Let’s take the second lesson first. All too many Democrats seem constitutionally incapable of mounting a proportionate response to the day’s news. Everything is a crisis, and the rhetoric is constantly pushed to the limits. It’s one thing to react with outrage when Trump equivocates after the Charlottesville terrorist attack and declares that there were fine people on both sides, or when he takes to Twitter to launch personal insults at “Little Rocket Man.” It’s another thing entirely to describe, as Nancy Pelosi did, a completely normal GOP tax plan as the worst bill ever to come out of the House. It’s another thing to claim that Americans will die if conventional Republican policies pass.
Democrats still haven’t understood the extent to which their constant over-the-top attacks on men such as Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan inured the GOP public to further claims of racism, sexism, and xenophobia. So they go back to the same well, declaring that this time they really mean it, this time there really are racists on the loose.
Yes, both parties have a problem with proportionate response, as the GOP’s stunning overreaction to the so-called FISA-gate brouhaha illustrates, but the result is a kind of endless public screaming, an unmodulated howl that drowns out truth, equalizes the two sides, and renders nothing truly outrageous or disqualifying even as partisans try to claim that everything’s an emergency.
And that brings us to the first lesson: Be better. Talk to most Democrats, and they’re simply flabbergasted that so many Americans did not see Hillary Clinton as possessing the slightest character advantage over Donald Trump. And why would they? The differences often boiled down to style and manners. Trump’s blunt style bludgeoned the truth to death with a verbal hammer. Hillary’s sophistication sliced the truth to ribbons with a verbal scalpel. Either way, the truth died.
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Originally Posted by LA Ute
