THE CURIOUS GAP BETWEEN THE PUNDITOCRACY AND THE UN-CONSULTED VOTER: THOUGHTS ON LAST NIGHT'S DEMOCRATIC DEBATE

Summary: Thursday night’s Democratic debate, the last in the hypertrophic Democratic primary campaign before the infamous Iowa caucuses, produced the usual gaggle of pundits and talking heads all trying to spin the results of last night’s debate in favor of which ever candidate any given pundit happened to support at that moment. Perhaps we, the unconsulted voters of the provinces, need to make our opinions known rather than assume that our opinions should be dictated by the chattering classes or the punditocracy, however well-meaning they may be.

If one thing was clear from last Thursday night’s Democratic debate, it was that Joe Biden has got his groove back. By contrast to the other six candidates on the stage, Uncle Joe came across as measured, experience, confident, and most of all, presidential. Given how the punditocracy has been so fond of assuming that the quondam Vice President would inevitably collapse, last night’s performance inevitably gave his supporters aid and comfort, boosting morale and improving his chances of victory in the unrepresentative, anti-democratic, racially problematic, Iowa caucuses.

Of course, we should also acknowledge a point made by Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar and South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg, that there is very much a double standard in place in the heavily gendered enterprise of political campaigning. Men, in short, are allowed, even expected, to behave like assholes, to flaunt their male privilege and not be called upon it. Women, on the other hand, can’t be sharp elbowed or pointed in their critiques without being accused of being hoydens, harridans, or harpies.

Neither Elizabeth Warren nor Amy Klobuchar have yet to accumulate the sheer credibility and clout of House Speaker Nancy D’Allesandro Pelosi, who because she is who she is, and because of her sheer political skill, gets to be sharp elbowed, pointed, and deeply critical without anyone daring to call her a hoyden, a harridan, or a harpy. In short, Nancy Pelosi is a diva, and if there is one rule for coming at a diva, very simply it is: don’t.

Moreover, gay men, who, Lindsey Graham notwithstanding, are not divas like the divine Miss Nancy, are often subject to the same kind of disability; a gay man who deploys sharp elbows or pointed language does so at the acknowledge risk of being called a drama queen or worse.

Nonetheless, when Elizabeth Warren came out swinging at Pete Buttigieg, unsurprisingly given his ascent to near front runner status in Iowa, Senator Warren, without realizing how much she was standing into danger, was foolish enough to sail right into a trap of her own making. With flags flying, sails billowing, and guns blazing, Senator Warren attacked Mayor Buttigieg for the manner in which Mayor Pete engages in campaign fund-raising.

Not to put too fine a point on it, Mayor Pete eviscerated Senator Warren in front of a substantial debate audience at Los Angeles’s Loyola Marymount University. Where Senator Warren had attempted to play the Bernie Sanders purity card, Mayor Pete noted, somewhat acerbically, that not only was he the least well-off of the candidates on the debate stage that night but also that Senator Warren was herself a millionaire, and that Senator Warren had used exactly the same kind of fundraising strategies in her Senate campaign as those for which she was criticizing Mayor Pete. For Senator Warren, her attack on Mayor Pete’s fundraising, while it may play well among the Sanders/Warren activist faction on Twitter, was, for most watchers, an unforced error that was, in effect, a double whammy.

For not only had Senator Warren attempted a sharp elbowed attack that would have garnered criticism even had she been a male candidate, but the double standard identified, ironically enough, by Mayor Buttigieg and Senator Klobuchar herself, worked to her and Senator Klobuchar’s additional disadvantage in that it opened her up to some highly gendered criticism from both sides of the political divide.

Amy Klobuchar did not fare much better against Mayor Pete. Indeed, Senator Klobuchar’s response to Mayor Pete can be described as being akin to the umbrageous response of a terribly grand French noblewoman of the ancien régime trying to swat down a brash, but savvy, peasant from the provinces.

Buttigieg’s criticism of the culture in Washington DC, and its frequent out-of-touchness with the lives of the unconsulted voters in “flyover country,” struck a nerve with Senator Klobuchar, though the criticism itself, aimed squarely at a singularly dysfunctional “Inside the Beltway” culture, was by no means unfounded or out of line. Indeed, having lived just over the Maryland line in the relatively affluent suburb of Bethesda, I know how alien the world beyond the Capital Beltway can seem to denizens of the District of Columbia or to those of us who lived within a mile of Westmoreland Circle. Buttigieg’s barb hit Senator Klobuchar dead amidships below the waterline, and it stung. The unbrageousness of Senator Klobuchar’s response, resembling also that of the commander of the besieged fortress hurling maledictions down upon the besieging troops, was testament to the correctness of Mayor Buttigieg’s criticisms.

