by George Rasley
The official entry into the Democratic Party’s presidential sweepstakes of former Vice President Joe Biden means the two leading presidential candidates of the party of “woke” are two old white males, and the number three candidate is, wait for it, a young white male.
So, what happened to the party of breaking the glass ceiling and empowering women?
This year’s Democratic presidential primary field is full of female candidates, but most of them barely register as a blip in the polls and, except for California’s Far-Left Democratic Senator Kamala Harris, none of them are raising the kind of money necessary to be competitive with Biden, Sanders, O’Rourke and Buttigieg.
Adherents of gender politics will no doubt claim that the main reason none of the female candidates is breaking out is because they have an embarrassment of riches – there are too many good female candidates in the Democratic primary field, and they are splitting up the feminist vote.
They can go with that if they want to, but we have a more reality-based analysis: It turns out that claiming to be inspired by Eleanor Roosevelt, but sounding and voting like Margaret Sanger, is not a formula for success for Democratic women.
Few voters outside college campuses and the liberal Twitterverse are attracted to angry white feminists, sneering liberal arrogance, smug elite condescension, Hillary Clinton-style flip-floppers and scary socialist commissars – which pretty well sums-up the Democratic field once you get past the old and young white guys.
Kirsten Gillibrand, Kamala Harris, Amy Klobuchar and Elizabeth Warren all embrace the wackier elements of and personas of Far-Left progressivism, only Tulsi Gabbard seems to make any attempt whatsoever to appeal to centrist voters, which means she probably has no prayer in the Democratic primaries.
But even Rep. Gabbard is far out of the mainstream in her embrace of the Green New Deal, universal health care, breaking up big banks and reinstating the Glass-Steagall Act, which limits the relationship between investment firms and commercial banks.
While she presents herself as a non-angry moderate or centrist, Rep. Gabbard’s policies are at least as Far-Left as the angry Leftwing non-Indian, Sen. Elizabeth Warren.
Another allegedly moderate female candidate in the Democratic field, Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar, has a two-fold problem; Klobuchar is pitching herself for the White House as the commonsense Midwestern answer to President Donald Trump — while former staffers portray her as a brutal boss who mistreated them.
Former aides, speaking anonymously for fear of retribution, described a toxic office environment including demeaning emails, thrown office supplies and requests for staff to perform personal chores for the senator, reported Politico’s Elena Schneider.
In other words, she’s moderate, but still angry, making Klobuchar a sort of “The Devil Wears Prada” type of figure, albeit clad in sensible flats from Kohl’s rather than stilettos from Prada.
New York’s Senator Kirsten Gillibrand has a similar problem, although not quite the same fashion challenges as Sen. Klobuchar. Gillibrand once wrote that Hillary Clinton, the former secretary of state, first lady and 2016 Democratic presidential nominee, changed her life inspiring her to run for office.
Gillibrand is a staunch supporter of the #MeToo movement, who has made women and family “rights” her priority. Sen. Gillibrand, who oozes “men bad women good” from every pore was the first Democrat to call for Sen. Al Franken’s resignation or expulsion from the Senate after his obnoxious behavior toward women was revealed.
But its for her flip-flops away from the center that Gillibrand now wants to be known for. Gillibrand said at a recent CNN townhall meeting that she was “ashamed” of her past conservative views on immigration, telling voters that she believes she is in the “right place” right now.
Gillibrand ran and won a House seat near Albany, New York, in 2006 by attacking her Republican opponent from the right on immigration and guns, calling securing the border “a national security priority.”
Now, Gillibrand, in the same hour that she apologized for her past position on immigration, also confirmed her previous statement that she was “embarrassed” by her past positions on guns.
Lastly, as Becket Adams noted in this excellent piece for The Washington Examiner, there’s Gillibrand’s current position on LGBT rights, which is basically the exact opposite of where she was as a congresswoman, back when she received the lowest rating of any New York Democrat from the pro-LGBT Human Rights Campaign. In 2009, after coming to the Senate, Gillibrand endorsed the legalization of same-sex marriage in the Empire State. Interestingly enough, she specifically declined to endorse this when she served the state’s 20th Congressional District.
“Evolved” rather than lied or flip-flopped?
For those needing a fix of Hillary Clinton’s smug condescension when caught in a lie or abandonment of principle, Kirsten Gillibrand is your candidate for president.
And then there are Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris, the two meanest and scariest Democrats of all.
Warren and Harris together and individually cover the entire menu of reasons why middle America does not trust or particularly like the new Far-Left Democratic Party.
Senator Harris says her biggest priority is raising salaries for every teacher in the United States. She proposed a $315 billion investment that would boost teachers’ pay by $13,500. She also is a co-sponsor of “Medicare for All” and wants to reform the criminal justice system by legalizing marijuana at the federal level and changing the cash bail system.
