WASHINGTON -- As the Democrats grow increasingly ravenous to have a shot at the presidency of Donald Trump, they are beginning to train their guns on the frontrunners for the nomination. That means they are contemplating finishing off Sen. Elizabeth Warren long before 2020. They are taking aim at her claim to being a Native American maiden, though Trump has the best line on her. He calls her "Pocahontas." If she ever gets to debate him, that ought to be the end of our modern-day Sitting Bull.
Poof. By then, the president ought to be able to calculate how much money she, in her false claim, has bilked various universities and government organizations. He ought to be able to nail the universities -- most recently, Harvard University -- for their cheap claim of filling an affirmative action slot with Pocahontas. And he ought to be able to accuse Sen. Warren of professional fraud. I think it will be that easy to blow her away.
Yet her fellow Democrats in the Party of the Big Heart are pretty much stuck with her, even if her claim of Native American credentials is obviously fraudulent. She bases the claim on family lore or things she heard in her family's kitchen while growing up. Well, many of us have family legends passed on to us over the kitchen table, but that does not mean we would base our career on such undocumented claims. In the Democratic Party, many do. There are all these affirmative action slots to be filled. Identity politics encourages fraud. Remember the white woman Rachel Dolezal who claimed to be black and thereby took a position at the NAACP? She was exposed as a fraud but continued to claim that she was black. Few people seemed to care. This is what the Democratic Party has come to.
It is not only that the Party is filled with phonies but that the Party has no standards. It is without class. It is the party of maudlin claims and easy outrage -- often childish outrage. I was thinking about the decline of the Democratic Party recently when I began comparing some of the preposterous bumper stickers I have been seeing of late on the back of Democratic cars -- often Toyota Priuses and Volvos.
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In the old days the bumper stickers and other political slogans chosen by Democrats had a touch of class. They had some literary qualities. They were inspiring. They showed some imagination. There was John F. Kennedy: "We Can Do Better," "Leadership for the 60's" and "A Time for Greatness." That last one has the whiff of Trump's "Make America Great Again." And Lyndon B. Johnson: "All the Way With LBJ." And George McGovern: "Come Home America." And Gene McCarthy, one of my favorite candidates: "To Begin Anew." I knew McCarthy years ago. We did a television show from Montreal. In the evening, when all the guests broke for dinner, Gene would beckon me off to a corner, where he always had wry insights and revealed impatience with politics. About the presidency he seemed forever ambivalent.
What are the bumper stickers and slogans of the Democrats today? They almost seem to be the creations of children. How about "Drumpf"? What does that mean? Or "Not My President," or "No Trump, No KKK, No Fascist USA"? And then there are these: "Love Trumps Hate" and "Resist Hate." My guess is the pious Democrat's heart fills with love -- self-love -- when he/she/it applies that last line to the bumper. Some of the bumper stickers I have seen betray an alarming absorption in the Cold War. How about "Make Russia Great Again," or "GOP, Guardians of Putin"? And then there are the suggestions of romance: "I'm Still With Her," and "This P---- Grabs Back." Mental illness can be amusing.
No, the Democratic Party is not the party it once was. Of course I am not referring to the party as it was in the later part of the 19th century. In those days it was profoundly racist, both in the north and the South. There was even a Liberal Republican Party that was racist. Several thousand -- yes, thousand! -- recently liberated blacks lost their lives in the South to the Democratic racists, and a hundred or so white Republicans, too.
Eventually, things quieted down somewhat. The Democratic Southern racists like Woodrow Wilson and the Byrd family of Virginia gave way by mid-20th century to real liberals such as Hubert Humphrey and the aforementioned Gene McCarty. But now those names are names from the past. They have been replaced by ... well ... by Elizabeth Warren, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. And their slogans and bumper stickers become evermore vacuous and stupid.
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