The Democrats: Recruiting from the Crypt?
Does Joe Biden's party have a necrophilia problem?
Years ago, shortly after U.S. Senator Carl Levin announced he wouldn’t run for a seventh term, I talked with him at a reception in Detroit.
“Why aren’t you running?” I asked. “You look and act no more than 65 (he was then almost 80) and could go to the Bahamas, not campaign and still win easily.”
He laughed, and said that he did feel great. “But I don’t know how I’ll feel at 86,” he said. Well, by the time he would have been 86, he was dead from cancer. We’ve since seen what happens when a president who is over 80 tries to cling to power.
Unfortunately only some of us get it. If you had any questions about whether Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, an almost 75-year-old New York Democrat, is out of touch, he settled that earlier this week.
In order to have any hope of retaking control of the U.S. Senate next year, Dems have to knock off Republican Susan Collins in Maine. She should be beatable; she is about to turn 73, and Maine is a blue state. There is already a fascinating candidate for the Democratic nomination, Graham Platner, 41, an oyster farmer and military veteran who has already raised $4 million and won Bernie Sanders’ endorsement. But that’s not who Schumer wants.
He has proudly recruited the governor of Maine, Janet Mills, who has done a fine job, but who, by the time she took office, would be 79, and the oldest freshman senator in history.
Actually, I think Schumer would probably prefer another Mainer, former U.S. Senator Ed Muskie, who should have been the Democratic presidential nominee in 1972. However, his candidacy this year was handicapped by the inconvenient truth that Muskie died in 1996.
Seriously, how tone deaf can someone be?
Ed Muskie, still dead
My guess is that this kind of thinking would lead to the Democrats nominating J.B. Pritzker, the governor of Illinois, for President in 2028.
That would be sure to reassure the Not Much Change Ever caucus. True, J.B. would be by their standards a mere boy of 64 when he took office, but he is a heavily overweight billionaire, and candidates like that did very well in the era of William Howard Taft. But they would call this a progressive pick because he’s Jewish.
What needs to happen is the recognition that this is a new world and a new century. If Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez really does want to serve this country, she should challenge Schumer for the nomination for the U.S. Senate next year.
There really was a time when Democrats appealed to working people and ran candidates who didn’t need walkers. If they want to win some elections and maybe save democracy, it might be time to do so again.
On the other hand, the GOP needs to keep more people like Mitch McConnell.
It's WAY too early to conjecturize about a Democrat to run against J.D. Vance in '28. It won;t be an old fart like me. It will be somebody we don't even see on the horizon yet. But somebody young. I'd like to see AOC run against Schumer of the Senate nomination. She won't, of course but it would be fun. Trump is doomed to failure. His big Gaza deal has collapsed in less than a week already. The "NO KING" millions of marchers have turned the people against him and ICE.
He made a big mistake there: quotas. They have quotas. Nobody knows what they are, but they have them. They were supposed to concentrate on the criminals first, get rid of the criminal aliens before you start on the other illegals. But with quotas, it's a lot easier to pick from the low hanging branches; mothers dropping the American -born kids at school, agricultural workers, meat packers, etc. than to ferret out criminals. They are, after all, criminals and know how to hide. People would not demonstrate about that. Filling your quotas with the innocents is what everybody is ticked off about. Get the criminals first, then worry about the other illegals. I'm sure some kind of parole could be worked out with the necessary ones.