There’s so much going on in the political world that even big stuff can slip by. But, especially in light of what has happened recently, it’s time to revisit the remarks of Democrat Don Leonard two weeks ago.
Leonard, who is running to unseat Rep. Mike Carey (R-OH) in a Columbus-area district, said on a podcast that he’s not a Democratic Socialist, but “even if I were, I’d lie to the people of my district in order to get their votes.”
He said it with a laugh, and politicians, who are called on to talk a lot, do occasionally go overboard in their efforts to be memorable. But this felt more like a revealing and perhaps intentional glance into Leonard’s soul.
We know he is not at all hostile to the Democratic Socialist agenda. According to the Washington Free Beacon, Leonard, a former professor at Ohio State, has published an academic paper that concluded the best outcome for the United States is a socialist “counter movement.”
He has donated to and more than once publicly expressed support for Bernie Sanders and his Working Families Party. He has backed the WFP’s calls for taxing billionaires to bankroll “healthcare you can rely on,” “child care when and where you need it,” and “time to spend with your family.” He has praised New York City Working Families Party hero Zohran Mamdani and called for Medicare for All.
He published a Facebook post in December that read: “Working Families Party is on point here. Making homes, healthcare and child care more affordable would allow us to spend more time with our family. The only thing I would add is to provide support for family home care so that parents have the option to be with their children through the first year and retirees can afford to age in place.”
So Leonard is not bluffing about being willing to lie to his constituents. He’s leaving off some of the more radical planks – ending the Senate, the presidency and the Supreme Court and running the entire country out of an expanded House of Representatives chief among them. And he’s dressing up some fairly extreme leftist policy proposals as matters of “affordability,” rather than government takeovers of massive sectors of the economy.
But he is not an outlier by any means. The Democrats know they have a problem here. James Carville is saying he can’t be part of this. Democrat operatives are lining up behind Mike Rogers, the Republican running against Abdul El-Sayed in the race for the U.S. Senate seat in Michigan. Bill Maher is threatening to vote for Vice President JD Vance in the next presidential election.
They know they can’t disavow the DSA candidates and they can’t exactly endorse much of their platform. So a lot of mumbling, platitudes and coordination with the media will go into softening their images to make them more acceptable to voters.
Already, the networks are switching from referring to DSA candidates as “socialist” or “far left” to calling them “progressive” and “populist” – you know, like most Democrats.
They are taking great care to assure us that El-Sayed may talk a good Democratic Socialist Party or Working Families Party game, but he’s never actually signed up for either party. He’s just another mainline traditional Democrat – the kind your parents and their parents voted for.
”He’s not formally a socialist,” George Stephanopoulos said on ABC.
There could be no such hair-splitting when it came to Francesca Hong, the Thanksgiving-hating candidate for the Democrat nomination for governor of Wisconsin. She is a card-carrying member of the DSA and quite proud of her socialist preferences.
Still, the media referred to her as a socialist only two-thirds of the time in a recent study, and they avoided her when they could. In the last 10 days before the primary, she was identified in this way only nine times, compared to 70 for El-Sayed.
The media applied the same strategy to Graham Platner in Maine, not mentioning his disgusting social media posts, Nazi tattoo or allegations of abuse of women until after he won his primary with 72 percent of the vote. Then, when they discovered Platner could not beat incumbent Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME), suddenly another allegation arrived and the media hounded him out of the race.
Don’t expect integrity from the media or the left. They know their platform would not stand real scrutiny from voters or the media, so they are determined that neither will occur. As Don Leonard says, they absolutely will lie to you to get your vote.