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Your guide on what Trump’s second term for Washington, Business and the World means
Original sin is a strange name for a book that covers 2023 to 2024. This implies that readers will be taken to the ultimate root of a problem – the problem being that Donald Trump is in the White House – while in fact the authors lead them along the trace of blame more than two years ago. It was then that a young Joe Biden decided to show up again for the president. It was an odious decision. The concealment of his fragile state was worse. The peers who did not call him to go there until a televised debate exhibited him last summer must think about their breach.
But it was not “the origin” of anything. Biden has become a scapegoat for a much longer democratic problem, which is a tolerance of probable and often proven electoral losers.
If there was a sin, a fall, it was the choice of the Democrats of Hillary Clinton as a presidential candidate in 2016. World history turned to this unique act of the Espice. The polls said to the party that the voters had not hated it. She had already scrambled a huge lead on the young Barack Obama in the primaries of eight years earlier. Certainly, its low reputation has never been fair. She is not a crook or much more hypocrite than other politicians, just one of the groans of life. But the world is what it is. Democrats have chosen to ignore the objective of its unpopularity, and the result is a time of Trump which was probably avoidable.
The other event that led us to the place where we are today was the elevation of Kamala Harris as Biden’s running mate in 2020. Given his age, the Democrats were almost named a future president. Again, they were embarrassed by the clues to its limits. She was the first candidate to note from the primaries. Those who survived him understood the mayor of the fourth city of Indiana.
Biden carries the nominal blame for having chosen it as a running mate, but “choice” is a deceptive word here. There was a tacit democratic rule that a white man could not run with another white man. So not Pete Buttigieg. Minnesota senator, Amy Klobuchar, was a strong artistic but also took the recent history and politics of the State in which George Floyd had just been killed, which practically excluded him. Is there another party that is blocking like this?
Overall, Biden’s refusal to withdraw in the right time comes the third rank on the list of Folies Democrats in the last decade. The problem is not a man. The problem is a model of collective illusion on candidates who date back to the previous century. Look at the margins of defeat. Not since Barry Goldwater judged badly that the Republicans have misunderstood the candidate and the electorate as bad as the Democrats with George McGovern, Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis.
In the 50-50 nation today, Democrats are still competitive. As a result, it is easy to miss the amazing narrowness of their candidates. Tim Walz was the first person on the upper or lower half of a Democratic presidential ticket since 1980 which had not gone to the law faculty. There was no southerner at the top from Al Gore at the turn of the millennium, despite the distrust that the Democrats must overcome there. Last November, in a competition which he rightly described as existential for the Constitution, the party set up a pair of California (which has not voted republican since the 1980s) and Minnesota (which did not even vote republican in the 1980s). It is a party which is always willing to meet swing voters with a conservative spirit of a tenth of the path.
To be bad in the choice of a leader is to be bad in politics. Everything that seems to have importance in this profession, such as ideas and tactics, it stems from the primordial individual in a party. Good leaders will tend to do these things well. People like Harris, or Ed Miliband or Jeremy Corbyn in the United Kingdom, will not do so reliably. If this logic seems circular – “the winners win” – I fear that it is politics. There should be more research and comments on what constitutes “IT”, otherwise known as X-Factor, than on countryside, manifests and other outings Politics, the study of which is an exercise to look through a bad end telescope.
The question is why Democrats in particular are so often mistaken during the selection of leaders. Perhaps the parts of the left are necessarily softer on human weakness. The impulse that leads them to protect people without lucrative skills against market forces (a good thing) is the impulse that makes them biting the electoral no-hopers (a bad thing). This would explain why work in the United Kingdom has so often had the same problem: for each Dukakis, a Kinnock.
Or it may be that progressives, trained to think in terms of structural forces, consider the emphasis placed on individual talents as in unintellectual. Increasingly, a democrat is someone who breaks the rise of Trump on academic abstractions – neoliberalism, oligarchy – but the work of man is shirking not to choose a great turkey linked to a candidate every four years.
Anyway, this problem is previous and could postdate in Biden years. Even if he had left earlier, the Democrats would have everything related to Harris by deference to seniority and these unwritten identity standards. With a longer campaign, and therefore more exhibition of her mystifying syntax and opaque beliefs, I think she would have worse against Trump than she. Original sin Exposes senior democrats as a people of self -pity Titanic. “We were so screwed up by Biden as a party,” explains a big. “We were so screwed by the party as a world,” mressed up a reader.
janan.ganeh@ft.com
