OPINION:
Just in case you thought the losing Democratic Party was going to try a hook-or-by-crook method of winning back some seats in 2018, and actually move more moderate to capture some of the independent-minded or mainstream voters — think again.
Sen. Bernie Sanders, of “Yes, I’m a Proud Socialist” fame, and newly seated Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez have teamed for a 50-state tour to rally the grassroots to come on down and vote, come next election. Expect little more than a President Donald Trump bashing fest, one state at a time. Still, Republicans would be folly to fail to take note of and track the dynamite duo’s rhetoric and reception.
Just because Democrats madly insist on going left when the rest of the country seems to have gone right, doesn’t mean their progressive-socialist dreams won’t one day resonate to the point of winning majorities.
America needs to stand guard against such infiltrations.
The fact the free-market wheeling and dealing Trump won the White House on a wave of populism, patriotism and “America first” type of platforms — the kind that called for closed borders, more jobs, better national security and a kick-butt ’tude of all things ISIS — should tell, loud and clear, the days of U.S. concession, cowering and share-the-wealth era of Barack Obama came to an end. But for Democrats, they didn’t — they’re just on hiatus.
We know this because Democrats, on the heels of losing all kinds of elections at all levels of government, nevertheless, chose the fantasy land dweller Nancy Pelosi once again to lead in the House — the radical Muslim progressive Keith Ellison to sidekick Perez in the DNC.
They just don’t learn, right?
Or maybe, they just don’t give up — and that’s a red flag for the right. At least, it should be.
Democrats moving father left is never good for the country at-large and in the long run.
It sets the stage for Republicans, in order to keep up with the left’s campaign messaging of free college, free health care, free everything, to start to promise their own giveaways, or else face loss of seats. The establishment in the GOP always, always, always thinks that when Democrats go far left, the Republicans have to shift at least a little bit left — and thus we get candidates like Sen. John McCain and former Gov. Mitt Romney for the White House.
So this looming Perez-Sanchez cross-country partnership can’t simply be dismissed as a Democratic thang.
If polls start showing the pair’s messages resonating, then prepare for the Republican Party to start paying attention and launching its own feel-good campaigns for its 2018 vulnerables that seem just a little bit more left than where the GOP ought to be.
“At a time of massive income and wealth inequality and a shrinking middle class, we need a government which represents all Americans, not just Wall Street, multi-national corporations and the top 1 percent,” Perez and Sanders said in a joint statement reported by The Hill.
Likely, the wealth inequality the two speak about won’t include context of how Democratic-progressive policies under Obama furthered that gap — or even about how and why their own Capitol Hill colleagues seem to be standing more on the side of “wealth” than those of average America. No, it’ll be rhetoric about big bad business, and since Trump was a big, bad businessman himself, he has to go, along with all his Republican cohorts.
And they’ll be bringing that speech initially to Kentucky, Maine, Florida, Utah, Montana, Nevada, Arizona and Nebraska, states with some heavy conservative populations, a sign of the Democratic Party’s absolute willingness to tackle, head-on, the GOP’s most loyal.
“This is part of our effort to revitalize the Democratic Party, to turn it into a grassroots party, to tell people that Donald Trump’s agenda is not what he promised them,” Sanders told The Washington Post in an interview about the tour.
Well, guess what. Sanders actually has an “in” with that statement. Many who supported Trump on the campaign trail have grown angry with the failure of Obamacare to be repealed — angry, impatient and perhaps ready to entertain thoughts of other candidates.
On top of that, Trump himself said from the campaign trail that in a choice between Sanders and Hillary Clinton, he’d rather fight Clinton for the White House. While characterizing Sanders as crazy, Trump also recognized that the giveaway message the socialist carted, combined with his blame of Big Business and the military machine for nearly all that ailed America, was a big draw for the millennial crowd.
So there is that.
But Trump has an easy way to moot this latest leftist assault, and in so doing, help out fellow Republicans who will be facing their own campaigns in the coming months. In a word: Jobs.
Trump’s biggest weapon against this Sanders-Perez mount of state-by-state anti-Republican activism will be to usher in the economy he promised during his campaign and in his early days of the presidency, and then showcase these booming job statistics to an America that was decimated and depressed by Obama-era policies — and to do that day after day after day. A man at work doesn’t doesn’t need Democrats to dole him food stamps; a woman who’s employed doesn’t need the government to provide her free day care.
After all, it’s not the employed or the self-sufficient who want the giveaways that Perez and Sanders will be selling. And if Trump oversees the ushering in of a bustling economy, with jobs a’plenty, the socialist leanings of Sanders and the angry anti-business rants of Perez will only fall on deaf ears.
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