It’s amazing, but once in a while, even the most partisan, hidebound politicians can be smacked in the face by reality — and smacked so hard, so repeatedly, that they are forced to admit that they fouled up. That’s what’s happening with a group of Senate Democrats, who are finally admitting that their party is responsible for the oozing sore that is our southern border.
This is known as belaboring the obvious.
Democratic senators are privately acknowledging that their party committed “political malpractice” by bungling the issue of border security, which they view as a driving factor behind President-elect Trump’s sweeping victory and their loss of four Senate seats.
Democratic senators had a long and intense conversation about what went wrong in this year’s election during a recent lunch meeting in the wood-empaneled Mansfield Room just off the Senate floor.
The “long and intensive” conversation about what went wrong with Democrats this year could have encompassed a level of time measured on the geologic scale; they could have saved time by noting what, for instance, the Harris campaign did right, a conversation that would encompass approximately six minutes, five minutes and 48 seconds of which could be spent discussing the vice president’s makeup artist.
One would expect, from long experience, that this group would engage in some serious departures from reality. The Democrat senators didn’t disappoint; they demonstrated some real blindness in examining the issues.
Senators at the meeting offered a variety of theories about why their party got routed on Election Day, despite what many of them see as President Biden’s impressive accomplishments and the strength of the economy.
Many Senate Democrats think that voters’ sour views about Biden’s record was driven by their anger over rising costs. That was probably the biggest factor behind Trump’s victory, they say.
Look at that first sentence; President Biden’s primary accomplishment these days lies in remaining upright, and he has had several recent well-publicized failures in even doing that. As for the “strength of the economy” — these senators have obviously been residing under a flat rock for the last four years, as interest rates have shot up, prices on everything from gasoline to eggs to automobiles have shot upwards, and, oh, yes, the border remains an unmitigated disaster.
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And, finally, some reality is setting in.
But there’s a growing feeling among Democratic lawmakers that the Biden administration completely mismanaged the huge surge of migrants across the southern border and that this also hurt their party dearly.
“We destroyed ourselves on the immigration issue in ways that were entirely predictable and entirely manageable. We utterly mismanaged that issue, including our Democratic caucus here,” one Democratic senator told The Hill.
And there’s the nub of the problem. The Democrats have spent the last four years assuring us the border was under control, that illegal immigrants were law-abiding people, that what President-elect Trump (never will get tired of that) was calling “migrant crime” was a figment of the former and future president’s imagination, despite the evidence of Laken Riley, Jocelyn Nungaray, Rachel Morin and the residents of a couple of apartment buildings in Aurora, Colorado.
The big question here is whether this sudden realization will translate into any changes for the Democratic Party’s platform. A good hard look at that party’s recent track record would indicate that their collective cognitive dissonance will continue — that’s a bit of good news for Republicans.
