Are Democrats more extreme than GOP?
< < Go Back
by Alex Castellanos,
Damn those extreme Republicans. President Obama and White House press secretary Jay Carney have found Republicans guilty of extortion and blackmail. Joe Biden, per a report in Politico, once christened Republicans as terrorists.
Liberals have led a media assault, calling the GOP anarchists, jihadists, “gun to head” hostage takers, and the political equivalent of the Taliban. White House advisor Dan Pfeiffer has likened Republicans to suicide bombers “with a bomb strapped to their chest.”
What could be more extreme?
The Democratic Party.
True, the Ted Cruz wing in the House of Representatives is relentless, uncompromising and unmoved by practicality. As we all know, there are perhaps 40 or so “bullet-proof Republicans” in the House, in safe GOP districts, invulnerable except to Kryptonite.
No doubt, the GOP is a party divided, but there are a lot of Democrats in safe districts, too. Why don’t they fear a fellow Democrat getting to their left in a primary? Why aren’t the Democrats a party divided between a centrist mainstream and a more extreme, radicalized left?
Let us count the reasons: Barack Obama has taken the Democratic Party left of Clinton. He left blue-dog, centrist Democrats to be punished for his sins and they were wiped out in the GOP’s 2010 Congressional landslide. All the while, the Internet has empowered and organized the party’s remaining and most extreme elements. The Democratic Party can’t go left. It is left, in entirety. They already occupy America’s left fringe.
Today’s Democratic Party belongs to Elizabeth Warren. It is the party that just nominated a Sandinista trainee who returned from Nicaragua with “a vision of unfettered leftist government” for mayor of New York City, according to the New York Times.
And today’s Democrats think this is a good thing.
“The Rise of the New New Left,” “Bill de Blasio’s win in New York’s Democratic primary isn’t a local story. It’s part of a vast shift that could upend three decades of American political thinking.”
The Democratic Party is now animated by the “mobilized left,” Beinart writes, emboldened by Internet activism. Their cause was galvanized by President Obama’s seemingly impossible re-election.
… an intellectually exhausted Democratic Party proposes nothing new. If at first you don’t succeed, keep trying until you are $20 trillion in debt and failure litters your streets.
How our young President could only offer such dated ideas will be studied for decades. For now, we can mark candidate Obama’s transformation from agent of hope and change to defender of liberal calcification as one of the great sleight-of-hand tricks in political history.
The political trouble Barack Obama inherited from George W. Bush is nothing compared to what Obama has teed up for a future contender such as Hillary Clinton.
Our former secretary of state has had no choice but to campaign for president earlier than she would have chosen.
No other member of the old Democratic elite can possibly hold its left-sliding legions together, yet Hillary Clinton has only one credential that appeals to her party: She could be our first female president. Elizabeth Warren’s growing followers, more in tune with today’s radicalized, populist Democrats, are likely to find that distinction unimpressive.
Which party is more extreme?
A Republican Party divided between 180 mainstream House members and 40 Ted Cruz mini-me’s? Or a Democratic Party united to preserve our fossilized, ineffective public sector?
A Republican Party advocating a path to fresh, natural, economic growth? Or a Democratic Party offering young voters the outdated economics of conformity, artificially imposed by Washington’s elites?
More From CNN: