My sister sent me a piece from Politico yesterday which really points up how totally and completely the fake news media has collapsed now that they no longer have Trump to kick around anymore. The article claims that the two wings of the Democratic Party in the House are “tumbling toward intraparty war,’ and that only a major effort by Joe to play peacemaker will save the day.
What are these two factions fighting about? What they have been arguing about ever since the blue team won back the House majority in 2018, namely how ‘progressive’ versus how ‘mainstream’ the Democratic Party will be.
The Progressives want to spend trillions of dollars on every facockta government program which they can find, the so-called ‘moderate’ or ‘mainstream’ faction wants to keep some degree of fiscal sanity alive. The horse-trading that is going on involves how both groups deal with the infrastructure bill that was passed by the Senate and the safety-net spending plan which, if passed, will then have to be sent to the Senate from the House.
The Politico reporters summarize the whole megillah as the ‘combative fever gripping the Democratic caucus, which not only threatens to destroy the control which the blue team currently enjoys in both chambers on the Hill but will also cast doubts whether the Democrats can retain majority status after mid-term votes are counted next year.
I don’t know the age of the two Politico reporters who wrote that story, or the age of the editor who approved it to be seen and read by people like me. But if this story reflects the degree to which the Politico staff understands or even has the faintest degree of awareness of how politics works, then to quote Grandpa ‘oy zuch en vai,’ (read: what a mess.)
Maybe I’m thinking of a different Democratic Party, or maybe I’m making the whole thing up, but the Democratic Party that I have been voting for since 1968 has always (read: always) fought amongst themselves for how to govern much more than the fighting they did between themselves and the GOP.
You think the fact that the GOP relies on the votes of middle-class White people, particularly middle-class White people living in the ‘burbs, is something new? You think that the GOP’s promotion of prayer in public schools only started when Trump signed a ‘religious liberty’ Executive Order back in 2017?
My mother and her parents came to America from Eastern Europe in 1923. They got off the boat just three months before an immigration law was passed which would have kept them out. Know which political party was responsible for getting that bill through? Know which political party my mother never voted for over the entire course of her life? If you can’t figure that one out, to quote Grandpa again ‘gai mach en drerd,’ (read: sh*t your pants.)
The Democrats used to represent the unions and the European immigrants, both groups with Socialist roots. The GOP represented the country club, and the worst of them were people who wanted to become country club members but didn’t have enough cash to join. They were the ones who really hated people who spoke with funny accents, or people who were Black or Brown, or people who weren’t of the Christian ‘faith.’
Those alignments began to shift in the 1980’s when immigrants from Europe were replaced by immigrants from the South and then the Pacific Rim. This was also the time when many union members were second-generation workers whi had left their European cultures behind.
But one thing that didn’t change was the degree to which the important election in most blue districts was the primary election because that’s when registered Democrats would choose which House and occasionally Senate member would get elected from their district or their state.
Until recently, Republicans didn’t hold primary elections. Republicans weren’t all that interested in the whole voting process, and they certainly never (read: never) engaged in any kind of Get Out the Vote (GOTV) campaign.
We lived on Staten Island with all the New York City cops and firemen, so it was the one county which actually voted pro-GOP. Across the street from us was a lawyer named Vito Titone. He was the only other Democrat in our neighborhood and every two years he would go door-to-door asking people to vote for the blue team. They never did vote blue, but for his efforts he was named to the Court of Appeals by Mario Cuomo in 1985. So at least our neighbor got something out of always being on the losing side.
I never, ever saw anyone walking around my neighborhood canvassing for the GOP. I know people who worked as GOTV staff for Obama in 2008 and 2012. In both cases these folks were in must-win districts in Ohio and PA. They never saw any GOP canvassers in those locations at all.
Back in June or July of 2020, when Trump couldn’t make up the deficit with Joe no matter what he said, his campaign began talking about a 50,000-person ‘army’ that was going to go door-to-door before the election to bring the prize home. They said it and the fake news media dutifully reported it.
There was only one problem. The claim was what Grandpa would call ‘drerd’ (read: sh*t).
The single best piece of political reportage during the 2020 campaign was an article in New York Magazine (I can’t find the source right now) in which a reporter went out to three or four towns in Pennsylvania which were election districts that Trump had to win to keep the state red and which were listed on Trump’s campaign website as locations where training sessions for this GOTV army were going to take place.
Not only couldn’t she find a single one of these training sessions, but when she went to the state-wide Trump campaign headquarters and asked when and where such sessions were actually going to take place, the response was “duhhh….”
This whole calculus about how Democrats get involved in primary campaigns and Republicans don’t may change in 2022 and 2024 if Trump makes good on his promise to promote MAGA candidates in primary contests and cleanse the GOP of its RINO wing.
Good for him. If Trump wants to continue believing that he lost in 2020 because the 81 million votes racked up by Joe and Kammie represented all those Republicans who played the RINO game, as Grandpa would say, ‘gai gezinta hai’ (read: a real dope.)
Some days I wake up and wish that Trump would shut the f*ck up and go away. Other times, I think his presence guarantees another blue team win. Maybe the fake news media has every good reason to keep him around and pretend that the so-called argument between ‘warring factions’ on the Democratic side means anything at all.