The End of the Democrats

It happened.  Mary Landrieu was voted out of the U.S. Senate in her runoff election with Republican William Cassidy in Louisiana.  Cassidy has promised to fight President Obama's policies.  Well, of course he has; he's  Republican, and the President is a Democrat.  I couldn't find too many Democrats, though, who promised to fight for President Obama's policies.  They were too busy running away from him.  Landrieu tried to make her support for the Keystone XL pipeline, not the Democratic agenda, the centerpiece of her re-election bid, and the strategy blew up in her face.  Had the runoff election in Louisiana decided which party would have controlled the Senate, I would have encouraged my distant cousins in Louisiana (I'm not kidding, there are apparently a lot of people named Maginnis in the Pelican State, and I'm probably related to more than a few of them) to vote for her, if only to guarantee Harry Reid the deciding vote to keep him in as Majority Leader, but the Senate was already lost to the Republicans.  I say it's better that Louisiana have a real Republican representing it in the Senate than a fake Democrat.  So I'm glad she's gone.

On a broader point, I'm looking forward to when the whole Democratic Party is gone.  The party is incapable of either pushing a progressive agenda or sticking to its principles.  I am calling for anyone who donates time and money to the Democrats to stop doing so.  The party must be forced into extinction so that a real progressive party can replace it.  To wit:  The Democratic Party is a tickle of ineptitude on the belly of the American body politic.  It must be scratched.

When James Kunstler said that President Obama resembled Millard Fillmore, the thirteenth U.S. President, more than Abraham Lincoln, he meant that, like Fillmore, Obama has made several accomplishments but is still a mediocre President because of what he hasn't accomplished or what he hasn't been able to accomplish.  But I see Obama as a twenty-first-century Fillmore for an additional reason.  He is likely to be the last President of a party running on fumes and heading into the next presidential election with an underwhelming nominee.  The Whig Party in 1852 was a party of aging and tired leaders - two of them, Henry Clay and Daniel Webster, died that year - with diminished congressional caucuses  and with no authoritative voice on the issue of the most divisive issue of the day, slavery.  Similarly, the Democrats go into 2016 with diminished congressional caucuses and an aging leadership - its next generation snuffed out in the 2014 midterms - and no clear answer to the most divisive issue of our day . . . economic inequality.  (Some say it's immigration that's the most divisive issue today, but let that pass.)  In response to their survival crisis, the Whigs turned to that old tried-and-true parlor trick for the presidential election on 1852 - nominate a war hero, in this case, Winfield Scott.  Why not, it worked twice before for them.  The Democrats, in desperation, are about to pull a tried-and-true parlor trick of their own for the presidential election of 2016 - nominate a Clinton.  And if Hillary Clinton loses in 2016, as Winfield Scott lost to Franklin Pierce in 1852, then the Democratic party is as good as dead.  It would be poetic justice if Hillary ended up losing to Jeb Bush, whose mother is a fourth cousin four times removed of . . . Franklin Pierce.

There's no good news for Republicans in this scenario, by the way.  The election of Democrat Franklin Pierce as President in 1852 may have finished off the Whig Party but it accelerated the decline and disunion of the Democratic Party, which a new upstart party called the Republicans exploited in getting Abraham Lincoln elected President in 1860.  The Democrats were in the wilderness for decades after the Civil War.  If the Republicans of today, faction ridden and also in decline, continue on the same course that the Democrats followed in the 1850s, a new progressive party might up-end the GOP in a future presidential election . . . on the eve of another grave crisis threatening the nation's survival, possibly some time just before or just after the nation's quarter-millennial (250th) anniversary in 2026.

Whatever the future of the United States is, the Democrats are not likely to be a part of it.  And the Republicans' role in the future will not be a good one for them or the country.  Nothing short of a new progressive party can turn things around.