Democrats Need to Wake Up From Their ‘West Wing’ Fantasy
Democrats Need to Wake Up From Their ‘West Wing’ Fantasy
In the real world, noble ideals don’t guarantee a victory.
The issue isn't their nobility. Bombing women and children to support a religious genocide isn't noble. It is that they pick bad candidates. In a West Wing fantasy the President wouldn't be 81 years old. Democrats in 4 months will be asking how this happened, just like in 2016. Then they'll pick another bad corporate puppet and blame anyone that doesn't unify behind them.
I think there's a little bit of hero worship. Seeing Bartlet struggle over impossible decisions, coming to the least bad solution, often failing but always trying, that's how they imagine Biden behind the scenes. Or Obama, or even Clinton. They picture a room of impossibly competent and ideologically diverse paragons of civic duty respectfully debating the decisions of the day.
So when Biden does something horrible, they can rationalize that the alternative must have been worse.
The real delusion is that they are picking a candidate at all. The game is rigged, and the money picks the candidates.
Maybe the DNC policies for their primaries need to be changed. Like maybe they shouldn't be able to over rule the primaries like they did with Burnie or be able to decide that there will be no primaries like they did this year.
I think it's closer to the show The 100 😆
I lived in DC for seven years. I didn’t work on the hill, but several of my friends and roommates did. I remember one of them saying working in the government was much more like Veep than The West Wing.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The show, which ran from 1999 to 2006, portrays politics and policy not as ruthless powermongering pursued by nihilists (that’s “House of Cards”) but as a higher calling that flawed but idealistic people engage in from a place of civic pride.
Working across the aisle isn’t easy when your colleagues are telling their constituents that you’re demonic, and pushing conspiracy theories about child sex trafficking in pizza parlors.
In response to Project 2025 — the Heritage Foundation’s road map for a second Trump presidency, which includes agenda items so extreme they would be sent back to the writers’ room in Sorkin-land — Mr. Biden offers mostly dry policyspeak.
Today’s Democrats have been caught off guard by Mr. Trump’s willingness to overturn democracy for personal gain, the corrosion of ethical norms and the tectonic decisions that have come out of the Supreme Court in the last few weeks.
A college mentor of mine who was a Republican member of the National Security Council liked to say that somewhere in a dusty box in a closet in the Pentagon, there’s a plan for what the United States will do if we’re invaded by Canada.
It’s not clear to me that Democrats have enough invasion-of-Canada plans for all of the dumb and disastrous things that could await, even now, when you can say “former reality star turned president Donald Trump suggested that America buy Greenland” and not be wrong.
The original article contains 1,208 words, the summary contains 236 words. Saved 80%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!