Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) speaks during a Jan. 29 news conference on President Trump’s executive order temporarily barring entry to the United States for refugees and citizens from seven Muslim-majority counties. (Bryan R. Smith/Agence France-Presse via Getty Images)
The Democrats are babbling and discouraged. Specifically,
Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) is babbling, and Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.)
is in tears. They are feeling the impact of their 2016 losses more acutely now
than they did in November, as the full limits and consequences of their
powerlessness are on full display.
The Democratic Caucus is pointlessly attempting to slow
the confirmation of President Trump’s Cabinet picks, including boycotting this
morning’s Senate Finance Committee votes on Rep. Tom Price (R-Ga.) and Steve
Mnuchin and the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee vote on Scott
Pruitt. Ouch.
How bad do you think the Republican members of those
committees felt about the Democrats not showing up? Finance Committee Chairman
Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) offered his tight analysis to reporters: “Well, they
are idiots.”
And even the Democrats’ vow to stop Trump from filling
the “stolen” Supreme Court seat is not exactly off to a strong start. Politico
reports, for instance, that “at least seven Democratic senators have signaled
an openness to having a committee vote” on the nominee, the eminently qualified
Judge Neil Gorsuch.
I think the Democrats still feel they have to try to
rally against Gorsuch. Given his qualifications, temperament and record, that
won’t be easy. But what else are the Democrats going to do?
What makes things even harder for the Democrats is the
sheer volume of news that happens on a daily basis in Trump World. The news
cycle has been compressed.
Even after the firestorm of protests and outrage over the
weekend, most people have already moved on from Trump’s executive orders on
immigration, and we don’t know what the torrent of news will be in 24 hours.
The Democrats just can’t get their act together. They
have a number of problems; specifically, they don’t have a message or an effective
messenger. They are rapidly becoming an anti-white, anti-capitalism party, and
they can’t seem to get their footing with any tactical plan.
Even when they try to channel their outrage into a public
event, their efforts flop.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) sounded like a spokeswoman for an old Verizon ad campaign.
At the Democrats’ protest over Trump’s immigration
orders, a rally on the steps of the Supreme Court on Monday night, led by Schumer
and Pelosi, Pelosi — after a toe-curling, awkward few moments where she tried
to make sense of the sound system — turns to Schumer and is caught on the mic
saying, “I want to introduce the real people. I’ll do the real people now.”
But the “real people” were nowhere to be found — kind of
like the swing-state Democratic voters who have been missing since October.
Anyway, when you see a Democratic leader on camera
surrounded by a crowd, you can’t help but get the sense that if you filtered
out the government employees and those who don’t pay federal taxes, those
Democrats would be left standing on stage by themselves.
Obviously, this is one isolated clip, but it reinforces
where the Democrats are less than two weeks into Trump’s first term.
The Republicans and the White House may need to tweak
some of their processes and reconfigure some of their messaging, but the
Democrats need a whole new playbook.
Ed
Rogers is a contributor to the PostPartisan blog, a political consultant and a
veteran of the Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush White Houses and several
national campaigns. He is the chairman of the lobbying and communications firm
BGR Group, which he founded with former Mississippi governor Haley Barbour in
1991.
