Like with a sewer constructed with its contaminated water flowing downhill to the drain, the down-ballot candidates in a political party always suffer the residual consequences when the candidate at the top of the ticket is a dud. And that would certainly describe the state of the Democratic Party as it tries to somehow squeeze four more years out of one of the weakest presidents in American history. And with Joe Biden’s cognitive decline in plain view for all to see and the specter of a debate with Trump bound to send chills through the leftist establishment, it would be easy for any Democrat to try and blame all the party’s problems on the enfeebled president.
But if they continue to insist on pointing solely at their beleaguered incumbent, and ignore all the toxic progressive policies they convinced Biden to embrace, they will likely be left whistling past a November graveyard at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and Capitol Hill. But don’t take it from Liberty Nation or any other conservative source; listen to someone who has long supported the left.
Joe Klein (Photo by Paul Morigi/Getty Images for TIME)
Joe Klein is one of the nation’s most experienced and hard-edged left-wing journalists, and his take on the Democrats circling the drain should be deeply concerning to Trump-haters everywhere. His piece is replete with intellectual honesty, most of which will be ignored or decried by a Democrat establishment that either has its head in the sand, or as Trump 2016 Campaign Director Kellyanne Conway observed on Fox News recently, may just be letting the unelectable team of Biden and Kamala Harris “bleed out” as they turn their focus to Congress and to 2028, when both Biden and Trump will be gone.
Biden and the Democrats Bleeding Out?
In his Substack article entitled “It’s Not Just Biden,” Klein dives right in by stating that “Trump exhilarates his Republican base. Biden exasperates his Democrats.” But then he plunges deeper into the heart of the problem, identity politics, and how it has driven the Democratic Party off the rails:
“Democrats are an amalgam of identity groups, with varying agendas and beliefs. You can aim a message at black activists … and a fair number of Latinos will be turned off. You can try to stroke Latino activists on immigration, and a fair number of blacks … will wonder why on earth you can’t act to shut down the southern border … You can p–s off gay activists if you question, even just a little, the current, faddish obsession with gender fluidity. About the only thing Democrats have in common is abortion and even there, the activists are so extreme that rational discussion is impossible. Democrats can not say when a late-term abortion is too late. That is disgraceful … if they don’t have all those ethnic and gender identity agendas, what do the Democrats have left?”
Wow, that’s an awful lot of friendly fire from a reliably leftist voice.
Klein continues, complaining that Democrats lack any sense of nuance as they continue playing the race card when it no longer works as intended, pointing out that “[t]here is a black middle and professional class now; it holds different views from academic blackdom and from the black underclass.” And Klein contends that they hold an outdated view of Latino voters, who are becoming less dependent on government and “want to start businesses; they work construction jobs; they’re religiously conservative; they favor legal immigration, but not the mayhem we’re seeing on television … This has been a disaster for Democrats … They made a terrible mistake emphasizing identity over community fifty years ago.”
In attempting to appeal to all minority groups at all times, Klein continues that now “the [Democratic] coalition is fraying, for the very best of reasons. The ‘protected’ groups are assimilating into the American mainstream … to the dismay of the activists … slavery and all those Jim Crow statutes – the ones that made distinctions according to race – are gone now.” Indeed, Klein ridicules those who call America systemically racist, as Democrats including Biden claimed in 2020, because, unlike in the distant past, we have not a single law on the books permitting discrimination by race: “by law, we are no longer a racist country. And we should celebrate the progress we’ve made.”
And then the deeply despairing Klein drives a serrated knife into the Democrats: “Their future is their past, sadly. It is personified by Joe Biden. He should be walloping Trump—a corrupt, authoritarian wannabe with a potty mouth who tried to overthrow our democracy. But the opposite seems to be the case.”
Democrats Have Little Left to Offer
On issue after issue, Democrats have either miscalculated or demanded policies they had to know were well outside the mainstream of American thought. And this is even on the issues where a supermajority of Americans demand one thing, and Democrats another.
Our people want to feel secure once more, but Biden and the Democrats willfully turn a blind eye as millions of people about whom we know nothing pour over our southern border, overrun once-boastful-but-now panicked sanctuary cities, and divert billions of taxpayer dollars. Meanwhile, immigration rises to its highest perch in memory on the list of Americans’ concerns, finishing second behind only the economy. And, of course, dumping all of Donald Trump’s effective containment policies plays directly into the hands of the 45th president, who has been screaming about border security for eight years. Talk about political malpractice.
Another no-brainer issue is that Americans want safe streets again – and in what has become a common refrain among normal security-minded citizens across the country, most everyone this author knows living around the DC area will no longer travel there at night in light of the 959 carjackings that occurred in 2023 alone. The people want law enforcement authorities to crack down on street violence and a litany of crimes rarely before seen such as organized retail theft. But every day, we are witnessing George Soros-fueled progressive prosecutors refusing to back down from their deliberately destructive policies that are destroying the inner city and driving people from blue states to red.
Another prominent item on the laundry list of Democrat problems is money, plain and simple. People are infuriated at what they have to pay at the supermarket, the gas pump, and to heat their homes – the basics. Biden and his colleagues have tried taking credit for bringing the inflation rate down from its disastrous high of 9% – as if people won’t blame them for inflation in the first place. And after rolling out Bidenomics to great fanfare, Democrats rather quickly realized that moniker was actually hurting the president – raising an issue that could cost him the election. So they were forced to change the subject back to Trump extremism and abortion.
Rising prices, crime, and the border are just the domestic issues bringing Biden and his party low. Then there is foreign policy, which may be Biden’s ultimate Achilles heel. He has never recovered from his surrender in Afghanistan. He has overseen the start of two wars which threaten to metastasize. He has committed to perpetually supporting Ukraine in its war with Russia without properly explaining why to the American people, and now he faces his nightmare scenario in the Middle East, with the killing of three American troops by the usual suspects, Iran-backed militants. Even his mainstream response to the Hamas slaughter of innocents is draining his crucial support among the young. Will the president finally respond with force? Any way you cut it, Biden is in even deeper trouble on international issues than on domestic affairs, with Gallup reporting in November a dismal 32% approval for his foreign policy. That weakness on the international stage most certainly reflects on a party already widely viewed, paradoxically, as both war-happy and yet soft on national security.
The voters know that while Joe Biden is the face of the Democrats’ startling inability to read the room, and that he demonstrated cowardice in rolling over for a wildly unpopular left-wing agenda, it was the far-left wing of the party that forced it down his throat. Indeed, it’s not just Joe Biden, who dishonestly ran as a competent moderate and has presided as an incompetent progressive. As Michael Dukakis famously said of George H.W. Bush during his failed 1988 presidential campaign, the fish rots from the head, and the rest of the limbless vertebrate follow suit. In this case, though, it may be the opposite, the fish rotting from the tail up, in the person of the loudest progressive voices in the room. Not just Joe Biden, but Democrats at large now circling the drain have a lot of backpedaling, moderating, and gaslighting to do in order to convince a plurality of voters they deserve to continue in power.
