It’s the sitcom reunion nobody wanted to see. Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) is boring the nation to tears at the Amy Coney Barrett Supreme Court Senate hearings while a grandstanding Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) sputters interruptions at the judicial nominee. Meanwhile, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) is utilizing the same grating soccer-mom-on-amphetamines persona that served her so poorly one year ago to bash President Trump while South Bend, Indiana’s listless former mayor, Pete Buttigieg, is being hailed by the Los Angeles Times as a “ruthless secret weapon.” And, of course, Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) is on the ticket itself.
At a time when the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate Joe Biden should be running as far away as possible from the leftist circus that was the party’s primary process, several minnows from that underwhelming traveling roadshow are back in the spotlight less than a month before the Nov. 3 election. Causing voters to recall the trifling froth of that over-long primary season is the last thing Team Biden should want at this time. Yet here we are. It’s another scattershot moment for a campaign that never has had a solid core.
Supreme Court Pushovers
Team Biden had no say in Klobuchar and Booker having starring roles at the Barrett hearings. But that doesn’t make it any less of a negative. Americans following the proceedings must be having flashbacks to all those interminable Democratic debates from June 2019 through February of this year when the various rivals talked in circles on the same tired issues while trying to out-do each other on the progressive Woke scale.
Klobuchar has been her usual somnolently cloying self at the Barrett hearings, pleased with her own perceived cleverness as her words fell flat.
“This isn’t Donald Trump’s country. It is yours,” she said in her opening statement on Oct. 12, immediately turning her senatorial duty into a nakedly partisan affair. “This is a judgeship that was held by an icon who voted to protect your healthcare,” Klobuchar declared, paying inappropriately political homage to deceased Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg by celebrating her defense of Obamacare. And, as is her wont, Ms. “Midwestern Nice” quickly reached for the cheese:
“She never gave up. She had her own hashtag well into her 80s. The notorious RBG. And her last fervent wish was that a new president, the winner of this election, would pick her replacement. When you look at her opinions you realize, she wasn’t just writing for today, she was writing for tomorrow.”
It was vintage Klobuchar as fully showcased on the Democratic primary campaign trail. She was long-winded while saying nothing of any serious heft.
Booker, on the other hand, reminded voters how petty and pushy Democrats frequently could be during that drawn-out primary race without ever furthering meaningful discussion. The Hill’s Joe Concha tweeted out Oct. 13 that Booker had “now interrupted Barrett 9 times in less than 20 minutes” during his questioning of the nominee.
Entirely in keeping with his Obama-lite “unifier” imagery that failed to resonate with Democratic primary voters, Booker went for the touchy-feely gotcha moment with Barrett.
Booker asked Barrett if it was “unreasonable for people to fear” that Obamacare would be overturned if she were confirmed to the High Court. When she began to state her independence on the matter, Booker jumped in to curtly play his tiny violin.
“I understand that,” Booker said to her. “Can I restate my question because I don’t think you are understanding it? I’m just asking you as an act of empathy, can you understand the fears that are exhibited by the people we put up?”
Was he expecting to get “I have no empathy” for a reply? Booker was trying to project on-the-spot toughness while serving up soft mush. It was a jarring rehash of his inane performances on too many debate stages in 2019.
Biden’s Closers?
As all this was going down, Warren took her acerbic personality to national television. Although she demonstrably proved unable to persuasively stand toe-to-toe with the combative Trump throughout her train wreck of a White House candidacy, nevertheless she persists (wince) to pursue this same hackneyed approach in her current efforts to help elect Biden.
Warren was asked on The Real program on Oct. 12 why she thought Trump decided against participating in a virtual debate with Biden. “I got to tell you, my first thought, ” Warren said as she made clucking sounds, “you know, a total chicken.”
“He knows that he just got spanked in that first debate. And he got out there, and he blustered, and he strutted around,” the cackling senator continued.
She was just as ineffectively belligerent in a virtual appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live that same evening. “On a scale of one to ten, what number would you give the president as far as how he’s handled this pandemic?” a servile Kimmel asked Warren, setting up her corny zinger of a response.
Warren paused for effect. She rolled her eyebrows.
“Minus 4,961,” she stated as Kimmel guffawed and his miniscule studio audience limply applauded. “It’s not just that he’s been incompetent, it’s that he’s actually made things worse,” she droned on, scolding Trump over his mask mischievousness.
Kimmel cemented his status as a tower of blue jello sitting behind a desk when he asked the Democrat if she was surprised by how “forthright with his dishonesty” Trump was in moving to fill a Supreme Court vacancy right before an election. Oh, by the way, this is ostensibly a comedy show.
“We gotta stay focused on what’s going on right now,” Warren later addressed Kimmel, openly acknowledging that they are playing on the same team. None of this was remotely convincing one year ago when Warren was briefly anointed the frontrunner for the 2020 Democratic nomination. Why on Earth would Democrats and their dominant media friends think it would resonate now that she has been greatly diminished by her campaign flame out?
With Buttigieg, there was more of a fizzle than an explosion as he hung around until late in the game without ever making much of a mark. Yet that hasn’t stopped columnist Mary McNamara of the Los Angeles Times from declaring that the uninspiring ex-mayor “has found his format: the five-minute, remote-feed evisceration.” Say what?
“[M]aybe it should not be surprising to discover that when Buttigieg swore to do whatever he could to ensure the election of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, that ‘whatever’ turned out to include ‘speak softly and carry a sling blade,'” McNamara ludicrously asserts in her piece, which was picked up by Yahoo News.
It boggles the mind that anyone would think Buttigieg could move the needle on a presidential election at this final stage, yet big-box media figures seemingly cannot refrain from trying to turn Platitude Pete into everything he is not, i.e., a heavyweight with a mean right hook.
What evidence of Buttigieg’s shark-like “rhetorical assassin” skills does McNamara offer? “This is what nominees do. They write the most seemingly unobjectionable, dry stuff,” Buttigieg told MSNBC Oct. 11 of Barrett’s opening statement for her upcoming Senate hearings. “But really what I see in there is a pathway to judicial activism cloaked in judicial humility.”
Seriously, that’s about as “eviscerating” as things get.
Democrats would be infinitely better off keeping these shallow guppies from their train wreck of a primary season well away from the field of vision of American voters in the days leading up to Nov. 3. It is bad enough that Joe Biden adamantly refuses to stake out his own policy agenda and is solely running on a “I’m Not Donald Trump” slogan after 47 years as a major political player. His campaign does not need voters reflecting on all the crazy things he said while surrounded by desultory mediocrities on ten different Democratic debate stages before the party threw up its hands and anemically settled for him as its standard-bearer with a shrug and a sigh.
~
Read more from Joe Schaeffer.
