I seem to be on the Democrat Demolition beat.
I'm drawn like a moth to a flame to the slo-mo suicide these days of the party of Jefferson and Jackson:
First there was the bizarre and highly publicized behavior of the Capitol Hill Democrats sitting in on President Trump's Feb. 28 speech to Congress. Giving the "thumbs down" sign and giggling like schoolgirls when Trump promised to repeal Obamacare? Sitting fixed to their seats with Krazy Glue during a standing ovation for the widow of a heroic Navy SEAL killed in action?
Then we had the party's left wing vowing to purge already-beleaguered Democratic moderates in states that had gone red in the Nov. 16 presidential election?
Is this for real? Yes it is. And we now have the Democratic candidate who conspicuously lost that election, speaking at her alma mater, Wellesley College on March 2:
Democrat Hillary Clinton says the only thing she would change about her 2016 presidential campaign is the outcome.
“I’d win,” Clinton said Thursday when asked at Wellesley College what she would alter about her White House run, according to the Wellesley News.
That's it? Even the reliably left-leaning Mother Jones had intensely critical things to say about Hillary's ignoring–or at least taking for granted–the blue-collar workers in key Rust Belt swing states that had swung for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012:
Working-class white voters, including many union members, banded together into a pro-Donald Trump force that the strategists in Clinton's Brooklyn headquarters didn't see coming until it was too late.
But local Democrats did. And they tried to warn the Clinton campaign.
In May, after thousands of Democrats had switched parties to vote for Trump in the primary, Mahoning County Democratic Party Chairman David Betras circulated a memo cautioning that Trump was making headway in his Rust Belt region and urging the Clinton campaign to take the threat seriously….
"Somewhere in all of this, we forgot that we're the party of the working class," says Betras, trying to explain Clinton's loss.
And that's not even counting, oh say, Benghazi, the private servers used for State Department business, her voter-alienating embrace of gun restrictions and job-stifling government regulations. Or her failure to articulate policy positions on the theory that demonizing Trump was all she needed to do to carry the day on Nov. 8.
When you've learned nothing from the mistakes that caused you to lose, you're almost certain to lose again. And the Democratic Party seems to have learned nothing, all right.