Headless Democratic Party

Here is an excerpt from a Wall Street Journal article by Janet Hook:

“In the absence of a galvanizing party leader or a consensus about what the Democratic Party should do in the wake of the 2016 election, there is a proliferation of power centers offering different diagnoses and solutions for the future. . . The scattershot self-examination is reminiscent of Will Rogers’ famous aphorism: “I am not a member of any organized political party. I am a Democrat.””

The day after the 2016 presidential election, Politico quoted an unnamed Democratic strategist as saying, “The [Democratic] party is in a period of chaos.”

In their 11/17/16 Real Clear Politics article, Caitlin Huey-Burns and James Arkin write, “The [Democratic] party is beginning the work of rebuilding without a clear project manager. President Obama’s impending exit from the White House leaves a vacuum. House Democrats have delayed their leadership elections, and several candidates are vying to helm the Democratic National Committee. Obama’s electoral success and his high approval ratings have, in many ways, masked a divided and decimated party.”

In his 11/14/16 column, Democrat political analyst Juan Williams asks, “With Obama leaving office, the Democrats are losing his anti-war focus and the personal popularity that allowed him to hold the Democrats together. The president enjoys a sky-high job approval rating among his fellow Democrats. So, who replaces him as the working leader of Democrats in Washington? And what is the Democrats’ new guiding ideology?”

A 11/25/16 headline in The San Diego Union-Tribune reads, “Democrats ask: Who’ll lead the party from the wilderness, and how?”

USA Today ran the following editorial cartoon by Steve Benson:

That editorial cartoon by Steve Benson may just explain why the Democratic Party is currently running around like a chicken with its head cut off.

The Democratic Party was under the control of the Cult of Clinton until America called B.S. on it, as Brendan O’Neill explains in his 11/20/16 Reason commentary. He writes, “By the Cult of Hillary Clinton, I don’t mean the nearly 62 million Americans who voted for her. I have not one doubt that they are as mixed and normal a bag of people as the Trumpites are. No, I mean the Hillary machine — the celebs and activists and hacks who were so devoted to getting her elected and who have spent the past week sobbing and moaning over her loss. These people exhibit cult-like behavior far more than any Trump cheerer I’ve come across.”

In an April 2016 Salon commentary, Camille Paglia writes, “What is it with the Hillary cult? As a lifelong Democrat who will be enthusiastically voting for Bernie Sanders in next week’s Pennsylvania primary, I have trouble understanding the fuzzy rosy filter through which Hillary fans see their champion. So much must be overlooked or discounted — from Hillary’s compulsive money-lust and her brazen indifference to normal rules to her conspiratorial use of shadowy surrogates and her sociopathic shape-shifting in policy positions for momentary expedience. Hillary’s breathtaking lack of concrete achievements or even minimal initiatives over her long public career doesn’t faze her admirers a whit. They have a religious conviction of her essential goodness and blame her blank track record on diabolical sexist obstructionists. When at last week’s debate Hillary crassly blamed President Obama for the disastrous Libyan incursion that she had pushed him into, her acolytes hardly noticed. They don’t give a damn about international affairs — all that matters is transgender bathrooms and instant access to abortion.”

Now that the Cult of Clinton has been vanquished, perhaps the Democratic Party will gain a leader who doesn’t act as if the rules don’t apply to him or her.