DEMOCRAT DEATH WATCH

What’s most significant about the new 114^th Congress is Democrats no longer can block votes on popular reform bills the House passes, says columnist Charles Krauthammer. "The days of hiding under Harry Reid’s desk are over."

Journalists would rather talk about dissension among Republicans. A conservative revolt against House Speaker John Boehner — which, predictably, fizzled — was the big story from the opening session Tuesday (1/6).

Even before the new Senate was sworn in, there were stories about how hard it may be for the GOP to keep control in 2016.  You wouldn’t know from reading them that it’s the Democrats who are at death’s door.

There isn’t a single white Democrat from the Deep South in the new Congress, Senate or House. From the Carolinas to Texas, the GOP controls every gubernatorial office, every state legislative chamber.

The party of youth and vigor isn’t the one you’ve been told it is. The average age of the 246 Republicans in the House – the largest number since 1929 – is 54.9. The average of the 188 Democrats is 60.2.

"Extraordinary" losses in state legislative races wiped out the Democrats’ bench, could cripple the party for decades, said Slate magazine.

Democrats running for the U.S. House last year lost among working class whites by an average of 30 points, Gallup said.

Policies that are "a blend of racial and gender politics combined with a fashionable brand of environmental fanaticism," turned them against Democrats, says demographer Joel Kotkin. Only a return of the Truman Democrats can save the party from electoral disaster, he thinks.

But there are no more Truman Democrats, says Robert Tracinski. Nearly all Democrats in office today represent urban districts with far left constituents, or majority minority districts.

"Inside this far-left bubble, your rising political stars are rewarded for taking positions that antagonize the rest of the country," he wrote in the Federalist.

Media bias has given Democrats about an 8 percentage point boost in elections, according to the formula UCLA Prof. Tim Groseclose devised for calculating it.

Here’s the karma:  the media’s reluctance to hold Democrats accountable for policy failures and bad behavior encourages so much more of it their candidates become repellent to ordinary Americans, thinks the Wall Street Journal’s Jim Taranto.

Democrats live within a "cocoon" in which "liberal ideas have never been more firmly entrenched and less contested," so they don’t realize how unpopular are the policies gentry liberals favor, says American Interest Editor Walter Russell Mead.

So Democrats double down on policies which brought them low in the midterms. If President Barack Hussein Obama vetoes the Keystone pipeline – and Democrats vote to sustain it — the exodus of blue collar whites will accelerate.

Democrats hope their iron grip on the minority vote will make up for their defection. But as more blacks and Hispanics seek – and win – office as Republicans, that grip is bound to loosen.

Here’s a factoid to remember:  Every African American ever elected to Congress from a majority white district has been a Republican.

To maintain their grip, Democrats make ever more baldly racist appeals. They smear police, side with protesters who disrupt the lives of ordinary Americans, make excuses for rioting and looting.

Promoting racial division is bad for America. And for Democrats, says Pat Buchanan, who remembers the 1960s.

In 1968, four years after Lyndon Johnson won 61 percent of the vote, his vice president Hubert Humphrey got less than 43 percent, because race and anti-war riots triggered a "civil war" within the Democrat coalition, Mr. Buchanan observes.

LBJ and George Wallace, Chicago Mayor Richard Daley and "the radicals cursing his cops" all were Democrats, he noted.

After the murder of two police officers in New York City last month (Dec. 20), Mr. Buchanan sees a similar rift opening among Democrats.

Attorney General Eric Holder’s race baiting "disgusted" him, said Milwaukee County Wisconsin Sheriff David Clarke, a Democrat who is black. Most of the policemen in New York City who turned their backs on Mayor Bill de Blasio are Democrats.

 "A sundered America is siding with the cops and turning against those who turned on the cops," says Mr. Buchanan. "The hostility and anger among Democrats over (alleged police brutality and black criminality) makes the Tea Party vs. the GOP establishment look like a badminton tournament on the country club lawn."

Let’s hope so – for I might as well tell you what I really think:  Democrats today remind me of insects.

Vertebrates (except for college administrators and a few Republicans who’ve been in Washington for too long) have a hard internal skeleton that supports their flesh and organs.

Insects have a carapace, a hard exoskeleton inside which there is nothing but mushy gushy stuff. Pierce the carapace, and the insect is in beeg trouble.

The excesses and failures of the Obama administration are piercing the Democrats’ carapace, which is why I think Robert Tracinski is right to put the Dem party on deathwatch. It could fall apart very quickly.

For lo these many years, Dems have been boosted by media bias, which reached extraordinary levels in 2014. But I think it’s jumped the shark, passed the point of diminishing returns. 

For even with a news media that lies constantly on its behalf, a political party consisting primarily of gentry liberals and crony capitalists, public employee unions and race hustlers, demagogues and thugs isn’t viable.

Think of history as a speeding car and the Democrat Party as a bug flying straight for its windshield.   Deathwatch City.

Jack Kelly is a former Marine and Green Beret and a former deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force in the Reagan administration. He is national security writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Discuss this item on the forum. Click Here!