I originally predicted it would take up to ten days, but that was before the curveball of Biden’s cancer announcement. (We’re now on day six.) So, if we factor in the goodwill and/or social etiquette of “prayers and thoughts,” it probably stretches the process out a few extra days.
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But not much more than that.
Politics is eerily similar to capitalism: You have big brands (the A-List politicians), little brands (the D-List politicians), and emerging brands (the politicians scratching and clawing just to make a name for themselves). The biggest brands have the most to lose, so they tend to be the most risk-averse.
And, of course, the opposite is also true.
It’s a well-known phenomenon in the business world. You’ve probably noticed it, too: When tech companies get too big, they stop innovating internally and begin “growing” by acquiring outside startups. The perfect example is with the large language models that revolutionized artificial intelligence: Even though the Tech Giants had every institutional advantage to out-innovate the A.I. startups — the best staff, oodles of money, hi-tech equipment, amazing infrastructure — there’s a reason why Apple, Google, Microsoft, and the rest fell so far behind in the A.I. arms race. Big brands are like aircraft carriers at sea; small brands are like nimble battleships.
If a “race” requires sudden turns, stops, and pivots, an aircraft carrier simply can’t keep up. That’s not what it’s designed to do.
But when it does finally arrive… KABOOM!
The smaller brands don’t have that handicap. They’re built to be nimble. And they’re also willing to take the first risks.
Which means, if the Democratic Party was gonna make a major PR pivot, we wouldn’t expect the A-Lister to be leading the charge. You’d expect ‘em to come last.
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So far, so good!
Over the past few days, a hodgepodge of Donkey D-Listers began making good on my May 16 column:
Prediction: The Democratic Party will be pivoting to attack… the Democratic Party.
A smart, ambitious politician tells the audience what it wants to hear. In many ways, politics is intellectual capitalism; when an opening appears in the marketplace, someone, somewhere, will try to fill it.
And right now, the base of the Democratic Party desperately wants its leaders to be held accountable.
Right on schedule, the wannabe Donkey leaders — guys like ex-presidential hopeful Beto O’Rourke, CNN talking head Van Jones, and California gubernatorial candidate (and ex-Los Angeles mayor) Antonio Villaraigosa — have already begun testing the talking point.
That’s the first domino.
Related: Liberals Are on the Verge of a Major PR Pivot. And Their Next Target Will NOT Be Trump.
The second domino isn’t the A-Listers, but the Democratic Party’s strategists, pundits, and PR experts. (Since this is the Democratic Party, many of their “PR experts” also moonlight as unbiased journalists, but I digress.) Some of them, I’ve gotta think, were smart enough to identify this on their own, but the slower ones will react to the D-Listers. They try to influence the Donkey’s direction via policy papers, polls, op-eds, and media leaks, popularizing certain ideas and building a consensus.
Speaking of which, an interesting story appeared today in The Bulwark, an anti-Trump outlet: “Democrats Consider Tearing Up the Playbook.”
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Every presidential cycle loss prompts a party to rethink and restructure how it operates. But Democratic strategists say the 2024 defeat and Biden’s handling of his re-election bid created a massive trust issue that the party will have to address. Some compared it to the role that the Iraq war authorization vote played in shaping the 2008 primary—reconfiguring the issues of that race and tanking the candidacies of those who supported the invasion.
One Democratic strategist who worked on a 2008 primary campaign said, “Obama was fortunate because he wasn’t in D.C. so it allowed him to have natural distance. He could say ‘I’m an outsider’ without saying ‘I’m an outsider.’” In other words, since he wasn’t in Congress in 2002, he didn’t have to vote on the Iraq resolution.
