'Democrats are not only leaderless; they have no soaring promise, no defining mission, no ideas. They only know what they don’t want. Ask about the party’s vision and the response is a blank stare. '

Donald Trump’s caustic arrogance is the Democrats’ best weapon as they try to oust him from the Oval Office in the 2020 presidential election.

Defeating the president has become the Democrats’ obsession, but it threatens to obscure Democratic weaknesses. After all, Trump-hate isn’t enough to create a worthy bid for the presidency.

Democrats are not only leaderless; they have no soaring promise, no defining mission, no ideas. They only know what they don’t want, but are devoid of answers to the key issues that matter most to voters. Ask a Democrat about the party’s vision and the response is a blank stare.

On immigration and taxation, on the trade war with China, on America’s role in the world, on global warming and carbon taxes, even on health care, Democrats have no real answers, no plans, no serious alternative policies. Democrats need to do more than rant about Trump to be relevant.

While flipping three dozen seats to take control of the House of Representatives delighted Democrat elites, it didn’t address the fundamental problems facing the party.

Meanwhile, as Trump stands like a colossus astride the American political landscape — easily shaping the national debate even when he’s inventing non-existent threats — the Democratic leadership consists of proven losers, aging has-beens and unknown wannabes.

It’s an uninspiring lineup.

Consider that Hillary Clinton, 71, and husband Bill, are about to embark on a 13-city tour, apparently to test the waters for yet another attempt to move back into the White House — despite the couple’s toxic reputation. Or that Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, 77, a self-described socialist who has yet to join the Democratic Party, and former vice-president Joe Biden (another twice-failed presidential candidate) round out the septuagenarian threesome with the highest name recognition among those widely presumed to be harbouring presidential ambitions.

A gaggle of lesser-known hopefuls fills out a field of about a dozen Democratic possibles. At least they include several who would bring much-needed generational change. Among them are Sen. Kamala Harris of California, Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York and Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota.

There’s also Rep. Beto O’Rourke, who won national attention while losing his Senate bid in Texas, and Gov. Steve Bullock of Montana and Gov. John Hickenlooper of Colorado.

Meanwhile, leftish billionaires Michael Bloomberg, the former New York mayor who’s big on gun control, and anti-Keystone XL activist Tom Steyer, are pondering a run against the right-wing billionaire in the White House.

A chaotic field of presidential hopefuls isn’t necessarily bad, nor unusual, but running against an incumbent president is notoriously hard. Second-raters fail. Only once since the Second World War has a party lost the White House after only four years. That was when Ronald Reagan beat Jimmy Carter in 1980 following the latter’s disastrous mishandling of the Iran hostage crisis, and a doubling of oil prices that left fuming Americans stuck in hours-long lineups at gas stations.

Reagan was a successful two-term California governor with an established national reputation, a brilliant orator and unparalleled campaigner, and a Republican with a trades-union background. Nobody on the current Democratic horizon comes close.

Democrats need a first-rate candidate to take on a sitting president. To beat Trump, they also need one willing to wage no-holds-barred political war. Trump has shown himself dangerously adept at humiliating and defeating a succession of political heavyweights who underestimated his ruthlessness.

It also means some ideas — not just scorn and abuse of Trump’s.

It’s easy, for instance, to disparage Trump’s call for a wall along the Mexican border as a waste of money and as barely disguised pandering to ill-educated whites who believe the baseless claims that vast hordes of Central Americans are invading to murder, rape, pillage, steal jobs, sell drugs, and spread disease.

But exit polls show immigration was the top issue among voters in the midterms, after health care. That attests to Trump’s ability to shape the agenda, even with grotesque fictions. But it also exposes a fundamental Democratic problem: the party has no immigration policy.

Although illegal immigration is at a 20-year low, there are 22 million undocumented aliens living in the United States. Trump threatened to round them up and throw them out. It was odious and impossible, but it was popular among his base. In contrast, Democrats are pitching themselves as the party of diversity and inclusion, but no leading Democrat dares say publicly that those 22 million should be granted citizenship. The last amnesty was Reagan’s.

Trump wants to seal the southern border, eliminate family connections as an immigration priority, and end birthright citizenship for those born to mothers illegally in the United States. Trump wants America to pick and choose its immigrants based on criteria such as job skills, willingness to invest, and background checks, rather than let countless migrants choose to move to America.

The Democrats don’t know what they want, but they desperately want Hispanics — the nation’s largest and fastest-growing minority — to vote for them, because they claim to have a humane and progressive immigration policy, whatever that means.

The same applies to other hot-button issues. Democrats want to expand health-care coverage to the 50 million or more Americans who currently have none. But they have no plan to pay for it, and the well-heeled party elites have shown no willingness to trade their own front-of-the-line health-care access for a more egalitarian system prioritized by need.

Democrats rail about Trump tax cuts for the richest and for corporations, but tax levels are at their lowest in a generation for the middle and working class. And no prominent Democrat is actually proposing tax hikes.

Instead, there are some bizarre schemes. Harris has a sweeping tax-credit proposal for lower- and middle-income families that would cost $2.8 trillion — yes, trillion — over the next decade, adding to an already unsustainable Trumpian national debt.

The dearth of Democratic ideas extends into foreign policy, as well. Would any Democratic hopeful dare suggest moving the U.S. embassy in Israel from Jerusalem back to Tel Aviv? Or a return to the hawkish standoff with North Korea, during which three presidents (two of them Democrats) huffed and puffed while the murderous Kim dynasty built an arsenal of nuclear warheads and the missiles needed to loft them across the Pacific?

Trump’s bellicose “America First” stance may offend multilateralists on the left, but Obama’s mantra of “Lead from Behind” manifestly failed in Syria and Ukraine.

Democrats may be embarrassed that Trump pulled out of the Paris Climate Accord, but will anyone running for the presidency propose a carbon tax? Or run on scrapping Trump’s tariffs on China? Or removing sanctions on Iran? Or telling NATO allies it’s OK; they can backslide to spending less on defence?

In 714 days, Americans will chose a president. Currently the economy is booming, unemployment is at a 50-year low, inflation is benign and serious crime continues a 20-year decline. Trump has all the advantages of an incumbent president, magnified by prosperity at home and peace abroad.

Democrats need far more than their anger over being beaten by a detestable and dishonest celebrity if they want to put one of their own in the Oval Office — or do anything worthwhile if they get there.

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