"What is the Democratic agenda? What does the party have to offer besides disunity, obstruction, incoherence, obsession, and obliviousness? They haven't rallied behind a plan to fix Obamacare or an alternative to the president's tax proposal. They seem dead set against enforcement of immigration laws, they seem opposed to any restrictions on abortion, they seem as eager as ever to regulate firearms and carbon dioxide. It's hard to detect a consensus beyond that. Banks, trade, health care, taxes, free speech, foreign intervention -- these issues are undecided, up for grabs.
"For eight years President Obama supplied the Democratic message, provided the Democrats answers to public questions. Now Obama himself is under fire for agreeing to deliver a $400,000 speech to Cantor Fitzgerald. He is already a figure of the past: His hair gray, his legacy under siege, his time spent lounging on Richard Branson's yacht or listening desultorily to Chicago undergrads. The energy is with Bernie, with the identity-politics movements, with the paramilitary 'antifa' bands, and each one of these overlapping sects are outside the party establishment Obama represents.
"That establishment is just as befuddled as its Republican counterpart at the current political scene. 'I don't know what's happening in the country,' Hillary Clinton is said to have told a friend at some point during the recent campaign. This apprehension of distance between herself and the everyday lives of her co-nationals is one of the most perceptive observations Clinton has ever made. Her problem was she never figured out the answer, never came to realize that the various guesses she and Obama and other professional Democrats have wagered about 'what's happening in the country' -- racism, sexism, nativism, gerrymandering, Citizens United, Fox News Channel and talk radio, Russia -- are insufficient. What the Democratic party has yet to understand is that its social and cultural agenda is irrelevant or inimical to the material and spiritual well being of their former constituents. And until the Democrats recognize this fact, their next 100 days will be no better than their first."
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