Are Dems This Stupid?

This week the Democrats tried to pass in the US Senate a campaign finance bill that would have privileged liberal groups like unions and penalized corporations. That's after they stepped back from the unpopular cap-and-trade bill, and after the passing of the unpopular ObamaCare bill, and the derisive "stimulus bill."

Don't they get it? Hugh Hewitt wonders:

The Manhattan-Beltway media elite have fundamentally misunderstood or refused to believe what is happening in front of their eyes, and their blindness has apparently led the MSM-addicted Congressional Democrats to ignore the issues that do concern voters while pushing forward an agenda that deeply offends an already outraged electorate. The president's deep-seated ideology similarly renders him incapable of understanding the depth of the rejection of his agenda that is sweeping the country.

Most ruling classes get this way. They settle into their sinecures and lose the sharp edge they maintained when they were insurgents besieging the citadel of power.

In the case of Barack Obama, thoughtful people were already saying in 2008 that Obama and his people only knew urban politics--in Chicago and Boston. They really didn't know much about the ordinary suburban American people that constitute the majority.

That's leads to a piece from Wesley Pruden that explains why the president isn't getting any traction these days. No matter how great a salesman you are, you can't ignore Rule #1 of selling:

He never learned the drummer's first rule for success: "You gotta know the territory."

You have to hand this to the Democrats. They are master tacticians of day-to-day politics. They excel at 24-7 political combat.

But they seem to lack a strategic sense of what is prudent and possible.

I'm reading Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow right now. The astonishing takeaway is that Hamilton, who was in his early twenties when he became General Washington's chief of staff, had an amazing strategic vision.

Hamilton saw, at age twenty-one or twenty-two, at the beginning of the Revolutionary War, that the patriot strategy should be one of retreat, avoiding battles with the British. He saw throughout the war and particularly in 1782, when the un-paid revolutionary army started getting fractious, that there was no substitute for a strong central government with the power to tax--and pay its soldiers.

It is this penetrating vision that Democrats lack today. They do not see into the future. They do not understand how their brazen political tricks utterly disgust the average American. They do not see the greater currents at work in our society.

And so they will fail. Hugh Hewitt again:

Taken all together the Democrats are not merely headed towards a political cliff, they are sprinting towards it.

Yes, but don't they see what they are doing to themselves? No, they don't. They have become a classic aging dynasty. They don't understand the roots of their power; they don't understand the injustices their power has spawned; they don't understand the people they rule.

And that's a shame.