The party that can't stop digging
PLUS: Join Dr. Annie Andrews, who is seeking to defeat Lindsey Graham, and me TODAY at 12 pm ET
There are two old sayings every competent political professional should know.
The first is that you can’t fix stupid.
The second is that when you find yourself in a hole, the first rule is to stop digging.
The Democratic Party has responded to the Graham Platner debacle by attempting to disprove both.
It has discovered an astonishing third option: keep digging while arguing about whose shovel it is.
That isn’t strategy. It isn’t leadership. It isn’t politics.
It’s malpractice.
The Platner fiasco should never have happened.
This wasn’t an act of God. It wasn’t bad luck. It wasn’t an October surprise that arrived three months early.
It was a preventable failure of judgment in one of the most consequential Senate races in the country.
The race was supposed to be about Susan Collins. Instead, Democrats have made it about themselves. That takes a special kind of political talent.
Susan Collins has spent years cultivating the image of an institutional moderate, while helping assemble the Supreme Court majority that eliminated the constitutional right to abortion.
She should be defending that record every day. Instead, she’s been handed a gift.
No competent political operation gives away the initiative in a race this important, yet here we are.
Then came the inevitable search for someone else to blame.
John Fetterman has demanded that Bernie Sanders apologize.
That’s interesting.
If Bernie Sanders is putting together an apology list, he might consider beginning with John Fetterman.
The United States Senate was once regarded as the greatest deliberative body in the democratic world.
Today, a sweatshirt-wearing schlub, who seems far more interested in distinguishing himself from his own party than confronting Donald Trump, has decided that he’s the man to demand apologies from Bernie Sanders.
The image is undignified, and so is the spectacle.
Meanwhile, another question hangs over the Senate.
The American people are being asked to accept political assurances from the likes of John Thune and Scott Jennings regarding Mitch McConnell’s condition.
That’s no longer good enough. Not after years of lies. Not after years of being told to reject what our eyes have seen and our ears have heard.
Credibility, once squandered, can’t be summoned back by press release.
The standard is simple. A board-certified attending physician. On the record. Answering questions.
That’s not an unreasonable expectation. It’s the minimum.
Trust isn’t owed. It’s earned.
The Republican Party has spent years exhausting the country’s willingness to extend it.
This brings us back to Democrats.
If democracy is truly on the ballot, then competence isn’t optional. Candidate selection isn’t optional, nor is discipline or judgment.
The Democratic Party doesn’t suffer from a shortage of intelligence. It suffers from a shortage of seriousness.
There’s a difference.
The consequences are measured in Senate seats, judicial confirmations, executive appointments and, ultimately, the direction of the country itself.
There’s another uncomfortable truth.
The misjudgments of 80-year-olds carry a unique burden — not because of their age — but because they are less likely to live with the full consequences of the decisions they make.
We will. Our children will.
Time never negotiates. History never forgets.
The Republican Party has squandered the country’s trust.
The Democratic Party is rapidly squandering the country’s confidence that it possesses the competence to defeat it.
Those are different failures.
They may produce the same outcome.
Then again, this is the political party that lost two of the last three presidential elections to Donald Trump, and spent months insisting Joe Biden was fit for another four years — until reality became impossible to deny.
Nothing should surprise anyone anymore.
The Save America Movement's "Fighting Democrat" series is back with Dr. Annie Andrews — the woman positioned to do what no Democrat has ever done: beat South Carolina's Lindsey Graham in a U.S. Senate race. Dr. Andrews joins me live at 12 pm ET TODAY to talk about why 2026 is the year to unseat one of the most corrupt, sycophantic, unhinged lawmakers in U.S. history and how her experience as a paediatrician and mom has positioned her to fight for her state and WIN. Dr. Andrews needs all of us in her corner to send Lindsey packing, so don't miss this conversation!
Just brilliant analysis...especially the line:The misjudgments of 80-year-olds carry a unique burden — not because of their age — but because they are less likely to live with the full consequences of the decisions they make.
Indeed, the Platner candidacy says a lot about not just the Democratic Party, but the political process in this country. The lack of seriousness that pervades American politics, at least in part, can be traced back to the changes in the way political parties select candidates. I’m old enough to remember when candidates were selected by conventions, and some would complain that the real selection were made in smoke-filled rooms.
Well, primaries supplanted the smoke-filled rooms and conventions. But can anyone argue that this has improved the quality of candidates? I doubt that Graham Platner, Marjorie Taylor Green, John Fetterman, Lauren Boebert or Donald Trump would have emerged as candidates in that era. Primaries have given inordinate power to attention seeking candidates adept at manipulating media and both mass and social media have further amplified their voices. The primary election itself gives inordinate power in selecting candidates to the most extreme and committed voters, and primaries are themselves used as threats against candidates who can’t cater successfully to those extremes.
If we manage to survive as a democracy past November, we must reform so many of the glaring structural weaknesses exposed by Trump regime and more broadly. Part of that must include changes to the primary system. I personally would like to see non-partisan ranked choice voting that would allow the majority of voters to sift through the candidates, rather than ceding that power to the few extremists that show up for a June Primary.