Feeling a bit confused after the Democratic National Convention?
Let’s see. We have a completely undistinguished liberal hack senator with virtually no accomplishments on his Congressional résumé, who is completely lacking in charisma, but is married to a billionaire, who made her money the really old fashioned way—she inherited it. He is anti-war and anti-defense, but is staking his candidacy on what is now being exposed as a phony claim to war heroism—and all this to a group of people, everyone of whom (himself included) opposed the war in Vietnam, and despise all things military anyway. His running mate is a jumped-up pretty boy plaintiff’s lawyer, who resides in that special group that even plaintiff’s lawyers hate—junk science-enhanced medical case exploitation.
The veep candidate is worth more than $50 million while the presidential candidate is married to the Heinz fortune. Even though George W. is by far the poorest of the field, it is the Dem candidates who are claiming that they speak for the common man.
Nearly all the speeches were the same old dreck about power to the people, the most hilarious moment coming when one of the useful idiots complained about urban inner-city schools, apparently forgetting or not even caring that every inner city and every large education establishment has been under Democratic control for at least 30 years. But, they can keep talking this way, since the Blacks and Hispanics don’t seem to notice or care either.
And then you have the royal reception given to Jimmy Carter and Michael Moore. If this peanut brain from Georgia had one scintilla of decency, he would be ashamed to show his face. He of the 19% interest rates, and he who empowered Islamist terrorism, by standing by slack-jawed and shell-shocked through nearly all of the Iran hostage crisis, which itself was caused by Carter not supporting the Shah. And then, when he finally mustered the cojones to do something, the military was in such disrepair that they couldn’t even get two helicopters to a single destination.
Some day, someone will have to explain how this former segregationist state senator and a fat slob barely competent film maker who loves the Palestinians, and hates Israelis can appeal to most Jews. I bet even FDR himself wouldn’t have believed that his unbeatable coalition of union members, urban ethnics, immigrants, pensioners, academics, and entertainment industry morons (minus the South, of course) would still be delivering for the dear old donkey party.
And who can forget Bill Clinton? He of the “good economy” that was nothing more than a latter-day tulip craze induced stock run-up, that also had a terrible run-down, including the worst deal in the history of commerce—the AOL Time Warner merger.
But, Dem disasters are hardly anything new, and the identification with the common man does go back to Andrew Jackson, a legit war hero, born in poverty. How, you might ask, did this party go from the likes of its founder Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe to our current brood of vipers?
Well, there was slavery, you see…
At the 1860 Dem convention, there was a split between the Northern and Southern Democrats over a rather subtle distinction. The Northern group (calling themselves the Democrats) nominated Stephen Douglas, while the Southern group (the “National Democrats”) nominated John Breckinridge. Both groups were cool with slavery (as were even the Republicans—at least for the South), but the Douglas faction wanted popular elections in the territories to determine if they would be slave or free, while the Breckinridge faction just wanted slavery legal everywhere all the time.
As it turned out, Breckinridge garnered 72 electoral votes to Douglas’ pitiful 12, and Lincoln scored an electoral landslide with 180. Based on the much larger population in the North, even if the Dems had not split, they could never have defeated Lincoln. Still, given the Civil War and Radical Reconstruction—Republican-inspired (or at least Lincoln-inspired) policies—the South remained strongly Democratic until the 1960’s.
From 1860-1908, the Dems only secured the presidency via Grover Cleveland, and he was the most conservative Dem of all time. The party’s resurgence occurred under ardent racist Tommy Woodrow Wilson, even if it took 467 ballots at the national convention to nominate him. By then, it was all about faux populism and the “little guy.” But, it was not until the Great Depression, and FDR’s crushing defeat of Hoover in 1932, that the Dem policies would be firmly entrenched: identifying victims, and promoting the government as the solution to all problems. Ironically, about the only federal program that actually did any good during the Depression was Hoover’s Reconstruction Finance Corporation.
During the 1932 campaign, Hoover tried to depict Roosevelt as an extremist who would bring ruin to the country. Given the proliferation of domestic socialism, and the outcome of World War II, that energized Communism for another 44 years, he was right, of course. Too bad that a Left-tilting news media, educational system, and pop culture spun the truth, and transformed a nation of self-reliant can-do individuals into a spoiled bunch of victims, dilettantes, ward heelers, idolaters, and pampered misfits.
Not exactly what Jefferson had in mind.