The GOP’s Trump Problem Will Fade, but Democrats’ Bernie Sanders Troubles Are Just Beginning : Jonah Goldberg

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/422405/gops-trump-problem-will-fade-democrats-bernie-sanders-troubles-are-just-beginning

Neither Hillary Nor Bernie Is Up to the Task of Holding the Obama Coalition Together
‘We are trying to be reasonable,” an organizer for Bernie Sanders’s Seattle rally said.

The Clinton team is clearly nervous. Her poll numbers have been plummeting as Sanders’s have been surging. The campaign moved up its ad buys from November to this month. She’s been tacking ever further left.

The trouble for Clinton and the Democrats generally is that while Barack Obama was able to unite the factions of the Left to get himself elected, it’s not clear anyone else can.

The trouble for Clinton and the Democrats generally is that while Barack Obama was able to unite the factions of the Left to get himself elected, it’s not clear anyone else can.

Obama wanted to be a Reagan of the Left, a “transformative” president who moved the magnetic poles of American politics leftward. The jury is out on that project, but he did succeed in at least one sense. Reagan united foreign-policy hawks, social conservatives, and economic conservatives — the famous three legs to the stool of the conservative movement.

Obama did something very similar on the left. He united the civil-rights or identity-politics wing, the economic or egalitarian wing, and the more elitist technocratic wing. Obviously, these movements overlap — just as the different factions of the Reagan coalition overlapped — but each has its own priorities and passions.

Aided by his experience as a former community organizer and his historic status as the first black president, Obama held the coalition together through force of personality.

The Democratic party has always had internal conflicts. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s coalition contained socialist Jews and blacks and Southern segregationists. That coalition held for 20 years after his presidency. But the Obama coalition seems to be fraying while he’s still in office. The black Left is angrier at the end of his presidency than it was at the beginning. The egalitarians think the country is worse off, and the technocrats are left trying to explain why their plans are so great, despite the fact that the economy has never really recovered on their watch. Moreover, none of Obama’s presumptive heirs have the charisma or skills to repair or sustain the coalition.

Sanders has charm, but the Jewish socialist transplant from Brooklyn has spent his political life in a state that has only about 7,500 blacks. He lacks the vocabulary to appeal beyond the white Left. Meanwhile, the black Left, an indispensable voting bloc, has no standard-bearer in the primaries and is clearly cross about it.

Clinton’s most comfortable in the role of elitist technocrat, which is great for fundraising from Wall Street and wooing Beltway journalists, but it’s not so useful for wooing voters in a populist environment. Thanks to her husband, she still has goodwill among African Americans. But she lacks the charisma, passion, or personal story to excite either the black Left or the white Left. The woman who left the White House “dead broke” makes five times the average American’s annual income per speech.

The GOP’s Trump problem will eventually melt away. I suspect the Democrats’ troubles are far more durable.

— Jonah Goldberg is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a senior editor of National Review. He can be reached by e-mail at goldbergcolumn@gmail.com, or via Twitter @JonahNRO. (C) 2015 Tribune Content Agency, LLC

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