A Post-Obama Democratic Party in Search of Itself

The 44th president left office as one of the most popular in American history. He also left behind a party struggling to find an identity — and to reconnect with voters in time for the 2018 elections.

“It reminded me of that scene at the end of ‘Animal House,’ where Kevin Bacon is standing in the middle of all this chaos, screaming: ‘Remain calm! All is well!’ ” Scott Peters, a congressman from California who was on the call, told me. “After telling us before that we were going to pick up 20 seats, and we end up with six, underlaid with Clinton losing, I had no use for that kind of happy talk.”

During and after Pelosi’s monologue, Democratic representatives who were listening texted and called one another incredulously, but Peters was one of the few who spoke up on the line. “I think we’re missing something,” he told Pelosi. “We’re just not hearing what’s on people’s minds.”

The discontent was palpable enough that two days after the conference call, Pelosi announced that leadership elections would be taking place less than a week later — leaving little time for a revolt to build, which some members I spoke to suspected was the point.

By that time, one of Pelosi’s House allies, Doris Matsui of California, had already sent out an email to all the women in the Democratic House caucus, urging them to sign on to a letter of support for Pelosi as leader. Three second-term Democrats — Seth Moulton of Massachusetts, Kathleen Rice of New York and Ruben Gallego of Arizona — wrote to Pelosi, urging her to delay the elections.

Rice would later tell her colleagues in a closed-door meeting, according to notes that were taken by a participant: “Look, I know from losing the state attorney general race in 2010: Losing sucks. But you have to get up the next day and take responsibility for it, take a hard look at every decision your team made, figure out what went wrong and learn from it.”

No president since Ronald Reagan has won the presidency as convincingly, twice over, as Obama did — but those victories papered over an extraordinary decline in his party that became suddenly unignorable on Nov. 9, 2016. The Democratic National Committee today is an understaffed, demoralized bureaucracy. It has raised less than half of what its Republican counterpart has taken in so far this year.

By the end of Obama’s presidency, the Democratic Party had lost nearly a thousand seats in state legislatures across America. It had forfeited its majority in both the House and the Senate. A mere 16 of the nation’s 50 governors were Democrats — and that number dwindled to 15 in August, when Jim Justice of West Virginia announced with a grinning Donald Trump at his side that he, too, had decided to become a Republican.

On the morning of October 5th, President Trump was on one of his Twitter rants from the White House, denying as “fake news” an NBC report that his Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, had called him a “moron” and threatened to resign. Elsewhere in Washington, the drama over whether Tillerson was actually on his way out threatened to overwhelm other news stories for a second straight day. But, when I arrived at the townhouse of Stanley Greenberg, the veteran Democratic strategist, on Capitol Hill, later that morning, it was not the distractions of the Trump White House that had him worked up. Greenberg was still fuming about Hillary Clinton.

Greenberg and other prominent Democrats still furious about last year’s Clinton campaign think it’s entirely possible, unless the Party figures out, and fast, a way to tackle the problem that sealed Clinton’s fate in 2016: how to appeal to the disaffected white working-class voters who provided Trump’s unlikely win a year ago.





Please enjoy my books on how the press bungled the 2016 election.

Caution: Readers occasionally may laugh out loud at the media as they read this account of Trump's nomination.

Almost a year after Donald Trump humiliated the Democratic Party 30 states to 19 3/4, only now is the party coming to grips with its defeat.Eight years of charming incompetence by Barack Obama fundamentally transformed the Democratic Party into an atrophied, sclerotic shell. The party is its smallest since 1929 as measured by governorships. Failure has consequences.Had they judged Obama by the content of his character instead of the color of his skin, Democrats may have been spared the Walk of Shame they must begin.The party has no leadership.Two articles make the Democratic Party's pain delightfully clear.In his article, Robert Draper wrote that the day after the Democratic Party lost Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin for the first time since the 1980s, Democratic Party leaders tried to spin it as a minor setback.The party is in trouble. One generation hangs on to power. Another generation is not ready to take over.Draper was polite:The "extraordinary decline" in Obama's party is because he led them into the dead end of Marxism.The Democratic Party is synonymous with defeat.Loser talk of overturning the election in the Electoral College was followed by loser talk of overturning the election by not accepting the results in Congress.Which was followed by loser talk of overturning the election by using the emoluments clause.Which was followed by loser talk of overturning the election with the 25th Amendment.Which was followed by loser talk of overturning the election by impeachment.All these attempts ended in failure.Every failure further defined the party as a group of losers.Who wants to be in that group?From Draper:The Party of Jackson and Kennedy is now the Party of McGovern, Mondale and Hillary.The media does not help matters by belittling and ridiculing President Trump.So the reader reads that President Trump is a moron, and then the reader asks himself: What sort of idiot loses to a moron?From Glasser:Yes, the party thought it did not need white people -- and jettisoned white working-class voters sometime in the 1970s. After Reagan won three consecutive elections (Bush 41's win in 1988 reflected Reagan's presidency, not Bush 41's abilities) H. Ross Perot siphoned enough white working-class voters to elect Bill Clinton.After Obama's election and re-election, Democrats ignored white working-class voters entirely.Democrats ignored the Tea Party Surprise in 2010. Demographics were on their side, they told themselves.Soon, white people would be a plurality in the United States.What they overlooked is that won't happen for another 30 years.That's a long time to be out of power.That's a long time to sit in second place.***Caution: Readers occasionally may laugh out loud at the media as they read this account of Trump's election.It is available on Kindle , and in paperback It is available on Kindle , and in paperback Autographed copies of both books are available by writing me at DonSurber@GMail.com Please follow me on Twitter