How can the Democrats lose to Trump in 2020? The same way they always do, by being taken over by the left wing nut case faction. Busing? Reparations? Medicare for All? Impeachment? Do everything they possibly can to force never-Tumpers to vote for Trump? to force independents to turn away in bewilderment? to prove to America that the Loony Left is riding again?
Look, I will vote for a giraffe before I vote for Trump. I have a bunch of very sound reasons for that, about which I am sure I will write of in the future and often. But now I am talking about the Democratic Party primary season. And so far it is not comforting to the large swath of moderate America hoping to find someone to replaced Trump who isn't nuts.
Loren Thompson of Forbes Magazine lays out a very articulate warning. He says he knows how this movie will turn out, he has seen it before, way too often. And Democrats lose a race that should be impossible to lose. Nixon crushed lefty McGovern. HW Bush easily handled lefty Dukakis. Reagan stomped lefty Carter and then had no trouble with lefty Mondale.
Clinton won as a moderate liberal, centrist - big tent. Obama was almost post ideological, not a lefty firebrand.
Thompson writes:
"Even in the depths of the Great Depression, FDR knew he had to run as a centrist and populist rather than a socialist to bolster his chances of getting elected (Carter and Clinton successfully embraced the same lesson)."
Trump is a dangerous lunatic but that is not how the campaign will be run. He will be the sane one and the Lefty Dem will be a dangerous Socialist trying to change everybody's lives, thoughts, feelings, and consciences.
Thompson says Trump will run on five things, probably successfully:
Peace - will say he saved the world from war with North Korea and Iran (only after threatening war with both and then pulling away)
Prosperity - good stock market, low unemployment, will say that tariffs and being a tough negotiator saved the day (all wrong, of course, but that will be a constant drumbeat)
Sovereignty - The Wall, The Wall, The Wall, Fear the Brown People, Fear, Fear, Fear....
Self Sufficiency - America First, America alone, America to build in America, American jobs in America (while actually destroying jobs in America with his ignorant tarrifs)
Energy of the candidate - Trump as the energizer bunny that never ever ever ever gives up and pushes and pushes and pushes for what he wants - bad things, of course, but many see them as good things.
Trump can't win on his base alone. So, why are the Dems playing to their base alone?
It is very predictable, of course, that the left, including me, thinks that Trump is so god-awful that the country will turn away from him in horror and nausea. And they will, unless the Dems are taken over by those that think that now is finally their chance to put in a radical lefty agenda.
For example - as Mark Shields, liberal commentator on the PBS Newshour pointed out after the first Dem debate - Liberals had been trying to get expanded health care for all for about a century and finally got it in the Affordable Health Care law. They got it through Congress. They survived a Supreme Court challenge. It is a compromise that keeps private hospitals, private insurance, private doctors, private drug companies. They won. And now we have Dem candidates who want to throw it away for the health care that exists only in the dreams of the extremists in the Democratic Party - Medicare for All, which would be a massive change and will be rejected fiercely not just by the Right wing but by moderates and liberals as well the more the details of what would have to change are revealed.
Never underestimate the delusions of the extremist faithful.
All the Dems have to do to beat Trump is not be crazy. Trump is crazy. One is enough.
