Friday, at the DNC's summer meeting in Minnesota, Martin O'Malley said precisely what one would expect a 3-percent showing in Iowa to say. He ripped into his party's six-debates-only schedule, alleging that this "is totally unprecedented in our party’s history. This sort of rigged process has never been attempted before."
Talk of unprecedented rigging is, of course, rubbish. The Democratic establishment, like every establishment, has never been in the habit of encouraging debate, dissent, or insurgency. And since (for now?) Hillary Clinton is the establishment — the éminence grise of the DNC machine (such as it is), powered by chairwoman and Clinton-supporter Debbie Wasserman Schultz — Hillary will have her way in her party's debate schedule. Sorry, Martin.
Notwithstanding the futility of O'Malley's plea, it "drew standing ovations from the audience," reports the NY Times, "and" — you gotta love this part — "scowls from [Schultz], seated a few feet away." O'Malley may have his problems, but that standing ovation portends a bigger one for Hillary, to which Bernie Sanders alluded.
"In my view," said Sanders, "Democrats will not retain the White House, will not regain the Senate or the U.S. House, will not be successful in dozens of governor races across the country, unless we generate excitement and momentum and produce a huge voter turnout. With all due respect — and I do not mean to insult anyone here — that turnout, that enthusiasm, will not happen with politics as usual."
Sanders noted the "abysmally, embarrassingly low" Democratic turnout of 2014, which, abysmal as it was, was also rather typical of midterm Democratic turnouts. At any rate, midterms are unsuggestive of presidential turnouts (something that appeared to genuinely surprise Mitt Romney).
The greatest motivator of Democratic turnout in 2016, however, would be Donald Trump — not raucous Democratic debates or unusual Democratic politics. Trump is far more a phenomenon of summer 2015; he's a Republican time bomb of extraordinary capacity.
He once said, "You know, it really doesn’t matter what they write as long as you’ve got a young and beautiful piece of ass." The press would give him a hell of an education once he secured the nomination; let us pray they go easy on him till then. A premature Gore-ification of Trumpified political news would only spoil superior fun down the road. For maximum enjoyment, windbags must be allowed to fully inflate before puncturing.
That said, I sympathize with O'Malley, but what else can one say? As for Sanders' analysis, a 2017 Republican White House is nearly impossible to envision. There are always increasingly sane demographics, a largely blue Electoral map, and oodles of horrorstruck enthusiasm for thrashing a Trump (or Bush) ticket, even if Democrats are less enthused with their own.
And having said that as well, I persist in my perhaps fanciful belief that a Biden-Warren ticket would encompass the best of all worlds: greater Democratic enthusiasm, with the establishment enfolding its primordial insurgency. Which would help Democratic turnout; otherwise, Sanders is probably right about that downticket thing.