Peggy Noonan Tells We Democrats: 'Sometimes Party Discipline is a Failure and a Mistake.'
Peggy Noonan Tells We Democrats: 'Sometimes Party Discipline is a Failure and a Mistake.'
A Biden renomination might well lead to President Harris who is 'a mystery, a politician who has been unable to say anything pertinent or even coherent on policy.'
Peggy Noonan Tells We Democrats: 'Sometimes Party Discipline is a Failure and a Mistake.'
Peggy Noonan, the former New York journalist and Republican presidential speechwriter, writes with clarity every Saturday in The Wall Street Journal.
Two days ago, she took apart notions that Democrats salivate to renominate President Biden and Vice President Harris. Republicans really don’t hunger for President Trump to be nominated for a non-consecutive second term.
And independents are decidedly indifferent.
Here’s what Noonan had to say. (Apologies to Noonan and the WSJ for this long excerpt):
Look at people’s faces when you say, “Looks like it’ll be Biden and Trump.” Those faces tell you everything — the soft wince, the shake of the head, the sigh. Those are emblems of the 2024 campaign right now.
Seventy percent of his own party doesn’t want Joe Biden to run. More than half his party doesn’t want Donald Trump to run. Yet here at the moment we are, with this growing sense of sad inevitability. “Apparently there are only two people in America,” Desi Lydic, sitting in on “The Daily Show,” explained.
Mr. Biden is unopposed because his party couldn’t rouse itself to do what Democrats have almost existed to do, have a big, mean, knockdown, drag-out brawl. Sometimes party discipline is a failure and a mistake. …
I agree with those who say the problem isn’t only Joe Biden’s age but the implication his age carries: that if he is re-elected there’s a significant chance Kamala Harris will become president. She has been a mystery, a politician who has been unable to say anything pertinent or even coherent on policy. Instead, the loud and sudden laughter unconnected to any clear stimuli, and the sheer looping nonsense of her words. This will give voters pause.
You bet. The Moderate Democrat supported Biden-Harris in 2020. As we have stated, and will make plain in upcoming posts, this administration has been a disappointment — angry-making, actually.
Noonan continued:
If it starts to seem clear that America is once again locked into a Trump-Biden race, I think the electorate is going to get frisky. I don’t see people accepting is. I see pushback and little rebellions. …
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who announced last week, this week hit 19% support among Democratic voters. That’s a lot. Especially for a guy who’s been labeled a bit of a nut. … But his larger general message would appeal to the edges of left and right, and blends into the general populist mood: Corporations and the government are lying to you, playing you for a fool. …
I say watch him. He is going to be a force this year.
Ms. Noonan ends her column with the prospect that the centrist group No Labels is gearing up to get on the ballot in every state, potentially with a centrist third-party ticket. She points out that independents now outnumber both Democrats and Republicans.
Third-party enthusiasts tend to be moderate, sober-minded. Such people are almost by definition not swept by the romance of history. But we are living in a prolonged crazy time in American politics. Anything can happen now.
Really, anything. I wonder if they know it.