The No-Class Party

What’s wrong with the Democratic Party? I am sure that you have been wondering how a once proud political party could have lost as many elections as it did over the past eight years. Even today, once proud Democrats are tearing out their hair and gnashing their teeth over their failure to defeat Donald J. Trump. If Trump is as bad as they say he was and if his badness was so obvious that even a ferret could see it, how did it happen that the marvelously qualified Hillary Clinton could not beat him?

Clearly, the question has been wracking the brain of the superbly qualified and totally competent Hillary. Of course, saying that Hillary was competent and qualified is like saying that women are just as strong as men. Unless you believe in magical thinking you are fostering an illusion.

Yesterday, Hillary Clinton showed why she lost and why so many women hate her. In her commencement address to the new graduates of her alma mater, Wellesley College, the Duchess of Chappaqua demonstrated, yet again, that she has no class. She also has no grace, no dignity and no decency. You see, her Hillaryness used the occasion of what is normally a pep talk filled with harmless bromides to act like an embittered crone. One suspects that the women who hated her knew this already. 

She did not lose, she implied. She was cheated out of what was rightfully hers. The Russians and James Comey destroyed her well-oiled campaign machine, machine that did not even understand the workings of the electoral college. Duh?

Better yet, as at least eight hundred commentators have pointed out, Hillary made a full throated defense of facts and reason, just before she declared that Richard Nixon had been impeached. In truth, Nixon was never impeached, but Hillary’s husband was. That someone who was peddling paranoid thinking about the vast right wing conspiracy could proclaim herself a champion of facts and reason beggars belief. That someone whose husband announced to the world that he never had sexual relations with “that woman” could stand up as a champion of facts causes your brain cells to short circuit. And let’s not forget the lies about Benghazi and so on and so on and so on.

Worse yet, what if the newly minted Wellesley graduates step forth into the world and follow the advice of an embittered crone. (It gives new meaning to the term: croney capitalism.) Will the bad attitudes that Hillary is promoting help their careers? Will the vitriol she was handing out help them to have more satisfactory personal relations? Do they want to grow up to have her marriage, or even her career? 

After all, whose life has been more of a lie than Hillary's? This champion of women’s rights rode her husband’s coattails to every important job she ever had. And she failed at all of them, of course. In the end she did not feel that she had to work to win the presidency because she believed that the nation owed her the office, considering all that she had put up with to give the nation Bill Clinton. The North Koreans owe her a debt of gratitude.

If you want to leave facts and reason aside try pondering the thought that Hillary was the most qualified person ever to run for the presidency. And then ask yourself how competent she showed herself to be while Secretary of State? And let’s not forget the private email server and the pass she got from James Comey in July. Note that the scrupulous Hillary rails against Comey's October surprise but has nothing to say about Comey's efforts to shut down the investigation in July.

At the very least, Hillary’s message to the Wellesley graduates was an offer to drink from the same poisoned cup that had made her so embittered. It showed no class. It showed no respect. Any woman who takes her message to heart will pay a price.

Anyway, our famous former president Barack Obama has a far better sense of public decorum than Hillary. It is not a very high hurdle to clear, but still. And yet, just in case you thought that Obama was all class, last week, in the midst of President Trump’s trip to the Middle East, he showed up in Germany to meet with Angela Merkel. Why did he do it? Surely, he wanted to upstage his successor and to pretend that he had not been repudiated as roundly as he had been repudiated. Obama behaves far better than most, yet his effort to undermine and cast some shade on Donald Trump counts as the ultimate cheap shot.

At a time when Trump was working to undo the damage that Obama had visited on the Middle East—and with some measure of success—Obama brought back his “citizen of the world” shtick and regaled an audience in Germany with it, yet again. That the American people preferred Donald Trump to the Obama shtick and had rejected as many Democratic politicians as they had over the Obama years did not seem to register.

Obama could not resist yet another star turn. Like Hillary he could not accept that he lost, that his legacy was being repudiated. If anything, Trump’s Middle Eastern trip was a blanket repudiation of Obama’s handling of the region. Perhaps he was not as much of a sore loser as Hillary. He did not display the revolting lack of sportsmanship that Hillary showed at Wellesley. But clearly, Obama cannot accept that center stage is no longer his.

One should also note that Obama was invited by German Chancellor Angela Merkel. The two were palling around in Germany while Trump was on his trip. Perhaps they were laughing about the terrorist attack in Manchester. Perhaps they were joyfully chatting about the rising rates of immigrant crime in Germany. After all, no European leader—exception given for the Swedes—had so openly embraced the Obama policy of opening borders to Muslim refugees. The horror of what had transpired in Manchester, like the horror that had happened in Berlin over Christmas, allowed the two leaders to pat each other on the back and to yuck it up. Speaking of indecency, the blood was not yet dry in Manchester when they put on their pro-refugee lovefest.

Think about this. After receiving Obama in Berlin, Angela Merkel went off to meet President Trump. Considering how classless her gesture was would you expect that the American president would be reward her? As it happened, Trump stuck to the message of his trip: the need to unite to fight against Islamist terrorism. Weak-kneed European leaders, led by Merkel, are more concerned with fighting climate change and Islamophobia. In that they echo the priorities of one Barack Obama.

Naturally, Trump was roundly criticized for not making nice with the all-too-nice European leaders, now led, not just by Merkel, but by boy wonder Emmanuel Macron. For two days Donald Trump forced them to face the truth. As it happened, this made them unhappy. Much of the American media declared that Trump had been rude. And yet, when he told them to honor their commitments to NATO and did not mention Article 5, he was telling them that they would do better to fight than to whine. He was telling them that they should not lie back and bask in the glow of their overly generous welfare states while counting on the United States military to defend them. For the record, the last time a nation sought to invoke Article 5, it was France after the massacre at Bataclan. You will recall that Barack Obama rejected the call.

The strength of a democracy, even a democratic republic like ours, lies in the ability of losers to accept defeat graciously, and to retire from the public stage… for a time, at least. The legitimacy of a new government depends on the old regime’s ability to recognize it. If Hillary is complaining that Trump is illegitimate and that she was cheated, she is undermining democracy. If Obama is meeting with foreign leaders and pretending that he is still president, he too is undermining democracy. He has more grace and decorum, but the message is the same.