If you watched last week’s Democrat National Convention in Chicago, you probably couldn’t help noticing that many of the liberal party’s stars were, let’s say, a little long in the tooth.
Starting with president senile Joe Biden on the first day of the convention – even if his 50-
minute speech did conclude well after midnight on a school night – the Democrats rolled out one after another of their premier talents from a bygone era. In addition, there was the decidedly gray Barack Obama (at 63 years old) the next night, the 78-year-old Big Bubba Bill Clinton on Wednesday evening followed by the early-60’s Minnesota governor and Kamala running mate Tim Walz, who looks at least a decade older.
Democrats also pushed the enfeebled Hillary Clinton (what was that outfit?) on Monday before senile Joe and made speaking space for the 84-year-old Nancy Pelosi and their seventy-something Senate Majority Leader Chuckie Schumer somewhere along the way.
All that was missing was 84-year-old James Clyburn. Relative “spring chicken” Bernie Sanders tipped the actuarial tables at 83. Oh yeah, they were there too.
So much for a youth movement, huh? Despite that geriatric line-up, Democrats still managed to serve up plenty of barely warm ideas, however. In an opinion piece titled “Democrats pass the torch while playing the oldies”, W. James Antle III, wrote at the Washington Examiner:
“Out with the old, in with the new. Yet this message is complicated by the fact that the speakers lineup has been dominated by the Obamas, the Clintons, the Bidens, and Pelosi, with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), who was first elected to Congress the year Ronald Reagan won the presidency, joining them for good measure.
“Republicans are often mocked, sometimes even by younger or more populist conservatives, for their reverence for Reagan 44 years after the 1980 presidential election. But Democrats have long engaged in similar behavior, venerating Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy for decades. Biden wanted to be compared to FDR, who died in office while the current president was still a small child, and Lyndon B. Johnson. Biden compared Trump to Herbert Hoover, a line that was dated by the time he was first elected to the Senate in 1972, the same year Republican presidential runner-up Nikki Haley was born…
“Democrats are always seeking an association with vigor, freshness, and youth, which they can more easily obtain through pop culture and A-list celebrity endorsements, whatever the actual ages of their candidates. But they are constantly searching for a new New Deal, new New Frontier, or new Great Society just as surely as Republicans seek to imitate the Reagan tax cuts. Harris has floated price controls in response to the economic conditions that preceded Reaganomics in the first place.”
I don’t do it often, but I disagree with Antle’s premise – at least the part about the Democrats having several young governors. Overall, the Democrats aren’t getting any younger, and as the writer’s final line indicates, neither are their ideas. Democrats can’t seem to agree on a national agenda that encompasses their increasingly unruly “woke” constituencies, so the age gap seems to get even worse.
When Kamala Harris came on stage for the second time last week, supposedly with a “new” set of ideas to tout to an expectant nation, she instead pulled out of her witches’ cauldron price controls and a similarly ill-conceived idea to give away $25,000 to first-time homebuyers who’d been priced out of the market by Biden’s own inflationary practices.
I’ve been saying it a lot lately, but what happens when you pour gasoline on a fire? It just burns that much hotter, not magically extinguishes the out-of-control conflagration in favor of cooling down and stabilizing.
Price controls? More free money? Who came up with that ploy? Was there ever a government price control scheme that’s worked the way it was intended? Will market forces suddenly silence themselves in order to charge consumers less, even if it makes foregoing profit for producers? It just ain’t going to happen, since once you ask someone to work as hard for everyone else as well as provide the lazy and entitled a meal plan, the whole system collapses. It’s human nature.
And free money for houses? Just like with education, providing federally sponsored stipends for first-time purchasers is destined to cause boosted inflation and make everything else cost that much more. I heard one commentator say that every home seller, knowing they’ve got some privileged homebuyers out there somewhere, will automatically raise their prices by $25 thousand – or more.
Didn’t the Democrats ever see that classic episode of “Little House on the Prairie” where Mrs. Olson reduced her prices by 20 percent so as to advertise her merchandise in the newspaper only to boost them in-store by 30 percent? That’s always the way it works, isn’t it? I seem to recall that the first thing we learned in high school economics class was that there was no such thing as a free lunch?
