Now and then, I select a quote of the day not for its insight or elegance, but for its obvious lack of penetration. Today is such a day:
“The challenge is that they’ve got—on the Senate side—incredibly ineffective and, frankly, out-of-touch leadership that has no idea how to offer an alternative to Donald Trump,” [pollster Frank] Luntz said. “They don’t wanna bash—slap around the president. What they want is that agenda delivered in a more efficient, more effective, more compassionate way.”
I’ve seldom seen a more complete failure to see and report in so short a passage. I could let it stand naked as a demonstration of the will not to see, but I’d rather unfold the thing a bit more thoroughly than that.
The Democrats’ Senate “leadership” is uninterested in “offering an alternative to Donald Trump.” It’s a gaggle of old men who have no real interest in “leading” anyone anywhere. Their sole concern of importance is to retain their positions for at least one more electoral cycle. No particular element of policy or Democrat ideology matters enough to twitch the needles of their meters. If Trump matters to them at all, it’s as an occupational requirement: he’s a Republican, therefore they must denounce him.
Quite clearly, Senate Democrats do “wanna bash—slap around the president.” It’s all they have to offer. They cannot articulate a “Democrat agenda,” because the voters have already rejected it. The public is delighting in the swift, forceful moves of the Trump Administration. Announce an alternative to that?
It’s ludicrous to suggest that anyone could do a more efficient, more effective job at implementing the Trump program than Trump is doing right now. He’s moved so fast and so firmly that even his most ardent supporters are breathless. But that’s to the side, because Democrats don’t want that program implemented at all. They want the status quo ante, wherein they could posture, bellow, and steal with impunity. As for “compassion,” Trump is exhibiting the only kind of compassion that matters politically: compassion for a suffering nation that’s been neglected (if not badly abused) by all of his post-Reagan predecessors.
I can’t imagine how a supposedly politically astute pollster could have jammed such a bundle of inanities together and offered it to the public. What’s worse is that Frank Luntz is a trusted source of strategic advice… among Republican politicians. Go figure.
