I must confess, as a devotee of schadenfreude I am deriving more pleasure from the Democrat Party primary process than is typically legal in most jurisdictions–save Nevada. And in the wake of the Pennsylvania Primary, I am experiencing such an intense feeling of epicaricacy that even being subjected to a 24 hour marathon of Countdown with Keith Olbermann couldn’t wipe the smile off my face. To borrow a bit from Barry Obama’s famous pastor “The chickens have come home to roost!” and the Democrat Party is waking up to the fact that their drunken hook up with Barry O has probably cost them the White House for at least another four years.
If you listen amongst the assorted fixers, ward healers, bagmen, shysters and union thugs who make up the pool of Democrat superdelegates, what was once a slight undercurrent of panic has passed the merely palpable stage and has mestastasized into a “REMAIN CALM! ALL IS WELL!” level of panic that would make Chip Diller proud. Like the drunken man in the country and western song who went to bed with Meryl Streep and woke up with Merle Haggard, the party pros are now fully awake to the fact that the guy the they thought was the black Jack Kennedy, reaching out to the center and touting a new “post-partisan” politics with lofty rhetoric that could make Ted Sorenson jealous, is in fact–to borrow from Joe Biden–a more articulate and cleaner cut version of Al Sharpton. You almost have to feel bad for them, all they wanted was someone who made them feel sexy again–oh sure, 2006 was nice, but it was accomplished by grinding it out and running faux centrist stealth candidates at the direction of Chuck Schumer and Ari Gold’s brother, each of whom is the most remote thing from sexy that you can find without digging up Bella Abzug’s corpse and running her for congress again. Barry O and his melifluous voice kindled something in them–the “tingle” in Chris Matthews’ leg if you will–and they fell for it hook, line and sinker. You almost have to forgive them for ignoring the fact that their Prince Charming was nothing more than a hack weened on corrupt Chicago ward politics and a man perfectly comfortable with advancing himself with the help of an unholy trinity of assorted terrorists (Bill Ayers), America-haters (The Most “Reverend” Wright) and felons (Tony Rezko). Now the Democrats are coming to after the bender that was the primary season and peering through bloodshot eyes at a man who has morphed into a really ugly Presidential bedmate, a novelty candidate whose thinly veiled condescension and preening arrogance turns off large swaths of their core constituency and only appeals to a narrow coalition of African-Americans, drug-addled adolescents/trustafarians, and rich white liberals–the effette, chardonnay-sipping sort who still read Pinch Sulzberger’s failing newspaper, hang out at Jean Georges and endlessly prattle on about the relative merits of sending their progeny to Collegiate or Trinity for prep school–who take a masochist’s pleasure in trying to expunge their sense of terminal racial guilt.
But what to do? If they quietly slip out of bed, put on their clothes and sneak off into Hillary’s steely, icy cold embrace, they will provoke the wrath of their most reliable voting block and the rich white liberals who bankroll the party. They also subject themselves to the sort of unhinged vitriol that makes the New York Times what it is today. If they try to find a third option–say the fearless hunter of Manbearpig aka Al Gore–they anger everyone and lay waste to their already specious claim to being the party of the common man. And so, they trudge onward–like the German POWs you can watch being marched out of Stalingrad in one of those grainy black and white clips you see on the excellent World at War series–towards what promises to be a very ugly conflagration in Denver later this summer. It is enough to make even a hardbitten and cynical hack like myself weep with joy.
Filed under: Virginia Politics
Nice post.