A Fox News article from Sunday night illuminated something which has been readily apparent just under the surface of the internecine legislative war the Democrats staged for the final couple months of 2021.
All of the attention had focused on Joe Manchin, the West Virginia Democrat senator whose refusal to go along with the Build Back Better boondoggle spending orgy the Left has demanded of the Biden administration. But Manchin is an outlier. He’s a refusenik. He’s akin to the pathetic Japanese soldiers in remote southeast Asian jungles continuing to fight on post-atom bombs, not realizing World War II had already ended.
The war within the Democrat Party isn’t quite over yet, but we can see the end from here. The signs are already up.
Fox News’ Adam Sabes took us on a tour of them in his piece…
According to a Politico report, several Democratic strategists think that a progressive will attempt to enter the 2024 primary race as a challenger to President Biden.
“Will there be a progressive challenger? Yes,” Jeff Weaver, a former presidential campaign manager for Sen. Bernie Sanders said.
Some believe that Nina Turner or former 2020 presidential candidate Marianne Williamson might challenge President Biden.
In describing President Biden, another progressive strategist said that he’s “deeply unpopular” and “old as s—.”
“He’s deeply unpopular. He’s old as s—. He’s largely been ineffective, unless we’re counting judges or whatever the hell inside-baseball scorecard we’re using. And I think he’ll probably get demolished in the midterms,” Corbin Trent, former communications director for Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and co-founder of No Excuses PAC said.
Progressive activists are also beginning to blame the president for his inaction on issues such as climate change.
Between Dec. 25 and Jan. 1, a group called “Occupy Biden” formed a camp near President Biden’s residence in Delaware, demanding that he declare a “climate emergency.” A spokesperson for the group criticized President Biden for not doing enough when it comes to climate change.
“We do understand that an administration that at least believes and asserts that climate crisis is real is an asset. But in a time of emergency we must act to do everything possible to avert catastrophe,” Karen Igou, a spokesperson for Occupy Biden told Fox News on Saturday.
The growing dissatisfaction with Biden on the Left is no surprise, as growing dissatisfaction with Biden from any quarter seems inevitable. That Biden is barely physically capable of conducting business in the White House now, much less running for re-election in two and a half years, is reason enough to doubt his future as the Democrats’ standard-bearer.
But what we should remember is that Hillary Clinton had to have the Democratic National Committee rig the 2016 election to keep Bernie Sanders from upsetting her for the party’s nomination. And in 2020, an orchestrated pullout of several semi-viable candidates to align behind Biden might have been the only thing stopping Sanders’ ascension.
They’ve screwed Bernie out of the nomination in both of the last two cycles. Can they do it again in 2024?
One wonders how or with whom.
Yes, Bernie Sanders is too old to run for president in 2024. Sanders will be 83 on Election Day in 2024. He’s 14 months older than Biden is. But Sanders is a bit sprier than Biden, and while what spews forth from Sanders’ mouth is a dog’s breakfast of Marxist-Leninist class-warfare piffle, it’s a bit more lucid than the emanations from the current president.
If Bernie is fit enough to run, or if Bernie can find someone plausible to carry his standard, they’re going to have a real problem on the Democrat side in 2024. They’re likely to lose their party.
The thing to understand about Democrat politics is twofold. First, Democrat politics is urban politics. And second, Democrat politics is machine politics.
Nobody wins elections in that party by offering up cool ideas or governing successfully. They gave up on all that years ago.
Now, you win elections by building up enough votes within your political machine to win the primary. And in more cases than not, you win the general election by the sheer weight of Democrat voters where that’s possible. If you’re in Pennsylvania, the Philadelphia machine vote can carry the state for you. If you’re in Indiana, the Indianapolis machine vote can’t.
Those machines are what win elections. Who controls the machines controls the Democrat Party.
And we’re in the midst of a silent coup across the country. Because the old machines are being replaced.
In every city Democrats control, big money has been flowing into nonprofits with innocuous-sounding names and laughable missions to “energize communities” under the banner of social justice. These nonprofits are funded by the usual sources — the Ford Foundation, the Kellogg Foundation, the Open Society Institute.
And in city after city, they’ve displaced the old Democrat power structure. This is how you go from the Daley machine running Chicago to having the place run by the terminally bizarre Lori Lightfoot, or how New York went from Michael Bloomberg to Bill de Blasio. Or how all the cities now have Soros DAs.
The Hard Left infrastructure now reigns in the cities, and it increasingly calls the tune. But at the statewide and national level, it isn’t quite dominant within the Democrat Party.
Because at the statewide and national level the leadership positions are chiefly filled by the devotees of the party’s most recent nominee.
This matters. It’s the reason the Democrats did everything they could to screw Bernie out of the nomination in 2016 and 2020. If he’d become the nominee, he could have put his people in all of those jobs, and that would have been the end of the James Carvilles and Donna Braziles.
Those old-school Dems are hanging on, just barely. They had to foist Biden on the public in order to hold power, but Biden is already past his shelf life.
And there is no bench. Not when Kamala Harris and Pete Buttigieg are supposedly the leading lights in the party. There were two dozen candidates in their 2020 field and Joe Biden turned out to be their only hope of keeping Sanders off their ticket.
There isn’t much uncertainty left about the 2022 midterms. Barring something unforeseen, the “moderate” Democrats who represent congressional seats that could be competitive will find themselves turned out of office en masse in the wave election which beckons, and that will mean what’s left in office will be the Pramila Jayapals, Dick Blumenthals, Cory Bookers, and Ilhan Omars. Hakeem Jeffries likely takes over as the Democrats’ minority leader in the House.
And if Biden wants to govern he’ll have to break bread with the Republicans, which will activate the Hard Left even more and guarantee he gets a well-funded and well-supported Hard Left challenger in 2024.
One who’ll have all the momentum inside the Democrats’ tent, while the public at large loudly signals its distaste for, and disinterest in, socialism.
They’ve got no bench. To build a bench in politics means developing a roster of capable and competent people who can govern. The Democrats have specifically rejected that as a fundamental mission of officeholding and have chosen social and cultural revolution instead.
Well, the revolutionaries are still engaged. But increasingly, nobody else is. And a Bernie Sanders or Stacey Abrams at the top of the Democrats’ ticket in 2024 is very likely to crash and burn. When it does, though, let’s understand that it was the center-left, such as it is, which collapsed in order to bring this about.
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