AND THE BLAME GAME WINNER IS ... By Jim Kent

At the moment, there is a fairly strong likelihood that The Aged Incumbent will not be re-elected in November. The Democrats will vigourously put forth several nominees for Whose Fault It Was. There will be nobody innocent among these, but none of them will have been the real problem.

First, of course, the Ds will blame M. Petits-Doigts. Might as well try--he is arguably the most loathsome human being ever to step foot into the White House, beating the stiff competition from both Andrew Js—but he is not the one who will have made the Ds lose this election.

The press will be a strong contender on account of giving up actual news so they could go to All Trump All The Time. They are not the primary cause either, though.

If Little Bobby Kennedy pulls a substantial percentage in one or more key states, he’ll be a popular favourite for the Ralph Nader Trophy.  Not him, either.

The general run of perfectly awful Republicans will have done their bit, aided by the press permitting my party’s frothing reactionaries to call themselves conservatives.  However, history will notice that they were just the Greek chorus in the whole show.

Almost no matter what goes on in the courts, the Ds will undertake to pin the disaster on the legal system (which nobody should ever call the “justice system” because it’s not).  But the judges did not appoint themselves to the bench, nor generally pretend to be philosophically disposed any way other than how they’ve acted.

Finally, losers try to blame the voters for not being bright enough to support them.  This is just silly, and is an argument usually advanced by folks who are afraid to disclose that they really don’t know how elections work in a democracy.  

No, if this loss occurs—or even if the Ds lose just one chamber of the Congress—the blame will rest squarely and unambiguously on the Democratic Party of the United States. Since before the campaign started, commentators have been saying that this election is the Democrats’ to lose.  Lately, however, nobody has remarked on the lengths the Democrats are going to so that this outcome is eminently foreseeable.

Start with the fact that they are running the most unpopular ticket anybody can remember. The only Democratic politician in the US polling worse than the Aged Incumbent is the hapless Veep. This has been obvious for quite a while now, and the Big Kahunas in the party should have taken this pair aside long ago and told them to announce their overwhelming desire to spend more time with their respective families. 

The Aged Incumbent has had a long and reasonably distinguished career in public service, but risks going out as a punch line. Presumably the senior grownups in his party just didn’t want to hurt his feelings. This, by the way, is the reason why the Olde White Guys in my party don’t want to stand up to M. Petits-Doigts. And it could end up just as badly.

During the 2020 campaign, the guy hinted broadly that he wouldn’t run for re-election but would step aside for somebody less creaky. Several presidents have apparently said this, some of them being VPs who took office when the Prez died, but so far I have located only two others who honoured their ostensibly voluntary pledges not to run again.  These were James K. Polk and Rutherford B. Hayes, whose nominations and elections were pretty divisive, what with one thing and another. 

So, you start with an Olde White Guy who decides to run again after he said he wouldn’t. And now he’s trying to pretend he’s not actually old. “Age is just a number” is among the stupidest sentences anyone can utter, and he’s taken it up. Income is just a number; height is just a number; blood pressure is just a number; batting average is just a number. They are not, however, numbers randomly assigned with no real-world implications. 

It is rare indeed for a person of eighty to have the same mastery of—oh, just about anything—as they did when they were forty or fifty or seventy, and to pretend otherwise insults everyone’s intelligence (also just a number, although rather less precise than some of the others). So, he couldn’t let go and nobody in the party seems inclined to make him let go, and the rest of us may end up footing the political and social and economic bills.

Meantime, he has done nothing to build up the reputation of the Vice, instead giving her the traditional ceremonial duties relegated to US Vice-Presidents. And she seems to be unable or unwilling to establish a separate and maybe even interesting incapable identity, so her star is not about to start shining brightly either. 

A great many people, rationally, expect the next elected President to take the Endless Nap before 2028, so you’d think somebody would be paying close attention to the heirs apparent. The Aged Incumbent is apparently sticking with his current loser, and the Prince of Orange will doubtless find somebody worse. (For a while, I thought Governor Noem might be the front-runner, but she literally doesn’t have a dog in that fight anymore.) We’ll see, but the current VP is a drag on an already overburdened ticket.

If Old Joe weren’t the candidate, Hunter’s laptop would go away, and so would Afghanistan, and inflation, and Gaza. My gang of churls and liars would of course come up with other bloviations about the eventual D candidate, but they’d have to think up some new stuff. That would at least take some time, and would meanwhile relieve the Ds of much baggage.  As long as they don’t go with Harris, that is.

Besides running with the wrong ticket, the Ds are resolutely running the wrong campaign. They seem to think they can frighten the voters better than my lot can, but they can’t. 

Anyway, that’s not how Democrats win elections. They don’t even win by making sure they get credit for stuff they’ve already accomplished.  They win through campaigns that paint a plausibly optimistic picture of Life Under The Democrats. Think FDR whose 1932 campaign song was “Happy Days Are Here Again” although they palpably weren’t; or JFK’s relentless emphasis on how young and cool he was despite being only four years younger than Nixon; or the hope-oriented slogans of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. 

Instead, President Eeyore is trying to sell his past record, which is admirable but in the past so it only accentuates his age, and dread of Trump, which is appropriate but people are frankly tired of it. And instead of talking about what the Democratic Party will do if you fill Washington with its adherents, he still talks about what he will do. He really needs to push the down-ticket Ds, and stop promising what he’ll do—with the unspoken provisos, “if I don’t die” and “even if don’t have Congress.”

Then of course there are the impending “debates” in whatever misbegotten format they end up with. Should be truly terrifying.

Look, this election shouldn’t even be close.  The Democratic party, doddering forward under the Aged Incumbent, have not given the press anything to write about, nor voters anything to look forward to. So, we get nonstop Trump bulletins, interspersed with occasional dispatches from Little Bobby’s band of merrymakers—who by the way would have sunk with barely a trace if the Ds had anything newsworthy to say.

At this point, there’s probably nothing to be done beyond offering up thoughts and prayers, an approach that has been signally ineffective in gun control and violence reduction.

So, if the US and the rest of the world get saddled with Mr. Tangerine Man again, let’s make sure the blame lands where it belongs: with the party that gave the election away, and the Olde White Guy for whom votes may be just a number.