And, like her senatorial colleague, Senator Klobuchar comes across, judged by that double standard as she is, as hoydenish, harridan-like, and harpyesque. Like Senator Warren, she stood into danger, sailing in to the attack with her own flags flying, sails billowing, and guns blazing, only to rip her keel out on the hidden rocks of Buttigieg’s response. The South Bend mayor may have been flustered, but he kept his cool, his composure, and his control. The “gay dude from Mike Pence’s Indiana” demolished, hopefully once and for all, the stereotype of the mincing, lisping, ineffectual, homosexual. If nothing else, Pete Buttigieg’s performance last night should have put paid to the idea that a gay man, at least an openly gay man, pace James Buchanan, cannot be president.

Of course, the right despises Pete Buttigieg because his existence is a living, breathing rebuke to their Bible brandishing invocation of Leviticus 18:22, and the semi-Marxist Sanders/Warren left wing of the Democratic Party, while often concealing their views behind anodyne, politically acceptable jargon, tends to share the Leninist/Soviet critique of homosexuality — particularly male homosexuality — as a bourgeois affectation by which queer men are held to lack the necessary strength and temper of the will to make the revolution and accomplish the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Off on the fringes of the debate, where the revolution was neither won nor lost, wealthy candidates Andrew Yang and Tom Steyer did little to move the needle for their campaigns. Though Yang possesses the saving grace of the deft touch of humor that seems to have rather disappeared from the hypertrophic Democratic campaign, his remarks could not escape a certain problematic quality. How much has to be offered to the American people to bribe them to vote for a particular candidate? Similarly, Tom Steyer failed to impress, either.

Which leaves us Bernard Sanders and Joe Biden.

It was hard not to get a little annoyed with Gospodin Sanders last night. Early on in the debate, waving his bony finger and raising his voice, the Independent Vermont Senator pronounced the US Mexico Canada free-trade agreement (also known as Child of NAFTA) as an “outrage.” Certainly, Gospodin Sanders seems to have bought entirely into the traditional Ming and Qing Dynasty concepts of trade being a privilege rather than the Western concept of trade being a right. Clearly, to the doctrinaire bloviating blowhard Burlington Bolshevik, the concept of the free movement of goods or services is “an outrage.”

But perhaps worse for Bernie is that his entire debate performance consisted of the same stump speech in answer to every single question put to him. At a certain point, a grim, prim, finger wagging, voice raised, doctrinaire delivery of the same “eat the rich, down with the billionaire class” screed begins to lose traction with all but the most hardened “progressive” Democrats. His propensity for interrupting bought him a wonderfully deft put down from Joe Biden, which had the salutary effect of shutting Bernie up for most of the rest of the debate.

And indeed, in this debate, Uncle Joe, whom so many people had been inclined to write off as being in some kind of political death spiral, showed that he had his groove back. He came across as prepared, confident, commanding, and above all, presidential. The way in which he put down Senator Sanders and his propensity for interruption demonstrated a kind of command of the debate stage that had not existed in the earlier cattle call debates.

In short, the nautical analogy of Joe Biden sailing through these debates like a great British three-decker line of battleship of the great blood and thunder Royal Navy days of Horatio Nelson, Samuel Hood, Cuthbert Collingwood or John Jarvis, first Earl St. Vincent still applies. Even more than in previous debates, Biden sailed through this one and, mirabile dictu, sustained no damage at all. The candidates who could have damaged him, most notably Kamala Harris, are gone now.

Subsequent events may prove me quite wrong, but I believe that if any candidate solidified his position last night, it was Uncle Joe, followed by Mayor Pete. Print me to suggest that what we may be seeing is less a primary among several possible viable Democratic contenders for the nomination then it is at this point a free-for-all audition to see who gets to be Joe Biden’s Vice President and who fills out the cabinet roster of his Heads of Department. A man whom that thing Donald Trump fears so badly that Trump is willing to risk his own impeachment to try to pressure one or more foreign governments in Kyiv and in Beijing into sabotaging that man’s candidacy is more than qualified to replace the criminal Donald Trump as President of the United States.