In the modern version of that, candidates further removed from the Biden White House will have more credibility and trust among those in the 2028 electorate who feel burned by party leadership. [emphasis added]
CNN’s Jake Tapper, who certainly has a vested financial interest in stoking outrage over Biden’s infirmities, did an interview in today’s New York Magazine. Here’s his take:
One of the reasons why the Democratic Party’s numbers are in the toilet is because there’s a real anger out there at the party. And I believe part of that anger, if not most of it, is rooted in this gaslighting that the Democratic Party did about President Biden’s acuity while (A) obviously we all were watching him in front of the camera, all these moments of being addled, all these moments of tripping and gaffes and such. (B) what we all saw the night of the debate. And (C) now there’s this book that Alex and I wrote, sourced by more than 200 people, most of them Democrats, almost all of them talking to us after the election. We see it was even worse than we thought. [emphasis added]
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Jake Tapper, quite naturally, claims his book tests beautifully with liberals:
No one I care about [on the Democratic side] is slamming me. I think people understand the truth of the book. So many people cooperated with it, and it’s just so soundly reported that there really isn’t any dispute about what we found. You have Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries out there saying, “We need to look forward,” which that’s for the voters to decide how effective and convincing that is. But behind the scenes, there were senators, House members, governors reaching out: “How do I get an early copy of the book? I need to see this. I’m so mad at these people. I can’t believe what they did.” And I know Alex and I have both gotten a lot of text messages from people who worked on the campaign, thanking us for telling the truth about what happened because this is a real scandal and a really horrifying thing to have happened.
I think a lot of people are still having kind of an emotional PTSD about it — people who worked for the Biden campaign, people who gave up their lives to move to Wilmington for a $35,000-a-year job, finding out that Mike Donilon demanded $4 million to give the advice that he gave. I think it’s rather triggering and upsetting, but Alex and I are just trying to tell the truth about what happened. [emphasis added]
The same themes in the Tapper interview and the Bulwark article were echoed in a recent Time Magazine piece, “Inside the Democrats’ Reboot.” Among the highlights:
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Many Democrats are not eager only for generational change. They want change at the top of the party as well. Some see Jeffries and Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer as too deferential to established norms or too reluctant to use procedural powers to slow down Trump’s agenda. Both are underwater in public-opinion polls. Only 27% of Americans approve of congressional Democrats overall—the lowest number since CNN started asking in 2008. [emphasis added]
Me [pretend my voice sounds like the evil Emperor in “Star Wars”] to the Dems: “Good! Give in to your hate! Your hate will make you strong!”
You can practically smell the desperation in Time magazine’s nihilistic closing paragraph:
Democrats are coming around to a new mantra: winning the argument is less important than winning elections. If the path to victory means embracing economic populism, they’ll do it. If they have to make room for new faces, then sayonara, old friends. If they need to tack to the center on some social issues, so be it. If winning requires doing more podcasts, or embracing Instagram influencers, or campaigning on permitting reform, they’ll give it a try. Because now that Democrats have seen what a second Trump presidency looks like, they’re relearning the lesson they should have known all along: only winning is winning. [emphasis added]
Which translates to: “Dems, do what you’ve gotta do and throw the deadweight to the curb!”
(Admittedly, as revolutions go, that call-to-action is pretty weak. But hey, it’s a start!)
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Our prediction hasn’t come true… yet. We still need an A-Lister — a big brand — a giant freaking aircraft carrier — to join the fun and unleash heavy artillery for this to be a full-blown Democratic civil war. Someone a helluva lot higher up the food chain than Beto O’Rourke or Van Jones, at least.
But holy smokes, we’re getting closer and closer.
One Last Thing: The Democrats are on the ropes, but make no mistake: The donkeys are still dangerous. 2025 will either go down in history as the year we finally Made America Great Again — or the year it all slipped through our fingers. We need your help to succeed! As a VIP member, you’ll receive exclusive access to all our family of sites (PJ Media, Townhall, RedState, twitchy, Hot Air, Bearing Arms): More stories, more videos, more content, more fun, more conservatism, more EVERYTHING! And if you CLICK HERE and use the promo code FIGHT you’ll receive a Trumpian 60% discount!
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