THIS
SAYS IT ALL – THE DEMOCRATIC LEADERS ARE TOO OLD, TOO WEAK, AND TOO TIRED TO BE
AGGRESSIVE ENOUGH TO SAVE OUR DEMOCRACY – BIDEN IS SIMPLY TOO WEAK TO PLAY
HARDBALL AND MCCONNELL HUMILATES HIM AT EVERY OPPORTUNITY
Gavin Newsom’s TV ad slamming DeSantis fills a void among Democrats
By Paul Waldman
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July 5, 2022 at 5:59 p.m. EDT
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The shooting at a July Fourth parade in
Illinois seemed somehow different — it wasn’t just one more massacre. This was
obvious to everyone, especially liberals who criticize American gun culture and
the difficulty of passing legislation at the national level.
Nowhere
seems safe, and politicians are unable or unwilling to do anything about it.
For
those liberals, the reaction of their party’s leadership, if not nearly as
repugnant as the GOP’s standard “thoughts and prayers,” is
nonetheless frustrating. Our country feels like it’s spinning downward at an
ever-more-furious pace, and the party is led by superannuated politicians who
at these moments explain why they’d like to do more but are constrained from
doing so.
So they
criticize the Supreme Court’s recent ruling nullifying
some blue-state gun laws and tout the new gun reforms,
which represent real progress,
though not nearly enough. But few national Democrats, if any, are making a
comprehensive case that right-wing radicalization threatens a nightmarish
future, on many fronts at once.
Right
now, the GOP is united in its determination to put more guns on the streets.
Its state legislatures compete to pass the
most draconian laws on abortion they can dream up. Its witch hunt against
critical race theory morphed into an anti-LGBTQ crusade.
It has given itself over to deranged lies about
voter fraud conspiracies, the very lies that inspired the Jan. 6, 2021, riot
and threaten to make fair elections
impossible.
Meanwhile,
President Biden keeps talking about the Republicans of good will whose support
he seeks. Democratic leaders in Congress focus on discrete pieces of
legislation they hope to pass but only occasionally do.
One just
doesn’t get the sense that their hair is on fire, which is how rank-and-file
Democrats feel.
We
think this is the context for the new, much-discussed move by California Gov.
Gavin Newsom (D). Over the weekend, he aired an ad on Fox News aimed ostensibly
at Floridians living under Gov. Ron DeSantis, the second most important
Republican in the country after Donald Trump:
“It’s
Independence Day, so let’s talk about what’s going on in America,” Newsom says
in the ad. “Freedom is under attack” in places like Florida, he says, listing
a number of issues — abortion, free speech, voting rights — on which
Republicans are trying to “take your freedom.”
The
message here is that all these right-wing efforts add up to profoundly threaten
the way of life that much of Blue America takes for granted. Why don’t we hear
this big-picture case more often?
Yes,
it’s a bid for attention. Newsom, an ambitious politician who’s likely eyeing a
White House run, knows a personal spat between two governors is irresistible to
political reporters.
But he’s
speaking into a real vacuum. Democratic voters crave signs
that party leaders understand their frustration is bordering on panic: As they
see it, the side making serious ideological gains is the opposition, whose
chances of winning Congress don’t seem diminished by revelations about Trump’s
GOP-enabled effort to destroy our political order, court decisions gutting
long-settled rights, or mass-shooting nightmares that seem horrifyingly
inevitable.
Newsom’s
foray captures a sense that a generational turn among Democrats is needed for
party leaders to communicate effectively about this pileup of perils. Consider
that the most viral recent moments communicating this radicalization have been
staged by younger Democrats, often quite effectively.
State
Sen. Mallory McMorrow of Michigan commanded far-reaching media attention by
tearing into a GOP colleague for pushing the vile “groomer” smear about Democrats, linking
it to a forceful critique of the right’s degradation of our
national life.
Similarly,
Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) has urged Democrats to “make more noise”
in response to right-wing extremism. In this telling, there’s a “loudness” gap between
the parties: Democrats must sound a drumbeat of urgency, if only to let the
country know something is dangerously out of control on the right.
Take
the Jan. 6 committee hearings. The disarming of GOP efforts to plant
saboteurs on the committee, combined with tactics such as
drawing attention to Fox News personalities’ texts and telling gripping stories
about Trump’s descent into madness and corruption, have focused extraordinary
attention on the insurrectionist mania gripping the right and some in the GOP.
House
Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) deserves credit for that success. But much
heavy lifting is being done by Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), the committee vice
chair, and hugely compelling witnesses such as Cassidy Hutchinson. It’s hard to
conclude that the Democratic leadership sees a broader lesson in the success of this effort.
And as Ron Brownstein notes, the
uncertain rhetorical response by Democratic leaders is joined at the hip with a
seeming unwillingness to fully embrace procedural hardball. Their call for an
end to the filibuster to protect democracy and abortion rights seemed belated
and tentative, even as the consequences of the right’s capture of the Supreme
Court are rubbed in liberals’ faces daily.
Democratic
strategist Simon Rosenberg suggests that
for Democrats to have any chance in the midterms, they must communicate with
the majority that’s repelled by the Trump-era GOP’s excesses. As
Rosenberg tells us: “We need to remind the anti-MAGA majority, who voted in
record numbers in the last two elections, that if anything, the radicalization
has gotten worse.”
Ask
yourself this: Who is speaking to that anti-MAGA majority?