Democrats' disastrous "plan": listen rather than lead

Political scientist Jacob Hacker acknowledges what's morphed from a mere truthful inconvenience to a monstrously debilitating disease: "[The Democratic Party] has proved extremely ill suited to the present challenge."

The opposition is "built for ... normal political swings," notes Hacker. That's peachy as apple pie in ordinary times, but the party is at nine in a 10-count as Trump delivers not customary swings but illegal haymakers. Confronted by these staggering blows, Democratic leaders consult their tattered, unrevised playbook.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries is ... racing to release a plan to revive a depressed base and sell voters on a Democratic Party that hears their concerns on affordability, safety and helping the working class.... Jeffries has launched listening sessions around the country and commissioned his own polling to map a way back from the wilderness.

On affordability — seemingly the plan's linchpin, based on the above-quoted WaPo story — Jeffries said that "in 2024 there was a failure to adequately address the high cost of living environment, and as a result, a price was paid.... That’s a mistake that can never be made again."

Here's another plan.

To hell with the plan. It's straight from the obsolescent playbook. Pitch it. Consulting the all-too-familiar will only lead to yet "other mistakes," which, as the minority leader keenly observed, "should never be made again." (File that.) One is commissioning pollsters to hear voters' concerns about "safety" — that would be the nonexistent crime epidemic — hyperventilating Republicans' Trumpian hellscape stewed in cauldrons of fearmongering.

The key mistake, however, would be to propose an "affordability" agenda without first clearing up what Jeffries calls Democrats' failure in 2024: "adequately address[ing] the high cost of living." Here the party encounters a self-inflicted defect that's far more damaging than its bungling of last year's electoral ire over inflation.

Ask most any voter what best describes the Democratic Party, and most often the answer is "weak" or some harsher variation thereof: gutless, toothless, spineless. Some voters prefer the gentle putdown of "too nice."

Whether aggressively negative or backhandedly complimentary, the answer's identical in thrust but carries an easily detectable, enormously ironic distinction: The Trump party wins because it's unintimidated by voters; it tells them what to be concerned about while you guys go around staging feckless listening tours.

Hark, the cliché — grow a pair. Rewind events and let voters know that they were the ones who botched 2024. They re-enthroned an ignorant tyrant based on their own ignorant grounds of intolerable Democratic inflation. Such would be the opening announcement at the opposition's electoral reeducation camp. And people, precisely how intolerable was inflation when you pulled November's retaliatory lever?

In September and October, inflation ran at 2.4% and 2.6%, just above the Fed's target rate. For that, you people voted in an economically illiterate, tariff-happy clown who now has you back on the inflationary roller coaster, going up.

Post-pandemic prices were unavoidable because of gushing demand and plugged supply chains; furthermore they were a global phenomenon that was, in fact, far worse globally than domestically. Then, while crucifying President Biden for earlier peak rates he had no control over, you turned around and voted yes to a criminal idiot who promised you a deliberate return to higher rates of inflation.

And we Democratic pols should now be listening to you?

The electorate's inattentive, uninformed stumblebums were the ones who got us into this mess — a crisis of extraordinary magnitude without precedent; a nation-killing exigency of Trumpian lawlessness, corruption and insufferable stupidity. And opposition leaders must be the ones to get us out of it — by their designs, if at all possible, not those of the stumblebum masses.

* This piece is cross-posted at Substack. Subscribe to be notified of new posts.