Democrats need to be more realistic about their candidates

Politics & Elections
1

There’s one difference I always note between reading conservative and liberal sources on politics, and it was true even before Donald Trump brought a tidal wave of weirdness into last year’s campaign. Republican writers, describing a candidate like Mitt Romney or John McCain are able to acknowledge that he has flaws. Democratic writers, and the other hand lean towards saying things like this:

Barack Obama isn’t really one of us. Not in the normal way, anyway.
… you want to know what it is? The appeal, the pull, the ethereal and magical thing that seems to enthrall millions of people from all over the world … Many spiritually advanced people I know (not coweringly religious, mind you, but deeply spiritual) identify Obama as a Lightworker, that rare kind of attuned being who has the ability to lead us not merely to new foreign policies or health care plans or whatnot, but who can actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet, of relating and connecting and engaging with this bizarre earthly experiment. These kinds of people actually help us evolve. They are philosophers and peacemakers of a very high order, and they speak not just to reason or emotion, but to the soul.

Back in 2008, Slate magazine actually had a feature called Obama Messiah Watch collecting evidence of the awesome, incredible, sometimes supernatural things that Obama accomplished according to the liberal media. It can be found here.

Nor was Obama the only Democratic candidate to transcend the earthly plane and rise to a higher level of existence. No less a source than Lena Dunham’s newsletter told us this about Hillary:

I love Hillary Clinton. I am in awe of her. I am set free by her. She will be the finest world leader our galaxy has ever seen. … Maybe she is more than a president. Maybe she is an idea, a world-historical heroine, light itself. … Hillary is Athena

This stuff hurts the Democrats. In Obama’s case, high views of the man led the Democrats to assume that he would bring the Democrats permanent victory, and they were blindsided by the huge gains that Republicans made in Congress and at lower levels. In Hillary’s case, they simply assumed that their candidate would coast easily to victory because they were blind to her massive flaws.

In ancient Rome, they had the practice of Memento Mori. Perhaps in 2020 Democrats could devise a 21st century version of the same idea to remind each other that their candidate is, in fact, a mortal human being with failings just like everyone else. Maybe a new Google Chrome extension which would take every article that mentions the candidate’s name and add the sentence, “Remember that ______ too is mortal” to the end of it.

2

Why do you care what Lena Dunham says about this subject or any other subject?

3

The fact is that just about any candidate has a given subset of supporters who harbor similar sentiments about their candidate. Even the current occupant of the White House.

4

He didn’t quote Lena Dunham. He quoted a piece by Virginia Heffernan posted on Lena Dunham’s web site. In addition to that it appears he spectacularly missed the point of the Heffernan piece he quoted.

5

I can probably find you dozens of writings which say the same about Trump. Or McCain. Or Bernie.
Or Cameron, Gandhi, Merkel and pretty much every democratically elected leader ever. Hyperbole is as human as breathing oxygen.

6

“Democratic writers”? You found a woo-heavy op-ed piece by an enthusiastic Obama supporter who teaches yoga and writes pop-culture columns, and you really consider that representative of “Democratic writers”?

Gonna need a cite for the claim that “Democratic writers” in general “lean towards” that perspective, thanks very much. The “Democratic writers” I read in actual political journalism are anything but uncritical towards Obama.

:eek: This has got to be some kind of apotheosis of the art of desperate straw-grasping.

7

…did you hear about this guy a couple of days ago?

8

So “seventies”. Aikido, feng shui, and orgasmic breathing techniques.

9

Yeah. Not for me.

Still, I prefer it to “thirties” nostalgia. Fascism & the Klan…

10

Thank you for this totally objective and not at all cherry-picked analysis of this super important issue! Wow am I ever glad I read it.

11

The OP must not have any Facebook friends who are fans of Dolt 45. These people seriously do not think he is capable of error and was chosen by God to lead the people out of the impending liberal Muslim apocalypse.

12

Odd how I don’t remember even one poster here who was over the moon about Hillary.

Regardless, the fact was then and still remains that she would have been a far better President, warts and all, than Herr Man-Baby.

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It expresses his true concern for the future of the Democratic party.

14

Here’s TV evangelist Pat Robertson saying, not tongue-in-cheek, that Trump is part of God’s plan for the US:

Here’s W saying that God himself chose him:

(I suppose that’s the candidate setting expectations too high for himself)

It seems to me that quoting Pat Robertson and an actual Republican president is less of a nut-picking enterprise than what was shown in the OP.

15

I’d kind of like to know in what alternative reality **ITRChampion **is living in where it wasn’t blatantly obvious to virtually every democrat that Clinton was a flawed candidate, to the point where a charismatic socialist out of left field damn near got the nomination. Maybe it’s the world where a random writer on a comedy personality’s website is the single most influential democratic pundit in the history of the world!

What a bizarre thread.

16

If Democrats need to be more realistic about anything, it’s not their candidates - it’s their opponents.

17

there’s a cartoon I saw which is topical.

18

Then you missed me, because I was over the moon about her. I knew a lot of others who were as well.

19

Sorry to double post-

I think it’s worth noting that you can be really excited about a candidate while being realistic about their flaws. All candidates are flawed, even charismatic ones. Bernie had a ton of flaws that were truly problematic. Many of HRC’s flaws were of her own doing but many were manufactured by her opponents (to the left and right).

Republican candidates are equally flawed.

20

I disagree with the premise of the OP. It does seem to me that there’s a lot more of this type of hero-worship on the Democratic side, probably due to the “youthful idealistic” nature of many of their strongest supporters. But I don’t think it was a factor in their losses, and if anything it’s probably a net positive, election-wise.

If you want to add to that, I don’t think Sanders was/is at all charismatic. He had as much success as he had by being the True Believer candidate, not by being charismatic. (Not enough True Believers to push him over the top, though, plus Clinton’s support from minorities.)

But I disagree that Clinton was a flawed candidate. All candidates have flaws, and in the heat of a campaign these get magnified astronomically. And when you lose, then these flaws seem like the cause and you look like a flawed candidate. (This is especially so when trying to justify losing to an even-more flawed candidate in Trump.)

But Clinton was not particularly flawed by the standards of other candidates. If she was as flawed as people like to depict her in hindsight, she would never have had the support of the vast majority of the Democratic establishment upfront. These people are not fools.