The 2020 Democratic Party primary reminds me of the movie Zoolander. In Zoolander, two male models engage in a “walk off,” a contest to see which vapid vessel can do the same standard model moves better than the other. It ends when Owen Wilson is able to remove his underwear one-handed without taking off his pants first. Derek Zoolander then gives himself an atomic wedgie trying to duplicate it. But for the presidential campaign, instead of the nearly two dozen Democrat running (so far) attempting to remove their tighty-whities and granny panties in a walk off, they’re engaged in the ultimate “woke off.”
The problem with the Democratic field, aside from their generally bad and un-American ideas, is they’re all the same person in different packages. There is no disagreement on the major issues or the vast majority of minor issues. It’s like coming down to the tree on Christmas morning, seeing 20 boxes in different wrapping paper and each one of them being filled with tube socks. It doesn’t matter which one you open or how pretty the wrapping paper is, it’s all socks.
Single-payer health care? Check. Universal pre-K? Check. Reparations for slavery? Check. You name the left-wing fever-dream and they all check the same boxes, only differing slightly on fringes.
That leaves the Democratic primary to be a choice about which wrapping paper you want for your socks.
The Washington Post wrote a story about the field that opens this way, “More than a third of the candidates seeking the Democratic nomination for president are women. There are two black men, a Mexican American man, a Taiwanese American man and a gay man. Yet in the initial phase of the 2020 race, two straight white men have emerged as the fastest fundraisers. Another has jumped to a lead in recent polls, before even announcing his candidacy.”
Each one of those characteristics listed are completely irrelevant to whether or not any of them are qualified to be president, yet that’s what a disturbingly large percentage of the media coverage has focused on. The Post continues, “Democrats said they view Biden, O’Rourke and Sanders as credible and compelling contenders best equipped to defeat Trump. The conflicting opinions revealed Democratic divisions touching on race, gender and identity that could shape the nomination fight.”
The campaign thus far has been so devoid of seriousness that many of the candidates haven’t bothered to have an issues list on their webpages.
They list stores where supporters want to buy t-shirts, hats, lawn signs, etc. (Remember when lawn signs were free?) But when it comes to what they’ll do if they were to be elected, many of them come up blank.
Normally, this would be a point of ridicule from the other candidates and a handicap with voters. But what’s the point of saying what you’ll do when you’ll literally do anything, and you’re willing to change any belief you swore you previously held in order to win support? Beto O’Rourke and Kirsten Gillibrand have disavowed many of the positions on which they were first elected because they won’t play in the modern Democratic Party. Even Bernie Sanders changed his tune on reparations when he went to kiss the ring of Al Sharpton last week because different opinions are not the key to winning Democratic primary votes.
It’s a sad commentary that a major political party exists purely on group-think and the hatred of their opponents. What each candidate stands for doesn’t matter. It’s a race to see whether liberals want to nominate a person with this skin tone or that one, this gender or the other, a straight woman or a gay man, etc. If a transgender Native American woman or a bi-sexual black man who liked to cross dress entered the race they’d immediately be a frontrunner.
Think I’m making this up? There was a serious discussion on the left about whether or not South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg was “minority enough” because while he’s gay, he’s white and grew up in a well-to-do household. The concept of “intersectionality,” where the more boxes someone can check on a sliding scale of victimhood makes them more appealing, is now an important unit of measure on the left for candidates for office.
It used to be candidates trying to appeal on issues, now that they’re all the same immutable characteristics are all that matter, because there is zero diversity of thought on the left.
Whoever they come up with will, eventually, have to answer specifics on the issues and explain how the failures of big government can only be fixed by imposing bigger government. But there’s a better than average chance whoever they nominate will not have answered a policy question with any more depth than “what they said.” Instead, they will be celebrated for their skin color or who they sleep with. It’s no way to pick a potential president. Hell, it’s not even a good way to pick a pair of socks.
Derek is the host of a free daily podcast (subscribe!) and author of the book, Outrage, INC., which exposes how liberals use fear and hatred to manipulate the masses.
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