-frisk made him seem like he was running away
from his record, not on it.
Bloomberg will now try to recover with another huge ad spend, and hopefully a better debate performance in South Carolina next week.
But he will do so having lost the aura of formidability that, until
Wednesday, had been his chief selling point. He entered the fray looking
big but now seems all too small. The “Little Mike” moniker that Donald
Trump has given him will stick.
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The
second part is the Bloomberg effect on Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg and
Amy Klobuchar, his fellow moderates in the field. Instead of bolstering
them, he is competing with them. Instead of blowing wind in their sails,
he’s piling dead weight on their decks.
The
moderates didn’t help themselves with intramural squabbles about
Klobuchar forgetting the name of Mexico’s president (though I found
myself wishing the senator could have explained to Mayor Pete that she
had merely experienced a senior moment — something that will happen to
him, too, when he finally grows up).
Nor
did their own attacks on Bloomberg do them much good, beyond lending an
assist to Elizabeth Warren’s surgical act of political evisceration.
The Democratic contest is essentially one between two camps — the camp
of infighters known as moderates, and the camp of out-fighters known as
progressives. Wednesday’s debate served as another reminder of why the
moderates aren’t winning.
Which brings
me to the third part of the debacle: Wednesday’s debate left Sanders
unscathed. Nothing and nobody touched him. The Democratic Party’s
riskiest bet is now its likeliest.
I say this as someone who wrote, a little earlier than most,
that Sanders had the best chance of winning the nomination, and that he
has just as serious a shot at winning the presidency as Donald Trump
did four years earlier.
But
that shouldn’t obscure the reality that Trump’s victory was an
electoral fluke against an overconfident opponent who didn’t have the
many advantages of presidential incumbency. And it mustn’t diminish the
fact that Sanders’s candidacy would represent a large bet — titanic, one
might say — on the willingness of the American public to embrace
drastic economic and social change in an era of relative peace and
prosperity.
So why would Democrats want to take that chance?
Maybe
it’s because they have overlearned the lessons of the 2016 election:
that nominating the centrist and responsible candidate served them
poorly. Or maybe it’s because they’ve reasoned that “electability,”
being an insufficient requirement for the nomination, is an unnecessary
one as well. Or maybe they feel that, when their hearts scream Yes, it’s
best to ignore the brain’s screams of No.
Alternatively
— a darker thought — maybe Democrats aren’t being entirely honest with
themselves when they claim their first priority is to end Trump’s
presidency as soon as possible. There’s a certain self-righteous
pleasure in hating Trump, as well as an entire cottage industry devoted
to indulging that hatred, which would mostly vanish the moment he left
office.
What’s more, the far-left that Sanders represents has always been at least as interested in wielding ideological power within
the institutions that matter most to it — academia, journalism, labor
unions, the Democratic Party — as it has been in wielding political
power beyond those institutions. If Sanders were to win the nomination
and lose the election, many of his supporters might call the result a
wash, even a modest victory. The struggle always continues.
For
the rest of us — that is, those of us who want Trump and Trumpism
defeated and replaced by something considerably and sustainably better —
the prospect of a Sanders candidacy is doubly depressing. He is the
candidate Trump most wants to run against. And he would be the president
least likely to govern well.
This
week, as Mike Bloomberg nearly achieved onstage spontaneous combustion,
that prospect came appreciably nearer. To call this bad for the
Democrats is an understatement. It’s a fiasco-in-the-making for the
country, too.
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