The House and the White House are on the Democrats’ minds. And both ambitions are threatened by the current face of the party, which right now appears an amalgam of big-city pols Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.).
Recognizing this, many Democrats are upset that Pelosi — most famous recently for brain freezes and mangling words in press conferences — intends to seek the speakership if their party retakes the House. As the Sacramento Bee editorial board writes:
The Democratic Party cannot be seen as the party of Nancy Pelosi and win in November.
It’s getting close to crunch time, and the San Francisco Democrat must put her party and her country ahead of her personal ambition and declare that she will not seek the speakership again.
This is much bigger than her. To retake control of the House, Democrats need to gain at least 23 seats in November. That’s no easy task. And it’s even more difficult now that Pelosi’s future has become a distracting campaign issue for Democrats in key swing districts, where they need moderate and even Republican votes to win.
So far, 45 Democratic nominees (including Andrew Janz, who is running against Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Tulare) and 10 incumbents (including Rep. Linda Sanchez of Whittier) have publicly said they will not support Pelosi for speaker.
Yet Pelosi shows no signs of going anywhere, despite her strange facial ticks and odd mistakes such as repeatedly confusing President Trump with G.W. Bush (video below). As the Sac Bee also writes, “Asked during a Sunday interview about Democrats opposing her for speaker, she accused MSNBC of being on a “jag” against her. Better than most, she ought to know that’s getting precariously close to Trump calling any critical coverage ‘fake news.’”
It wouldn’t be a surprise, though, if MSNBC wanted her gone. She’s threatening the Democrats’ prospects for power, after all.
With her pitifully low national poll numbers, one thing Pelosi’s not thinking of running for is the presidency; other equally unpalatable Democrats have that covered, however. The San Francisco Chronicle mentions a California contingent, starting with the state’s junior senator, Kamala Harris. The other cited Golden State would-be golden boys are mainly in the Chronicle piece to fill up space and are a testimonial to human vanity and opportunism. They are: East Bay representative Eric Swalwell, billionaire San Francisco activist Tom Steyer, Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti, and Congressman Adam Schiff.
Aside from Harris, none of these candidates stands a chance (and none are serious about running, concludes the Chronicle, except for Harris and Garcetti). Among the reasons for this, a major one is generally unrecognized — race.
I wrote back during the 2008 presidential campaign that the main reason Senator John Edwards had no chance to win the Democrat nomination was that the politically correct, cultural-affirmative-action-oriented Democrat electorate would never choose a white male over a minority (Barack Obama) or a woman (Hillary Clinton). Back then I was a voice in the wilderness (a status to which I’m accustomed). But, lo and behold, Captain Reality must have somehow gotten through the Washington Post’s door. For in June the paper published the column, “The worst thing to be in many Democratic primaries? A white male candidate.”
In our time of “white privilege” and “deconstructing whiteness” dogma, this prejudice better informs about who will be — and, more significantly, who won’t be — the 2020 Democrat nominee than perhaps any other factor. For example, while New York governor Andrew Cuomo and his state’s junior senator, Kirsten Gillibrand, appear to have presidential ambitions, their chances range from slim to none (Cuomo, being male, occupies the latter end of that range.) As pundit and humorist Ed Straker wrote at American Thinker last month about Gillibrand’s whiteness woes:
New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand has a problem. She wants to be the Democratic nominee for president in 2020. But she’s white.
Not only is Gillibrand white, but she’s extremely white. She’s so white that even Hillary Clinton looks almost Hispanic by comparison.
That’s not an asset in a competitive Democratic primary. It used to be that being a woman was sufficiently virtuous. No longer. Gillibrand has to compete against candidates from other identity groups. Cory Booker is a minority; Kamala Harris is a minority; and even though Elizabeth Warren isn’t a minority, she does play one on TV.
While this is quite funny, not a joke is that today’s Democrat party is defined by identity politics. It’s not what you know, but what you are. A case in point: Vermont Democrats just nominated for governor Christine Hallquist, a man masquerading as a woman (a so-called “transgender”).
And that’s today’s Democrat Party: boys in girls locker rooms on the agenda, a California octogenarian rabble-rouser (Maxine Waters) in the House; an ascendant New York socialist who says that the only reason unemployment numbers are low is that everyone has two jobs (Ocasio-Cortez), and skin color and chromosome configuration elevated over meritocracy.
The Democrats used to be called the party of the common man. Now they’re the party of the uncommon man.
Image: screenshot from YouTube video of Pelosi montage
