Stupidity As A Way of Life: Why The Democrats Will Lose In 2008

Humorist Dave Barry once guessed that there was a huge, secret “stupid ray” beamed at the White House. Barry said this, because throughout recent history, while the men who have attained the Oval Office have all been intelligent, thoughtful men, at some point all of them have said or done moronic things, so often that one begins to wonder about the cause. If such a beam exists, however, it would appear that its scope has increased. My case for today is that the Democrats, having regained control of both the House and Senate and enjoying good prospects for the Presidential race in 2008, appear to have arranged a meeting, wherein they agreed to compel their candidates to abandon reasoned debate and constructive planning, in favor of screeching hate speech and mindlessly rehashing of long-dead feuds. Having done their utmost to defeat our troops fighting in Iraq, the Democrats appear to be embracing defeatism in every aspect of their decisions.

It may come as a shock to Democrats to learn that President George W. Bush will not, in fact, be running again in 2008. I should not be surprised that the Democrats’ comprehension of the U.S. Constitution is so poor, given their illucid interpretation on what sort of rights Americans enjoy, indeed even who should be considered an American. Yet even so, it is remarkably thick-headed to establish the base issue of your campaign against the one person you know will not be an opponent. The utter hysteria of Bush-Hate which pervades every major campaign among Democrats, will prove in the end to be a waste of attention and noise, and drives away more reasonable voters than it gains by appeasing the vicious extremists on the Left. Not merely because the Democrats have forgotten that 62 million voters supported Bush in the 2004 election, but also because most Americans have an innate sense of balance, and when a major political party adopts the stance of its most vicious fanatics a lot of folks are going to balk.

The next point is Iraq. Democrats have a bad habit of lying, you know. They say they support the troops (Don’t question their patriotism!), but they won’t let them do their job. They had the same information as President Bush and in large numbers voted to approve military action in Iraq, yet they now want to pretend they were “misled”. They agreed, almost to a man, that a specific timetable for withdrawal from Iraq would only help the terrorists win, yet that is precisely what they voted for this week. So it should come as no surprise, that Democrats have also been lying to themselves about Iraq. They have told themselves that abandoning Iraq will somehow improve our allies’ confidence in our commitment and responsibilities. They have told themselves that the most outrageous lies screamed by Leftist extremists are somehow the national sentiment. They have told themselves that the 2004 election they lost was not about Iraq, while the 2006 election they won was clearly a referendum on Iraq. And now they believe that attacking America’s goals and work in the war in Iraq is somehow going to impress the mainstream voter in America, and that vicious attacks on Republican candidates because of Iraq will be the way to gain the public trust. This particular conceit is a bad decision, for many reasons, but the obvious fact lost on the Democrats is that conditions in Iraq a year from now, and the relevance of that issue to the 2008 election will be very different then than it is now. The Democrats’ plan to focus attention to Iraq is therefore desperate and ill-considered, since it is unlikely that conditions will gravitate towards an optimal result by chance. If things in Iraq succeed, Democrats may suffer from their obvious attempts to derail U.S. efforts now. If things in Iraq fail, however, the current defeatism by the Left may also come back to haunt them. This is not to say that Republicans are doing everything right or that Iraq will not present problems for them as well politically, but the Republicans have not set Iraq as their base issue, nor are the leading 2008 candidates other than McCain seen as directly linked to the Iraq war. The Democrats have signed on, therefore, to a high-risk-low-yield gamble.

Up next, poor math skills. The two leading Democrats in the ‘I Wanna Be President’ rally, 2008 edition, are Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. The reasons these two lead the pack are varied, but one important reason often cited by “strategists” is that Hillary and Barack hail from states with large Electoral Vote counts. This is true, but really, does anyone expect the Democrats to lose either New York or Illinois? If not, why emphasize those states when the last several elections have shown that other states, specifically those in the Midwest and South, are often more critical battlegrounds. Yet we see Hillary and Barack continue to push as if they would win the nation by winning their “home” states, even though it should be obvious that what sells in New York may fail in Florida, that what people in Illinois find right on the mark, may not be anywhere close to what people in Missouri expect. For all the best evidence that winning the election comes down to winning the 270 Electoral Votes threshold, there is scant attention in the Left to battlegrounds of historical significance. At first glance, the Republican candidates may appear to be making the same mistake, yet all of the GOP candidates seem to me to have noted salient issues on more levels than the Democrats have cared to do. And the field of Republicans in the race is far more varied in state size and regional source than the Democrats can claim.

That’s not to say, of course, that the Republicans have locked up the 2008 election. Republicans have said and done any number of stupid, venal things (yes McCain, that includes you!), and it’s likely that more than one leading Republican will destroy his POTUS chances through sheer arrogance (yes McCain, even you), but in the main it appears that the Democrats have been working far more feverishly at trying to lose. The “leadership” we have seen from Pelosi, Reid, and Dean, the absolute ignorance of Middle America by the likes of Clinton and Edwards, and the spirit of Class Warfare embraced by the core decision-makers at the DNC, combine to make it all too simple for any reasonable person to reject the Jackass in ’08, even if that means accepting a certain amount of pachyderm poop (yes McCain, that includes you).