08 Nov The Defeat, but not the End, of the San Francisco Democrats
In all the post-mortems and analyses of the election, inevitably the authors will identify a specific point at which everything changed and the fate of the 2024 campaign was decided. Some, for example, will say that the bungled withdrawal from Afghanistan sealed the Democratic nominee’s fate, and that it didn’t matter who the nominee would eventually be. Others will point to that fateful day in July, when a would-be assassin’s bullet clipped Donald Trump’s ear, and Trump responded by climbing back to his feet and pumping his fist. Still others will suggest that Trump guaranteed his victory when he had the sense to name JD Vance as his running mate and, thereby, assured the voters that the nation and his movement would be in good hands, even if something happened to him.
For my money, the day everything changed was November 15, 2002. That was the day that Nancy Pelosi won the Democratic caucus vote to replace Dick Gephardt (D, MO), who had resigned his position as House Minority Leader (for life) to run for president in 2004. By choosing Pelosi, the House Democrats not only repudiated the previous decade of Bill-Clinton-led centrist Democratism, but also handed power over to a literal “San Francisco Democrat” the likes of which Jeanne Kirkpatrick had savagely (and rightly) condemned in her famous 1984 Republican National Convention speech.
The fringe San Francisco Democrats would gain more power four years later, when Pelosi became the first female Speaker of the House, after the 2006 Democratic midterm election blowout, and would authoritatively lock in their position of power two years after that, when progressive icon-to-be Barack Obama handily beat the other half of the Clinton team to win the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination.
And it’s been all downhill from there.
The Democrats like to think that Barack Obama is the perfect campaign surrogate. And why shouldn’t they? He’s affable. He’s charismatic. He’s engaging. He’s successful. He’s everything you’d want in a surrogate.
There’s only one catch: he’s also a self-absorbed, condescending asshat. He makes a positive impression on people who don’t need convincing, but he just ticks off the people who are, theoretically, persuadable. He is, in truth, a terrible campaign surrogate.
It is worth noting along these lines that Barack Obama has never campaigned effectively for any candidate not named Barack Obama. He won in 2008. His party got clobbered in 2010. He won again in 2012, but his party got clobbered again in 2014. He hand-picked Hillary over Biden in 2016, and she lost the most winnable election in history. He hand-picked Biden in 2020, and Biden won, but only by explicitly promising to bring back “the good ol’ days” and to restore the Obama ethos to the White House. His party was beaten (although less badly than expected) again in 2022. And then…well…then there was this past Tuesday, which will, in the end, probably go down as the most definitive repudiation of any political movement since 1980, if not 1932.
It is no coincidence, by the way, that the candidate who was so summarily crushed on Tuesday was, more or less, Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama’s love child: a progressive, female, racial minority from San Francisco. Kamala Harris was the both the literal and figurative culmination of 20 years of Pelosi-Obama scheming to create the perfect leftist candidate. They forced Biden to put her on the ticket in 2020 because of her unique combination of personal and political characteristics, and they forced Biden out of the race this past summer to ensure that she could run in his stead. Both decisions will haunt the Democratic Party for years to come.
Everyone these days has advice for the Democrats about how they can fix what is wrong and regain their mojo. I appreciate and understand the effort, but I just don’t think it’s going to work – at least not right now. I discuss one of the major reasons it won’t work in my American Greatness column tomorrow, but it should be clear to most observers that another significant reason is that Barack Obama is only 63 years old. Pelosi, for her part, is older than both Joe Biden and Methuselah (she’s 84), so she won’t be a problem for the Democrats for a whole lot longer. That’s not to say that she’s on her death bed or anything (and I hope she lives another 20 years), but she is reaching the end of her career, whether she likes it or not. Obama, by contrast, has at least another ten, if not twenty years in him. Theoretically he could still be running around the country telling dad jokes and not-so-slyly attacking young men for not being as righteous as he is in 2044, when Barron Trump (currently a college freshman) is running his first presidential campaign.
As we’ve learned over the past week, the Democrats in power have no interest in listening to or taking advice from Bill Clinton. I’d argue that Clinton was ten times the retail politician Obama could ever hope to be and still has better instincts, but no one cares – and no one has cared for 22 years. This is Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi’s party. It will soon be Obama’s party alone, and it will remain so for as long as he wants it to be. Very few people in the ruling class have the insight to see just how destructive he is, and among those who do, none has the courage to challenge him.
In a narrow sense, this is great for Republicans, who can expect to settle in as the ostensible majority party for the next few years – assuming Michelle Obama keeps her promise and stays out of politics. In a grander sense, however, this is terrible news for the country. All polities need an effective and sane opposition party. Without one the majority party grows corrupt and soft. More to the point, the Obama Democratic Party is ugly and destructive. It is focused on division and hatred. It is the embodiment of the old ‘60s motto that “the personal is political,” and it is, as a result, all-consuming and bifurcating.
Ironically, Harold Ford, Jr., the man whom many observers expected to be the nation’s first black president before Obama emerged in the scene, was the candidate whom Pelosi defeated for the Minority Leader position back in 2002. Ford – from Tennessee – was a member of the Democratic Leadership Council, the market-friendly centrist group that was started by Al From in 1985 and that backed Bill Clinton’s presidential aspirations from the very start. If Ford had beaten Pelosi in that contest, the world would be a much, much different place today.
As it is, we’re all stuck with the San Francisco Democrats rather than the Memphis Democrats.
It’s too bad for everyone, really.
