Welcome to the (Brain) Deado-cratic Party

Brian Schatz: OMG! He's liberal and wins!

Here’s what happened on November 4: the Democrats got their proverbial clocks cleaned. It was a GOP rout—an old-fashioned, ass-kicking, beat-down, barnyard whupping.  Here’s what should happen next: the Democratic Party should reinvent itself and jettison the pandering centrists whose shrill voices signify nothing. Here’s what will happen: the party bigwigs will talk about the need to move more to the center to attract the “middle class.” (That group of Americans was pretty much rendered defunct by class warfare in the 1980s.)  In other words, let’s have more Hillary Clinton and less Elizabeth Warren.

If there is a less imaginative group of people than the Democratic National Committee please don’t tell me about them. There is great handwringing over the Democratic “loss” of the U.S. Senate, a load of hooey as the Democrats didn’t control that body on November 3. That “control” rested on a handful of Republicans masquerading as Democrats. In 2014, they lost to actual Republicans. Don’t take my word for it, look at the data.

As you might expect, conservative think tanks keep track of the most liberal members of Congress. Check out the voting records compiled by the National Journal, which counts the Heritage Foundation among its supporters. Now compare them to Tuesday’s results. Using their data from 2013, here are a list of incumbent “Democrats” that lost on Tuesday; the percentage following their names represents their support for conservative issues as interpreted by the National Journal: Mark Pyror (Arkansas, 54%), Max Baucus (Montana, retired when polls went south, 42%); Mark Begich (Alaska, 45%), Kay Hagan (North Carolina, 51%), and Mark Udall (Colorado, 30%). Come Louisiana’s run-off you can add Mary Landrieu (42%) to the list. The only person on this list that could remotely considered liberal was Mark Udall, who simply didn’t get out the Hispanic vote needed to keep his seat.

Now let’s look at who did win and how often they supported conservative issues:

               

                Brian Schatz (Hawaii, 11.8%) –reelected with 70% of the vote

                Al Franken (Minnesota, 14%)

                Jack Reed (Rhode Island, 16%)

                Tom Udall (New Mexico, 28%)

                Chris Coons (Delaware, 30%)

                Jeff Merkley (Oregon, 32%)

                Jeanne Shaheen (New Hampshire, 33%)

The numbers are pretty clear­—Democrats who had principles won; with the exception of Mark Udall, those who acted like Republicans lost. Want more evidence of why it would be suicide for Democrats to move to the middle? The National Journal also ranks the “most moderate” members of the US Senate. Guess who was smack dab in the middle, the very model of non-partisanship? Soon-to-be ex-Senator Kay Hagan.

Will the Democrats get the message? Of course they won’t! They’ll continue to tell us of how Barack Obama was misunderstood or stymied at every step by evil Republicans. (It couldn’t be because he’s an empty suit devoid of leadership skills, could it?) They’ll wax nostalgic for the greatest “Democratic” Republican of all time: Bill Clinton. They’ll salivate when Wal-Mart Hillary stops her endless political striptease and announces she’s running in 2016. She might actually win, given that the current GOP presumptives are crazier than an asylum during a Thorazine shortage.

Democratic voices will be shrill and they will signify nothing. Will they speak on behalf of working people? Heaven forbid! They’d be accused of fomenting “class warfare.” Funny, Bernie Sanders always says the real class warfare is that perpetuated by Wall Street upon American workers and the only way the GOP will ever get his seat is when he shuffles off this mortal coil. Will Democrats go into black and Hispanic communities and tell them that the GOP is racist? Shudder! That would lose the “middle class” vote—read suburban white bigots. Will they talk about the free trade fraud that steals American jobs and saddles American children with crippling national debt? Nope—they’ll talk about the need for Social Security reform instead. Will they ask why the hell American kids are dying in places populated by Islamic lunatics that we ought to allow to rot in their own rubbish? Oh no, mustn’t offend our “military families.”

And the only Democrats that will excite anyone are the Elizabeth Warren types. Who can blame voters for ignoring the incumbents who lost? If act like a Republican, why not vote for a real one? If you take a path down the middle like Hagan, you’re just not paying enough attention to warrant it from voters. Remember what Bob Dylan wrote: “You don’t need to be a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing.” But first you have to open the window!