By Matt Rooney | The Save Jersey Blog
At least until the email fiasco, Save Jerseyans, almost everyone talked about Hillary Clinton as inevitable in 2016.
In the clear light of day, one can’t help but wonder if that attitude had more to do with the Democrats’ bench problems than Hilldawg’s actual virtues?
Look back to last November. It’s easy to forget that President Obama hasn’t just weakened the nation as a whole both domestically and overseas, but he has also actively decimated the ranks of his own political party.
I’m not exaggerating. There are thousands fewer Dem elected officials today in this country than during the last days of the Bush Administration. Since taking office, President Obama has overseen the Democrats losing no less than 13 U.S. Senate seats, 69 House seats, 11 governor’s mansions, 30 state legislative chambers, and 913 state legislative seats. Republicans now enjoy their largest overall majorities since the 1920s, before the Great Depression and FDR, reversing a century of dominance in the relative blink of an eye.
How it happened is a complex question but none of the answers are flattering for the President.
Some of it is a matter of decades of electoral strategic design narrowing the Democrat Party’s appeal, albeit inadvertently. Esteemed American political handicapper Michael Barone recently discussed this very top and pointed out how “[t]he geographically clustered Obama coalition—blacks, Hispanics (in some states), gentry liberals—tends to elect officeholders with little incentive to compile records that would make them competitive in target states and capable of winning crossover votes.”
This phenomenon explains why the Democrat Party of the 1990s could come up with a moderate-ish candidate like Bill Clinton of Arkansas or even Al Gore of Tennessee while the current party would need to fall back on Massachusetts’s Elizabeth Warren (D-Cherokee Nation) or the kooky Martin O’Malley, both uncompromisingly far-left politicians from deep blue states. To the drive the point home, despite getting plenty of positive attention from the liberal media as of late, O’Malley oversaw a decline for his own state party in recent years, culminating in the 2014 election of a Republican governor (Larry Hogan).
Republicans, on the other hand, are about to field the strongest and most diverse field of viable presidential candidates… ever? And in every sense of the word. Chris Christie, Carly Fiorina, Ted Cruz, Ben Carson, Scott Walker… the GOP coalition is truly national again and penetrates all geographic, ethnic, and gender boundaries.
Of course, President Obama hasn’t helped these trends one iota. He’s exacerbated them. Unlike Bill Clinton, who for all his faults at the good sense to track to the center after getting his clock cleaned by Newt Gingrich in 1994, Barack doubled-down and dug in his heels behind a radical agenda centered upon the failed Obamacare experience and hallowing out our nation’s defense capabilities particularly in terms of the projection of power.
Could the GOP stumble in 2016 by mishandling its primary? Yes. Could a Democrat emerge from the wilderness and lead the party to salvation? Sure.
But legitimate possibilities aren’t the same thing as true likelihoods, Save Jerseyans, and if I was a betting man, I’d say the Democrat Party’s woes are likely to multiply before they ever get better thanks, ironically, to 70 years of short-sighted thinking and a President’s cult of personality that left no room for sustainable growth.
