For years, the most common complaint I have heard from Democrats is that their party does not fight like hard and never dirty, like Republicans do: they don't bring guns to a gunfight. Since 2016, I've heard that comment from Republicans, too: Never-Trump guys expressing surprise and exasperation that their Democratic comrades-in-arms against he The former president does not take up arms politically.
Democratic politicians will admit it: They worry about how they might look to political science professors, pundits, and civic-minded idealists. His penchant for good governance is commendable. But being repeatedly outplayed by people like Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell is not.
opinion columnist
Jackie Calmes
Jackie Calmes brings a critical look to the national political scene. He has decades of experience covering the White House and Congress.
“One of us is playing with a rolling pin and the other is fighting with a gun,” an aide to Senate leaders once told me, frustrated that Democrats were adhering to the Marquis of Queensberry rules while Republicans were violating the rules to fill the federal courts. “We always bring a butter knife to a gunfight,” veteran Democratic strategist Brian Fallon similarly said. She complained Not a long time ago.
Fallon felt so strongly that Democrats were weakening that in 2017 he co-founded a liberal activist group, Demand Justice, to give the left a more combative approach in judicial confirmation races. He recently left the group for a I work on the Biden campaign, as communications director for Vice President Kamala Harris. That's a good thing: Democrats need junk, a lot of them, and the ever-cautious Harris in particular needs power of communication.
Even better signs of a more enthusiastic Democratic Party have emerged lately, just like Biden and Trump each one insured their respective parties' nominations on Tuesday with victories in the primaries of several states.
One sign was Biden's. brave state of the union ADDRESS last week, in which he fired a dozen shots at “my predecessor” and dodged mockery from House Republicans like a smiling dark brandon comes to life, shooting red lasers from its eyes. Listening to Republicans complain afterward that Biden was too partisan gave new meaning to the phrase that the kettle was black.
Another sign of an intensified Democratic offensive was news of a massive $30 million Biden campaign ad buy, coupled with the president's busy schedule in battleground states and the campaign's plans to hire hundreds of aides. He first ad It was also a good one, featuring an animated Biden mocking his age, highlighting his accomplishments, drawing contrasts with Trump and, fittingly, promising to “fight for you.”
And there was some evidence Tuesday that other Democrats will back Biden. Members of the House Judiciary Committee came full of support to a hearing held by majority Republicans to introduce Robert Hur, a Republican and former special prosecutor whose recent report on Biden's handling of classified materials included damaging comments about the president's age and alleged “diminished faculties.”
The Democrats on the committee, particularly the California representatives. Ted Lieu, Adam B. Schiff and Eric Swalwell, It appropriately focused less on Hur's comments about mental lapses and more on his report's conclusions that “criminal charges are not warranted” against Biden (compared to 41 felony counts against Trump). And that despite Republican claims to the contrary, what Biden did with top-secret documents was in no way comparable to the much more serious accusations against Trump of conspiracy and false statements.
The Democratic committee did not ignore the question of age and mental acuity; they just turned him against Trump. Several of them came, yes, armed, with video montages of the former president's verbal gaffes, slurred words, and inconsistencies at recent MAGA rallies.
But the lack of fight more typical of Democrats explains why Hur, a former Trump Justice Department official, was chosen as special counsel by Biden's prosecutor. General Merrick Garland, first. Democrats, who want to be seen as fair, continue to give Republicans a virtual monopoly on independent counsel positions whenever Washington decides it needs another high-profile investigation. Whether the person being investigated is a Democrat (Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton) or a Republican (Donald Trump), Democrats have supported having a Republican prosecutor.
The Republicans do not reciprocate.
David Brock, now a Democratic operative but notorious in the 1990s as a ruthless right-wing scourge of the Clintons, confessed to me a few years ago his occasional irritation with his new party for its blunt attitude, for example in rejecting a line of attack like something unfair.
“That's nothing I've ever experienced as a young conservative,” he told me. “There is a different ethic.”
“Republicans just want the result, they just want to get there, they want the winner”Brock added. Democrats, on the other hand, “worry a lot about how to get there,” about whether they are being respectful of “the process.”
And yet, if you ask most Republican voters, they will tell you that it is the Democrats who are the dirty fighters, who cheat in elections and use the government as a weapon against their enemies, primarily Trump. Because that's what Trump tells them.
That is the dirtiest move of all the Republicans. Lying to their own voters.
This election year will probably be the cruelest in living memory. I hope I'm right that Biden and the Democrats have sheathed the butter knives and put away the rolling pins. It's not that Trump hasn't given them ammunition for a shootout.
