Democrats pay the price for rampant electoral arrogance

Joe Biden listens during a briefing about Hurricane Milton in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.

Gnashing of teeth by senior Democrats is inappropriate after Tuesday’s loss. A more apt reaction would be a woeful smile, a gentle clap on each other’s back and the words, “Hey, we might have won if we’d taken the thing seriously.”

If, in their vast contempt, Democrats hadn’t tried to wangle a demonstrably senile president’s renomination and re-election. If they hadn’t tried to serve up a last-minute replacement who convenienced certain party leaders, such as the Obamas, without any consultation with the party’s rank and file. Working Americans, when they voted for Democrats, were the backbone of America, saints of small-town virtue. When they didn’t, they were garbage and deplorables.

In a fit of short-sightedness, Democrats committed the idiocy of fabricating evidence that their 2016 opponent, popular with half the country, was a Russian agent. Eight years later, voters seemed to remember that this happened even when friendly media subservients pretended it didn’t.

In 2020 Democrats put forward a candidate and later president who evinced a demonstrable family corruption problem related to Ukraine. They got him elected after the CIA lied and blamed the problem on Russia. Now, when voters hear the words Russia and Ukraine, they wonder if Democratic corruption had a role in landing us in the middle of a war between the two countries.

Let’s try to be sensitive. Democrats and major media figures today are psychologically fragile, especially the latter, who got used to believing elaborately fraudulent things about themselves. Unfortunately, it isn’t practical to assign guardians to each media personality lest they be tempted to do something unhealthy to make the pain of self-discovery stop.

As for Kamala Harris, she won’t be that occasional losing presidential candidate who nevertheless is accorded a status as her party’s leader going forward. She can expect to be jettisoned as an uber-Dukakis, not only because of perceived inadequacy (she lost) but because of the sense of illegitimacy that attended her rise. Her seeming vacuity doesn’t help; she gives no evidence of historical imagination when her party needs it.

Actor Don Cheadle (C) and his wife Bridgid Coulter (C-L) wait with other supporters for Democratic presidential nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris to take the stage.

Through three successive presidential elections, Democrats became only more committed to using the national-security state (led by the FBI and CIA), the tools of lawfare and censorship, and a compliant media to wage their political fights, to the point of milking the musings of constitutional scholars for reasons to strike an opponent from the ballot without due process.

What criminal renounces his crime after he sees it pay off? If God’s wisdom is revealed in Tuesday’s outcome, Democrats at least will now seek a more honourable path.

The best reason to have hoped for a Harris victory was to spare the nation another four years of open warfare between our corrupt institutions and the antic and untameable Trump. Politely, in the sanctum of our private thoughts, we might expect now for Biden the fate his Catholic faith promises the unrepentant sinner – or at least that he be remembered as the worst president since James Buchanan.

For two years this column lobbied against Biden seeking a second term. It pointed to his obvious motive in seeking to make sure Trump would be his opponent because Trump was the only Republican he might beat.

A year ago Biden might have resigned in favour of Harris so she could test her presidential mettle, compete in an open and normal Democratic primary, and, most important, rescue his Ukraine policy.

GOP voters might have taken the cue that Trump’s era was over too. We wouldn’t have gotten the deluge of criminal prosecutions so crucial to restoring his standing with Republican primary voters. These prosecutions indisputably (the New York Times can stop lying to itself about this) were undertaken to help Biden. As it is, we should consider the US as having dodged a bullet on Tuesday when Trump’s victory was substantial enough that Democrats cannot challenge its legal or moral ­legitimacy.

I was a Democrat for 37 years by family accident but found my hand writing down “independent” in 2017 upon belatedly accepting that the state where I currently reside has become my home. It seemed a bit of a heavenly joke that Trump was the vehicle for laying before me the swinishness of people like Hillary Clinton, Adam Schiff and, later, Joe Biden and his retinue.

My cynicism had perhaps ­failed me, but the world isn’t Manichean, a battle of opposites. Trump may be a clumsier (and lonelier) liar compared with many of those who were ranged against him, including much of the press. But his voters by now understand his nature. He beats our establishment politicians at their own game of non-stop cynicism. His opponents might finally ask themselves why.