No Irish (Or Other White) Guys Need Apply

Somewhere along the way, the Democratic Party came to bear an unsettling resemblance to twenty-first-century popular music; there's little if any room for white guys with guitars.

There ain't much room for white guys without guitars, either.  Joe Biden notwithstanding, the leading candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020 are white women and people of color, as if the Democratic Party base decided that another white-boy nominee is as old-fashioned and as offensive as classic-rock radio.  And that's not good news for someone like Martin O'Malley, who had enough trouble being taken seriously as a presidential contender back in 2016.  This past week, at the utterly pointless Brett Kavanaugh hearings, Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats grilled the Supreme Court nominee over his views and his past in the George Walker Bush White House, and though white guys like Patrick Leahy of Vermont and Richard Durbin of Illinois joined in the fun, Cory Booker and New Jersey and Kamala Harris of California  were the top grandstanders.  Their high-profile questioning of the hapless Kavanaugh, though, had less to do with undermining his confirmation - which is going to happen, boys and girls, and as he is my age, Kavanaugh will be on the Court for as long as both of us are on this planet - than with shoring up their presidential ambitions.

O'Malley is shoring up his own presidential ambitions by building up the party with his Win Back Your State PAC - doing the work the Democratic National Committee should have been doing for the past decade - but no one seems to care in part because he's a white guy.  And even had he been elected to the Senate from Maryland in 2016 (which was a possibility open to him) and were on the Senate Judiciary Committee grilling his fellow Irish Catholic homey Kavanaugh with the same gusto as Booker or Harris, his race and his sex would likely still have disqualified him for the Presidency among the "political correctness" (PC) crowd in the Democratic base.  Not to mention his religion, as the Church isn't very popular these days thanks to the ongoing sex-abuse scandal.  His guitar hobby, of course, is the ultimate deal-breaker among EDM-loving progressives.  Even his Irishness, an Irishness as deep as and as obvious as any Irish pol since John F. Kennedy or Richard J. Daley - maybe more so,  since neither Kennedy nor Daley were known for reading Yeats or singing a Clancy Brothers tune in public - doesn't inoculate him from charges of being too white.

And this disinterest in white guys among Democrats doesn't stop with the Presidency.  I have already noted the fall of Representative Joe Crowley (D-NY) in a U.S. House primary to Puerto Rican progressive challenger Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez this past June.  Last week, in Massachusetts, Democratic Italian-American Representative Mike Capuano, who is as far to the left as any Democrat in Congress today, and holds the House seat once occupied by John F. Kennedy, Tip O'Neill, and Kennedy's nephew Joe Kennedy II, lost his primary to black female Democrat Ayanna Pressley.  His failure? Simply being a non-Hispanic white guy in a district in which non-Hispanic whites are now outnumbered by everyone else.  Pressley said it was time for the district to have someone who looked like the majority of its constituents representing them in Congress, though by that criterion, Barack Obama should never have been President because a white majority still held nationwide in the span of his two terms.  But there's very little logic in identity politics, in which the conversation topic switches from something that concerns all of us, like infrastructure and health care, to something that only concerns some of us.  I reiterate: Take care of the issues affecting all of is, and the issues that affect some of us will take care of themselves. Universal health care means equal health care for everyone, be it white men, black women, or the children they sire together. ;-)

And again: If either Jack or Bobby Kennedy were alive today, they could never win the Democratic presidential nomination thanks to the narrow-mindedness of the party's PC crowd.  Though, I have to admit that this whole thing about presidential candidates reflecting the Democrats' and the country's "diversity" has a powerful appeal, especially when you realize that buttons from the campaign of the last successful white male Democratic presidential candidate are more than twenty years old.

No, white guys will never experience the discrimination other people do, but does that make Clarence Thomas a worthier Supreme Court justice than Stephen Breyer?  Or Tim Scott a better senator than Sherrod Brown?  I'd like to think that a white guy like Martin O'Malley has something to offer that can make America sane again, like all-payer health care or modernizing Amtrak - or even his green-energy plan and how to make environmentally friendly energy profitable . . . and give the term "green energy" a double meaning.

And though my shared Irish heritage with O'Malley has long motivated me to support his presidential ambitions - identity politics of my own, I'm not going to lie, that's a part of it - I am supporting his presidential ambitions for 2020 for the same reason I supported them in 2016 and for the same reason I voted for Barack Obama in the New Jersey presidential primary in 2008.  That is, I'm simply supporting the person I feel is the best candidate for the Presidency.  No one else impresses me, and that includes Joe Biden. I gotta tell you, though, I don't like the idea of a honky like me being written off by the Democratic base just because he's a honky.  The Democratic Party doesn't care about me because I'm a white male, and the Republican Party doesn't want me because I'm a liberal - my oh my, what is a white male liberal to do?  And I'm just a voter.

On the other hand, in Delaware, white male Democratic Senator Tom Carper just successfully fended off a primary challenge from a black female opponent in his bid for re-election.  And in Texas, white male Democrat Robert "Beto" O'Rourke is within striking distance of unseating not-Latino-enough incumbent Republican Senator Ted Cruz.  Both of which I take to mean that some Democrats aren't ready to throw the baby out with the bathwater just yet.