I believe it was British prime minster Harold Macmillan, who served Her Majesty from 1957 to 1963, who said that a week in politics is a lifetime and a month in politics is an eternity. So the Democrats probably hope that, with Iowa, Trump's Senate acquittal, and his relatively good poll numbers (actually, it's only one poll, but let that pass) having smitten them last week, they can get all that behind them and look ahead.
Not so fast.
The Democratic Party is broken, and it can't just be fixed in a week. The damage from last week is too great and too obvious to paper over. This time two weeks ago, Nancy Pelosi was deemed one of the most effective tacticians in the history of Congress. This week, she's seen as a defensive old woman who was only too happy to give in to demands to impeach Trump despite knowing the eventual outcome and knowing that the Ukraine affair would be followed by Trump shaking down China, Turkey, the Czech Republic, or maybe even East Timor if he thought it would help him get dirt on Democratic candidates in the presidential election - and then have a paper-tearing tantrum when she realized she'd blown it. Perhaps her biggest mistake was to work with Trump in getting a revised trade deal with Mexico and Canada to prove that the Democrats can still work to improve people's lives while still pursuing impeachment. Despite changes that helped workers and increased the required domestic content of U.S.-made automobiles, Trump ended up taking all of the credit for it and did not invite a single Democrat to the deal's signing ceremony. Freshman House Democrats who won their seats in districts that Trump had carried in 2016, including my own congresswoman, find themselves, according to a couple of polls, now on the verge of being thrown out in November by Trumpers who are pissed off at them for supporting impeachment. And the latest Senate forecasts now give a slight edge to the Republicans for keeping their majority and Mitch McConnell keeping his seat in particular. It was McConnell himself who pointed that out. Speaking of McConnell, the Democratic effort to brand him as an obstructionist for refusing to allow Senate votes for popular bills the Democratic House has passed has won no brownie points for Pelosi and her leadership team.
The Democratic Party is on life support now. Unless Democratic candidates for President and for state and local offices can focus on issues having nothing to do with impeachment, like health care and education, and unless they're willing to acknowledge the robust economy while still insisting that they can deliver more prosperity to more people - the people so far left out of the Trump economic juggernaut - they could lose everything in November. Not just the Presidency, but the House of Representatives and a chance to retake the Senate. And with Trump still in office in 2021, the Supreme Court could swing solidly to the right with the already rightward swing in the federal courts being further strengthened. And it's a safe bet that if the Democrats fall from power nationally, their hold on state and local offices could collapse as well. That will be it. That will really . . . be . . . it.
Trump won't have to get a Republican Congress to abolish opposition parties with a national emergency as an excuse because the Democrats will have already disintegrated.
If last week's events can be compared to a car getting stuck in the snow, then the present time is about getting that car out of the snow so the Democrats can resume their journey to their intended destination, which is the White House. That effort begins today, ironically, in the snows of New Hampshire with the presidential primary.
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