I’ve spent the last few weeks — and indeed most of this primary season — taking potshots at the GOP. Their prancing disaster area of a nominee makes them an easy target. But this week, the Democratic Party establishment has reminded us in memorable fashion that you don’t need to be short-fingered and poorly-informed to really put your foot in it.
As any conservative or person who has been paying attention in the last few years will tell you, this is by no means the first bump in the road for the Democrats. Their voters don’t turn out in midterm elections. They struggle to get progressive or even bipartisan legislation passed in an unfriendly Congress. Their nominee can’t manage to stop stumbling into scandals.
These things have flown, so far, in part because much of it can be blamed on voters, the GOP or Hillary Clinton’s own personal failings, but the DNC email scandal is a particularly frustrating showcase of Democratic flaws.
This election should have been the Democrats’ to lose. Republicans have nominated one of the least qualified and suitable candidates for the presidency ever to get this far into the process. By most quantitative measures, Barack Obama’s presidency has been a successful one. Liberal causes have made groundbreaking steps forward.
Democrats had only one job: Don’t screw it up.
To this end, they ran a group of candidates who were (in order of disappearance) baffling, awkward, unknown, boring, socialist, and scandal-ridden and are now losing to a fear-mongering demagogue. This week, when the convention should be giving them a boost, they have possibly alienated a large part of their base with pointless political maneuvering.
Bernie Sanders was always going to lose. We knew this. Barring Clinton’s death or arrest, the best he was going to get was what he got — to give her a pretty good fight for a while and then speak on the first night of her convention. He did not need the DNC’s help. All they had to do was watch. But instead, they were batting around ideas to sabotage his campaign — ideas which, in an age of hackers and political intrigue, they should have known might leak.
This week, Democrats look petty and corrupt. Although accusations of sabotage have been flying all primary, Debbie Wasserman Shultz insisted that the process was “eminently fair”— which we are now discovering she knew not to be true. This could be yet another perceived betrayal by the establishment to Sanders’ younger demographic, whom Clinton is already struggling to resonate with. Along with her unappealing VP pick, this could lose her a chunk of fickle, but extremely important, voters.
This race should have been a cakewalk for the left, what with the fractured, squabbling GOP. The Democrats are making it difficult for themselves with carelessness.
If we wake up to President Donald Trump in January of next year, it will not be because he was good enough to win. It will be because the Democrats were irresponsible enough to lose.