You can almost taste the flopsweat from the elite political media. They’re warming things up in case there really is a Democratic wave in the fall. Experience tells us that, if that happens, the elite political media will immediately engage the dampers on anything a Democratic majority might want to do that is in anyway Democratic or (horrors!) liberal. Expeditions to the Trumpish hinterlands will depart immediately. Appeals to “bipartisanship” will deafen the gods. This is what happened in 2006, when the country revolted against George W. Bush and his many crimes and failures. This is what will happen next fall, too.
You’re seeing it with the hilarious contortions of [the New York Times'] James Bennet regarding how he’s putting together his Opinion staff, and this obvious ratings extravaganza is another indication that all the old tracks are being set down again. In 2006, this phenomenon helped with the efforts to toss the Avignon Presidency [Cheney-Bush] down the memory hole so that people wouldn’t notice how it was the logical end to 30 years of conservative politics. It’s going to take even more of an effort to do that with this disaster. No wonder they’re starting early. [my emphasis]
Michael Tomasky looks at the prospect of big Democratic gains in the 2018 elections (The Blue Wave Is Real, and It Looks Really Big—Provided Democrats Don’t Block ItDaily Beast 02/28/2018) Tomasky is a good analyst and always worth paying attention to. And he gives a good description of why the prospects for a Democratic "wave" are good.
But at the very end, he puts in the ritual preliminary surrender mantra of the Thanatosis Democrats:
If national Democratic money doesn’t deliver for Lamb for these reasons, that’s stupid and short-sighted. You want the Democrats to win 50 seats? Great. You know how many of those 50 are going to have to run as squishy on guns and anti-Pelosi? Surely half of them if not more. It’s the only path to a majority.
Democrats have a lot going for them this year. They just can’t let ideological purity get in the way. The time for determining the party’s ideological direction will be the presidential nomination battle. For now, the tent needs to be as wide as possible.
Things are going our way. So let's surrender in advance!
And the Democrats think all they need to do to recover from the massive losses in 2016 is ... blame the Russians!
Nothing the Russians could do would disadvantage the Democrats as much as their own compulsion to roll over and play dead.
Brian Faler explains what can happen when you just cobble together a bunch of lobbyists' submssions and pass them as a tax bill without any kind of minimally reasonable legislative vetting.'This is not normal': Glitches mar new tax lawPolitico 02/24/2018.
The sentence that jumped out at me is, "Democrats may also decide to wait, figuring a good showing in this fall’s midterm elections will only increase their leverage when it comes to demanding changes in the law."
Except they usually don't get around to the "demanding" part. It was pretty obvious in the DACA/shutdown confrontation that was their underlying plan, to just cruise and let the Republicans roll over them until November and hope for a wave election in their favor. So with the DACA thing, they did a head fake toward actually fighting over mass deportation. Then after a couple of days, they threw in the towel and said, well, gee, that fine fellow Mitch McConnell promised he would do something nice for us.
Then they rolled over and played dead. Which unfortunately is all too often their default approach. The clinical name for that is "thanatosis." For the tax changes, the Dems' Thanatosis approach is likely to be: complain and grump in public about the unfairness of tax bill, then pick just enough Democrats to vote with the Republicans on the items the most influential business lobbyists want fixed. Then: roll over, play dead, repeat.
This is what Democrats think of as Resistance.
This cute-pet video is a pretty good illustration of the corporate Democrats' reflexive response to Republican initiatives. Particularly since most the animals look like they may be enjoying the game. Animals Playing Dead Supercute 10/28/2012:
Also, it may be time to park the "this is not normal" mantra. Trump is the normal for the Republican Party now.
Tim Alberta writes in Trump’s Takeover of Conservatism Is Complete and TotalPolitico 02/25/2018. She opens her piece with an account of conservative think-tanker Mona Charen speaking at this year's Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC), who drew the CPACers wrath by saying things like this: "I am disappointed in people on our side for being hypocrites about sexual harassers and abusers of women, who are in our party, who are sitting in the White House, who brag about their extramarital affairs, who brag about mistreating women—and because he happens to have an ‘R’ next to his name we look the other way."
And she even criticized Nazis!
Actually, to say something that she must have known would sound, uh, counterintuitive to the CPAC crowd, I have to wonder if she isn't setting herself up for a new gig as a convert from the conservative cause. Or maybe she really is becoming a convert. The conservative stalwarts responded like this:
By the time Charen had finished, boos and taunts drowned out the applause. “You’re a disgrace!” another man shouted.
Waiting for Charen afterward in a hallway inside the Gaylord National Resort, I was surprised to see her surrounded by three security officers. She was surprised, too. Charen told me the detail had suddenly appeared backstage, “seemingly nervous,” having been assigned to protect her on the way out. As we talked, and the detail marched Charen briskly toward the front doors, a few people tried to approach her but nobody got close. “They were acting as if I were in real danger,” she texted me afterward, “which I didn’t feel at all.”
Faler's report focused on CPAC, whose attendees understand themselves as "movement conservatives" or the like. But CPAC is not a sectarian outlier in the Republican Party:
These days, [former Reublican National Committee Chairman Michael] Steele said, “the sideshow is on the main stage.” This has meant a blurred line between patriotism and nativism. It has also meant provocation over policy: On Friday morning, National Rifle Association spokeswoman Dana Loesch said that “many in legacy media love mass shootings,” adding, “Crying white mothers are ratings gold.” A bit later, before Trump spoke, Fox News host Laura Ingraham quipped, ”Liberals are kind of like herpes. Just when you think you have them beat, they come back again.”
Perhaps most manifestly, the shift at CPAC has made hyperbole and alarmism the norm. No one bats an eye when a video message from the Tea Party Patriots warns that America is doomed unless its patent system is strengthened. Every head nods when former White House adviser Sebastian Gorka—who shoved one reporter at the event, and threatened at least one other—says Trump must finish two full terms, followed by two for Pence, because, “We need a minimum of 16 years to get back our republic.” It’s par for the course when radio host Mark Levin says the nation is “at a precipice” and warns that the left is going to defeat Trump “over our dead bodies.”
All of this fits “a broader pattern of a party that has lost its way, lost its moorings,” Steele, a frequent critic of his party, told me. [my emphasis]
The Arkansas Blog tweeted ironically over the Charen incident, poking fun at the WATB baby act on the right of The Mean Libruls Are Pickin' On US:
Claire Conner wrote this past December, "While Trump tweets, insults, and attacks, the GOP is getting exactly what they’ve always wanted. This is their big chance." (What Trump & the GOP Are Really Doing and Why 12/31/2018)
