Democrats Can No Longer Tell the Difference between the Press and the Voters

I’m starting to suspect that Democrats have finally and irrevocably lost the capacity to tell the difference between what the political press will print and what the voters will actually believe. Sure, it’s important and useful to be able to “win the news cycle” or get your version of a story to trend on Twitter, but that doesn’t mean ordinary voters will believe it. They’re just skipping the essential final step, like Soviet commissars who are happy to meet their production quotas by mass-producing left shoes without regard to whether people buying shoes want one for both feet.

This mental error yields an approach in which the most important things are to (1) produce a party line that says what you want, (2) convince everybody inside the party to stick with it, (3) sell it to sympathetic reporters to run with it, and (4) bully the rest of the political press into going along. The problem is that none of this actually matters if the voters won’t walk around wearing only the left shoe.

Examples abound. Was the point of the Inflation Reduction Act to reduce inflation? No. To convince voters that it reduced inflation? They’re hardly even trying to do that, either. The point was so that Democratic politicians could say “we voted for a bill that reduces inflation” and get the national political press to print it. Then . . . profit!

Joe Biden isn’t the man he once was. He’ll be 80 next month, his schedule is shockingly light, he’s visibly slowed on his feet and in his once-profuse mouth, and he keeps saying things disconnected from reality. Polls show that huge proportions of the public think he’s no longer mentally up to the job. But who cares about that? The point is just to yell at anybody who would print that Biden isn’t okay. The same dynamic gets repeated with John Fetterman, who had a stroke and is very, visibly, obviously not okay. When NBC’s Dasha Burns made the mistake of reporting her own impression that Fetterman didn’t really understand all of her interview questions, she was pig-piled by her supposed colleagues across the press, as if shaming Burns into shutting up would fix the problem. Having convinced themselves that it was “ableist” to report that Fetterman was incapable of conversing or arguing, they then sent the poor fellow out to debate on live television. When this was predictably a disaster, the response yet again was to forget about what voters saw with their own eyes, and stay focused on what the press would report.

The latest example is maybe the most brazen lie I have ever witnessed in politics, which is saying quite a bit after witnessing the careers of Biden, Bill Clinton, and Donald Trump. Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer claimed that schoolchildren in her state were only kept out of classrooms for three months:

Not to be outdone, Minnesota governor Tim Walz claimed that “over 80% of our students missed less than 10 days of in-class learning.”

You can lie to people about a lot of things in politics and get away with it. You can lie about the budget, you can lie about what’s in your diary, you can lie about voting machines, you can lie about whom you slept with, you can lie about how many people attended your rally, and you can lie about what’s in the bill you just signed. But you can’t lie to people about their own children. They were there, they remember, and that, they do not forgive. But if you don’t care anymore what they think, so long as it’s printed in the papers, you deserve everything those voters will do to you at the polls.