At this time last year, in the wake of the drubbing Republicans received in the off-year elections, Donald Trump's re-election seemed a long-shot.
It now seems more likely than not, due more to the awfulness and mistakes of his opponents than anything Trump has done, most conspicuously the impeachment flop and the even bigger flop that is the Democratic primary field.
Whatever the "verdict of history" (and as Chou Enlai observed regarding the French Revolution, that verdict can be a long time coming) or the actual merits of the impeachment charges, it's become obvious that the Democrats' effort to remove Trump has strengthened rather than weakened their nemesis, as many of us predicted it would.
Part of the problem was the obviously partisan nature of the process, reflected in the straight party-line votes in the House and Senate (Mitt Romney excepted). Democrats across the board wanted Trump removed, Republicans nearly across the board didn't. And the large chunk of the public that didn't fall firmly into either of those camps simply rolled their eyes at the boring charade.
Impeachment may have consumed our media and excited the easily excitable resistance, but for the typical voter there was no interest because there was no doubt regarding the outcome. It was an exercise in futility that now allows Trump to present himself as vindicated, even if he really isn't, and as the winner, even if joining Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton in the impeachment club is a strange definition of winning.
Credibility was lacking in the Democratic effort from the very beginning, since anyone paying any attention to American politics since the evening of Nov. 8, 2016, knew that the Democrats never accepted the outcome of that election and began looking for reasons to impeach even before Trump was inaugurated.
The excesses of the resistance, in effect, doomed any effort to use impeachment as the primary constitutional means of resistance.
Once Democrats took control of the House, the only mystery concerned how long Nancy Pelosi could resist impeachment pressure from her increasingly unhinged followers. Pelosi then proceeded to mismanage the process in such a fashion as to guarantee it would backfire--from the rushed hearings in the House supposedly justified by the urgency of the task to the delay in forwarding the articles to the Senate, which suggested anything but urgency (On the latter point, it still remains unclear what Pelosi was thinking, since, as Mitch McConnell noted, Republicans weren't going to be bothered by her threatening to not send something they never wanted sent in the first place).
The claim that impeaching a president amounts to "overturning an election" is absurd because it would, if accepted, have the effect of removing the impeachment remedy from the Constitution, but in this case overturning an election result they didn't like has always been the Democratic motive.
The culmination of Pelosi's self-destruction project came with her shredding of Trump's State of the Union speech in full view of the cameras; a pathetic, pointless display of petulance that achieved what many previously thought impossible--to make Trump look like the adult in the room.
Pelosi is what she has always been, the gift to the GOP that keeps on giving. And she'll keep on giving for as long as Democrats and their media auxiliaries, in their staggering bubble of obliviousness, fail to recognize that she is less the master strategist than Trump's perfect foil.
The memory of the impeachment debacle will still be fresh, however, when the clown car that screwed up the Iowa caucus and contains the Democratic primary contenders rolls into Milwaukee this summer.
Democrats are now paying the price for having relied for so long upon Joe Biden and his presumed electability. Biden's only argument, reduced to its sad essence, was that "I was Obama's vice-president and I'm not quite as loony as the rest of these loons."
But Biden is still what we for so long thought he was: a dim-witted gas bag who can't be let loose on the campaign trail because he can't complete a thought, insults voters at inopportune moments ("lying, dog-faced pony soldier"), and has no idea where he even is. He was Obama's "impeachment insurance," but now, post-Obama, he's just embarrassing.
Biden was bound to collapse, but that it took as long as it did leaves the Democrats in the truly remarkable position of having a field of candidates that even Democrats suspect have little chance of winning in November, even against an opponent as unpopular as Trump.
Except, that is, for the candidate who hasn't appeared yet on a debate stage and is the only one that Trump might actually fear. He is also the one viewed with utter contempt by the Twitter left base of the Democratic Party: Michael Bloomberg.
The question thus becomes whether Democrats, in their desperation, would be willing to nominate an old white billionaire and former Republican turned Democrat from New York to prevent the re-election of an old white billionaire and former Democrat turned Republican from New York.
Which is just another way of asking what Democrats really care more about: ideological purity or ridding the republic of a neo-fascist ogre?
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Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.
Editorial on 02/17/2020