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Paul S. Marchand, Esq. Is an attorney who lives in Cathedral City, where he served as a member of the city Council for eight years. He practices law in the adjacent Republican retirement redoubt of Rancho Mirage. The views expressed herein are his own, and not necessarily those of the Biden campaign or of any other campaign. “Progressives” should get off their high horse.

HOW BERNARD SANDERS AND HIS REDELESS FOLLOWERS ARE POISONING THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY AND PAVING THE WAY FOR A SECOND TRUMP TERM

Summary: the doctrinaire cancer of purity testing and activist Leninism has begun to metastasize within the Democratic Party. The tone of the 2020 primary, like that of the 2016 primary, has been one of sneering, nastiness, pettiness, confrontation, condescension, and of sheer unwillingness on the part of a great many Democratic activists, particularly in the Sanders/Warren wing of the left side of the Party, to acknowledge that the sniping, the backbiting, and the propagandistic promulgation of a Sanders “we wuz robbed!” Dolchstoßlegende benefits no one except Donald Trump and his organized crime campaign.
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While I loathe the Russian/Republican Party, I can’t help but feel a certain measure of disdain and unease for my own Democratic Party.  Activists on the Sanders/Warren wing of the left side of the Democratic Party, not satisfied with relentlessly attacking current front runner Joe Biden have begun to fear the possible advent of a newer, younger, queerer possible front runner in the form of South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, on whom the vials of wrath and vitriol appear to have been well and truly opened.

This outpouring of what the Los Angeles Times today referred to as a “sneering tone,” of barely concealed anger at Mayor Buttigieg certainly puts one in mind of the sneering, misogynistic tone that Bernard Sanders and his redeless followers adopted toward former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton during the 2016 primary. The tone of the Sanders faction’s critique of Secretary Clinton was, to put it mildly, hateful, misogynistic, and steeped in male, Trumpian, privilege. Worse, the insistent Sanders "we wuz robbed" Dolchstoßlegende in which Sanders and his foolish followers claimed that they were deprived of the 2016 nomination through sharp practice at the DNC, benefited, and benefits, no one but Donald Trump. 

To put it bluntly, Bernard Sanders and his followers managed to inject a poison into the Democratic body politic in the 2016 primary cycle that has come back to haunt us in the 2020 cycle. That it is indeed a poisonous tone can be illustrated by the fact that the redelessly doctrinaire Sanders followers seemed to care not one whit that their confrontational, condescending, pugnacious, partisanship cost them friends within the Democratic Party and elsewhere.

 Indeed, we saw, throughout the 2016 election cycle, how not only did at least 15% of Sanders primary voters cast general election ballots for the unspeakable, soon-to-be impeached, Donald Trump, the Kremlin’s chosen candidate, but how even more of them eagerly and uncritically adopted the Trump-WikiLeaks-Kremlin narrative and talking points to attack Hillary, even after Secretary Clinton had clinched the nomination of her Party to be it standardbearer for the presidency of the United States. What we saw, in short, was a nasty case of sore-loserism, misogyny, and spite emanating from the Independent Vermont Senator and his hyperventilating followers. 

Now, with Pete Buttigieg rising in the polls and presumably siphoning off support from the sour, superannuated, shtetl Stalinist, the loudmouth Leninist loser, the blowhard bloviating Burlington Bolshevik Bernard Sanders, it is perhaps ineluctable that the vials of wrath and vitriol would again be opened. As much as the Sanders campaign in 2016 could justly be taxed with setting a bitter, divisive, misogynistic tone, in 2020 it can with equal justice be taxed with setting a bitter, divisive, Sanders- against-the-world tone that traffics in left bourgeois homophobia, left bourgeois misogyny, and (snortgiggle!) charges of ageism against Joe Biden, who is two years Bernard Sanders’s junior. 

And certainly, the Sanders campaign has managed to enlist the support of the default group of publications of the radical left. The Nation, once mordantly — and accurately — characterized by a Republican humorist P.J. O’Rourke as “that compendium of the snits and quarrels of the Old Left,” very publicly announced an “anti-endorsement” of the quondam Vice President.

Further into the realms of Marxist dialectic, the Intercept, Glenn Greenwald’s house organ for the traitor Edward Snowden, and the Marxist periodical Jacobin have both been banging the drums for Bernard Sanders quite loudly and insistently. Moreover, as Buttigieg has improved his standing in the polls, the Marxist magazines and “that compendium of the snits and quarrels of the Old Left” have fallen into lockstep to excoriate Mayor Pete for being, among others, insufficiently queer, too queer, too white, too privileged, too corporate, and just too much of everything that the doctrinaire left in this country despises. Even his relative poverty compared to the other Democratic candidates has been held against him. In all this, it’s not hard for a queer person to sense a kind of dog whistle homophobia. 

