Democrats can’t figure out where to stand or when to fight

Screaming and hollering outside the Department of Education; do-or-die defenses of foreign aid; “gender-nonbinary candidate” rules; and octogenarians holding all-nighters over agencies Americans have never heard of. Democrats have found their fight again, but have not been in such rudderless, leaderless disarray since the 1980s.

They don’t know what they stand for any more. President Donald Trump has flipped the table, putting lifelong Democrats who once championed bedrock (and common-sense) crusades into Senate-confirmed positions. His nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., for example, pushed once anti-Big Pharma champions like Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) to demand protections for … Big Pharma. The president’s pick of former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) even pushed Democrats to fight for more wars abroad.

‘You don’t swing at every pitch.’

There’s little better impetus for a new political direction than losing a presidential election. (For better and for worse: See the grueling postmortems that followed former Sen. Mitt Romney’s 2012 defeat.)

And there is positively no better impetus for true soul-searching than an incumbent party losing the White House after only one term in power. Young activists and progressive Democrats, however, haven’t gotten that memo.

The Democratic National Committee chairman debates and officer elections were an absolute clown show, featuring unexpectedly hysterical a capella protest songs and stilted lectures on how one party committee hadn’t achieved the proper gender balance required by the rules (“the nonbinary individual is counted as neither male nor female, and the remaining six officers must be gender-balanced”).

On Thursday afternoon, grizzled old coot (and former Bill Clinton adviser) James Carville lumped all these, plus the New York City Council’s proposed paid “pet bereavement” rule, into a quick and easy category: “unmoored … jackassery.”

Back in Washington, the Democrats fared little better. Early Thursday morning, they filibustered the impending confirmation of Russ Vought to direct the Office of Management and Budget. Later that night, one by one, Democrats threw tantrums on the Senate floor, adding speeches and invective to every “no” vote they cast. The New York Times couldn’t help but describe it all as “mostly a story of performative protest.”

And here’s the thing: While Vought is indeed a formidable man who will expertly execute the president’s agenda from a powerful post, Democrats face some serious headwind in making much hay of it. Since even the New York Times called it all “a story of performative protest,” all the country sees is a bunch of geriatric Democrats pulling an all-nighter to wag their fingers over the director of a federal agency most people have never heard of.

If you hadn’t had enough “performative protest” from the party of the theater kids, you could have swung by the Department of Education, another bloated, grant-giving organization, where an 86-year-old Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) tried to force her way into a locked building.

Then there’s USAID — an agency that even those who believe it’s necessary know is rife with fraud and corruption. Democrats are going nuts about its closure at a time when Americans are broadly sick of both foreign entanglement and Washington institutions. “Man, Trump will be well satisfied to have this fight,” former Barack Obama strategist David Axelrod told Politico. “When you talk about cuts, the first thing people say is: Cut foreign aid.”

“You don’t swing at every pitch,” former Chicago mayor and Obama chief of staff Rahm Emanuel echoed.

Senator and USAID fanboy Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) isn’t paying any of that any mind, however, telling The Hill, “Those guys [Carville, Axelrod, and Emanuel] have not been in the trenches legislatively or electorally in a full generation.”

All three, however, have helped win national elections — and held the gains for a second term.

Of course, impeachment, that perennial favorite, is always an option. Rep. Al Green (D-Texas) introduced fresh articles of impeachment on Wednesday. The 77-year-old called the president “dastardly.” If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.

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