If it seems to you as if the Democratic Party is hopelessly leaderless at present, rest assured that this is because it is. Does that seem odd? If one uses the Republican Party as a yardstick, it might. This is the tenth year of Trump’s domination of the GOP, and, if he survives to the end of his second term, he will have been its undisputed head for nearly a decade and a half. Relative to that, the lack of an obvious head honcho on the other side is jarring.
Trump, though, is not normal. Typically, even the most charismatic figures hold sway over their party for six or seven years at the most, and, once their grip has been loosened, they leave a vacuum in their wake. The Democrats were so fortunate to have Bill Clinton and Barack Obama come along within eight years of one another that one can forgive them for having concluded that being handed generational talent after generational talent was simply how contemporary politics worked. It isn’t. They were spoiled, and now they are suffering through the downswing.
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