Of course, queerfolk are despised by both the hard right and the hard left. The hard right, waving their copies of the King James Bible, excoriates queerfolk on the strength of certain verses in Leviticus, on whose authority they seek to compass our vanishing. The hard left, for their part, tend to adopt the Marxist-Soviet critique of queerfolk as not having the strength of will necessary to help accomplish the dictatorship of the proletariat. (This, notwithstanding the fact that the first foreign affairs, commissar of the Soviet Union, Gyorgy Chicherin, was an openly queer man who accomplished a great deal in advancing the dictatorship of the proletariat.)

Either way, the right-bourgeois will treat queer folk as unspeakable and not to be received in a social setting. But at least with the right bourgeois, queerfolk know where they stand. It is with the left bourgeois that queer folk are perpetually uncertain; from the left bourgeois, such as Bernard Sanders or even Mark Zuckerberg, one can expect lip service to the idea of tolerance for queerfolk, but privately, when they think no one is listening, left bourgeois personages such as Gospodin Sanders or Gospodin Zuckerberg will privately assure their intimates that we are really not their kind, dear.

 What this means, in short, is the Democratic Party has allowed itself to imbibe, in full measure, the same poison that has so badly damaged its counterpart, the Republican Party. Bernard Sanders, for example, has much to account for with respect to the poisoning with Vermont’s nuclear waste of poor, politically powerless communities of color in Barnwell, South Carolina and Sierra Blanca, Texas. In neither case did Gospodin Sanders apparently bother to acquaint himself with the fact that the communities to be poisoned with Vermont’s toxic atomic detritus were in fact communities of color. When Gospodin Sanders took a shellacking in the 2016 primary elections in Georgia, Mississippi, and Alabama, largely because he had not connected with African-American voters in those states, he pooh-poohed the poll results in primitive, racially insensitive terms. Of course, we all know how Sanders and his redeless followers, together with WikiLeaks, that asset of the Russian state, travestied both Hillary and Chelsea Clinton in the most offensive, misogynistic terms imaginable.

And it is happening all over again.

An Internet meme of some vintage suggests:
“Dear Liberals and Independents,
In 2020 there will be a candidate competing against Donald Trump for President.

It is very likely this candidate:
    -Isn’t your first choice
    -Isn’t 100% ideologically pure
    -Has made mistakes in their life
    -Might not really excite you that much
    -Has ideas you may be uncomfortable with

Please start the process of getting over that shit now instead of waiting till 2020.”

 

Democrats need, indeed, to start getting over that shit now, rather than getting into an endless conniption over who is their first choice, who is 100% ideologically pure, who has a totally clean record, who excites one, and who is free from any discomforting ideas.

Our candidate will not be a Messiah. Our candidate may well be prone to gaffes, or have some blots on his or her legislative escutcheon. Shit, some of them may even have said "no" to a Girl Scout cookies salesgirl in 1983. As Democrats, we need to remember that even our heroes have feet of clay. We can’t afford the vain and frivolous luxury of purity tests or looking into a candidate’s distant past to find that one indiscretion which the Marxist left defines as disqualifying.

We are in the fight of our political lives against an incipient dictator. We can’t afford to fight from a crouch or allow ourselves to be washed away on waves of fear pee every time the Republicans and the Kremlin say “boo.” 

Instead, we must be guided by the advice that Sean Connery’s character tendered to Kevin Costner’s character in the 1987 remake of The Untouchables:

“They pull a knife, you pull a gun;
they send one of yours to the hospital, you send one of theirs the morgue!”

The vanity and frivolous luxury of ideological purity testing, heresy hunting, or being terrified of making a gaffe cannot be allowed to metastasize. We can’t afford the equally vain and frivolous luxury of Michelle Obama’s well-meaning but unacceptable counsel of going high when they go low.

Instead, we must be prepared to meet them in the basement with a switchblade. 

The future of the Republic demands from us a kind of steely, Bolshevik resolve, a willingness to be Stakhanovite, and the readiness (hopefully in a merely metaphorical sense) to kill or die in the service of vision of America that must not be allowed to waste away or be sacrificed on the altar of the Republican Party’s insensate desire for power.

Citoyens, la patrie est en danger!