But her real selling point to the Democrat primary voter is her lack of civility and prosecutorial demeanor, which was rolled-out to great acclaim during the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings.
Here are just a few of the highlights:
The Judge Kavanaugh the American people saw before the Judiciary Committee does not have the character, the temperament, or the judgment to sit on the highest court in our land. His own partisan, evasive, dishonest, and aggressive testimony demonstrates that we cannot trust him to be a fair and unbiased jurist. He is simply unfit. The Senate should have put partisanship aside and demanded better.
As a former prosecutor, I have led investigations and I have tried these cases in a courtroom. I have spent countless hours with assault survivors. And when I look at what has occurred over these few days, we have fallen short in fulfilling our constitutional duty to fully evaluate Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination. This process has been a disservice to Dr. Ford. This process was a disservice to survivors everywhere. And this process has been a disservice to the American people.
Millions of Americans are rightly outraged at this hasty and unjust process, which threatens to cloud the legitimacy of the Supreme Court of the United States. And they are rightly fearful that Justice Kavanaugh will undermine Roe v. Wade, roll back access to affordable healthcare, and side with powerful and partisan interests over the most vulnerable.
And that doesn’t even begin to plumb the depths of Ms. Harris’ relationship with former San Francisco Mayor and California Assembly Speaker Willie Brown. “Yes, we dated” said Mr. Brown, acknowledging his past relationship with Harris in a letter to the San Francisco Chronicle while also acknowledging giving her appointments that furthered her career. Columnist Herb Caen once called Harris “the Speaker’s new steady.” Noting, when they met, she was 29 and Brown was 60 and married.
Speaking of partisan, evasive, dishonest, and aggressive, we saved Elizabeth Warren for last because she is, next to Harris, the most partisan, evasive, dishonest, and aggressive of the Democratic candidates, male or female.
The blue-eyed Sen. Warren, best known as Fauxcahontas, for years claimed Native American ancestry and rode the racial spoils system of the Democratic Party’s ethno-politics to lucrative posts in academia, while in reality being of 1/1024 Native American ancestry – whiter than the average white person in America as one wag noted.
However, Elizabeth Warren’s racial fakery isn’t, in our view, her least attractive quality. What really sets Sen. Warren apart is her willingness to put the Democratic nomination up for auction, naturally using your tax dollars as the kitty.
As Prof. Richard Vedder explained in a recent column for Forbes:
In the bidding war among progressive Democratic presidential aspirants to demonstrate their quasi-socialist bona fides, Elizabeth Warren is hard to top, the ne plus ultra of progressive chic, as her new proposal to wipe out most of the student loan debt in the U.S. demonstrates, to be largely financed by a wealth tax on affluent Americans.
This is probably the single worst higher education reform proposal I have seen in six decades of trolling American academic vineyards. It is mind-boggling in the potential harm it would pose to our nation. It is unfair to tens of millions of Americans who have faithfully repaid their student loans. Many with existing debt are living good lives, making minimal debt repayments, perhaps anticipating the successful enactment of a proposal such as Sen. Warren’s. It would create an enormous moral hazard problem, meaning future borrowers would simply not repay their debt.
Sen. Warren’s college debt forgiveness gambit is particularly interesting, given that she was the intellectual architect of much of the Dodd – Frank legislation and the push to create (outside the Constitution we might add) the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a federal agency whose purpose is to ration credit to those poor dumb plebs whom the government decides are too ignorant and gullible to manage their own personal finances.
You know, like someone who wants to use credit card debt to start a small business because big banks won’t lend to them or someone who is willing to pay a higher interest rate to obtain credit after a financial or personal reversal – like losing their job or getting divorced. Folks like that need the benevolent hand of Sen. Warren to decide if they deserve credit, how much, and at what interest rate.
However, people who took on tens of thousands of dollars in college loan debt to finance a useless degree in gender studies, why they deserve to have that debt forgiven and paid for by Americans who became apprentice plumbers or learned to code rather than go to college.
This is the smug elitism of someone, like the Harriet Olsen character in Little House on the Prairie, who thinks they are entitled to run your life whether you like it, need it or want it. And if you don’t like it, well then its going to cost you.
At its core that’s the problem for the mean girls of the Democratic Party – they’re all running to help you, whether you want their help or not – and it appears voters are just not that anxious to have Kirsten Gillibrand, Kamala Harris, Amy Klobuchar, Tulsi Gabbard or Elizabeth Warren tell them what to do.
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Photo “Elizabeth Warren” by Elizabeth Warren. Photo “Amy Klobuchar” by Amy Klobuchar.