Unless you dwell in Democrat-land, of course, “where unicorns are made of fudge and cotton candy, and everything is free.” (Rainbow-land is from the movie “The Campaign”) If you’re in second grade and assigned to pen a book about a fictional pricing scheme, you may very well come up with something that looks like a make-believe environment.
Only this “rainbow-land” isn’t meant to be a joke. It was Kamala Harris’s serious idea about how to reduce inflation in this day and age where everything costs so darn much, taking a major bite out of the legs of people who have to pay the levies. Seriously speaking, would you entrust air-brain Kamala Harris and commie Tim Walz to handle your business?
Neither of them has had a real job. Kamala is a career government employee who went to work for politicians right out of law school and Walz was a social studies public school teacher who demonstrated a real fondness for collective living in China – where everything is free and everyone shares. Oh yeah – everyone starves, too. Scary.
Beyond their poor bench of upcoming stars, Democrats don’t appear to want to part ways with their aging line-up of political headliners, as though they cling to the past with an unusual fondness for old clothes and listening to the strange talking box in the corner on closed circuit transistor radios. It’s safe to say most of these people grew up in the days before the internet and smart phones.
They’re definitely not cool, either.
It’s almost as though Democrats are trying desperately to make one last run using their old squad. Reminiscent of a basketball team that’s gone deep every season for years with the nucleus still intact, they re-sign the aging stars for one last time hoping to squeeze another year out of them only to realize halfway in that the old “magic” is no longer there for the has-beens.
Republicans don’t have this problem because their “core” is still young, even if their figurehead or standard bearer is, let’s say, a little bit past his prime. As mid-40’s Tom Brady amply demonstrated a couple years ago, you can get by, as a football team, with a passing quarterback who isn’t required to run too much.
But Tom Brady isn’t the norm and he didn’t earn the “GOAT” label simply by being slightly above average. And quarterback is just about the only field position where someone of Brady’s advanced age could hope to avoid being regularly hit instead of scheming for his deficiencies and rolling him out to the strong side of the field.
Or maybe a kicker. It could happen.
Normally, this can be a problem for political parties. Kamala is like a fantasy football team at the beginning of the year where you’ve got several stars who you’re excited about, but the fervor becomes much less amusing – and successful – when your rookie that you were so enthused about either doesn’t play much or fizzles out.
And even worse, the fantasy draft is over, your waivers position is pathetic and there’s very little left to pick over the next week.
The Republican convention, on the other hand, featured one vigorous better-than-his-age old guy – Donald Trump – and a series of ‘back-up’ talent waiting in the wings to constitute the next generation. Trump didn’t have to plan it this way, but I’m guessing J.D. Vance’s age was meant to contrast the Democrats’, regardless of whether senile Joe ended up the presidential nominee or not.
I’m not sure exactly what order they appeared in, but Trump gave speaking slots to Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley and Marco Rubio at the RNC, among others, none of which have gone completely gray as of yet. Contrast the bright future of Republicans with price-controlling communist cackling Kamala and Tim Walz and their Soviet-throwback proclamations for the economy.
Further, J.D. Vance has a beautiful young wife and three little children, as does Ron DeSantis. No shortage of little ones to position for photo-ops at future conventions.
Besides, the old “dinosaur” Republicans are no longer in vogue. 2012 nominee Mitt Romney just isn’t welcome any longer in the Republican big tent, neither is George W. Bush and the party’s 2008 nominee, who didn’t set much of a contrast (in a good way) with uber-young Barack Obama, is no longer with us.
Lastly, Republicans are finally going to replace the decrepit old Mitch McConnell in the senate, and Speaker Mike Johnson looks poised to make a semi-lengthy journey in the House as leader of a new breed of conservatives who won’t be as willing to capitulate before they even fight. If they get a big enough majority, that is.
Slapping a new and younger face on the same old socialist/communist platform won’t do much for the Democrats, and it doesn’t matter how much “joy” and cackling giggles they have to accompany their tired old platform. And their “new” ideas…? Can it get any worse? Don’t be fooled; Democrats aren’t united or settled on a direction forward.
No wonder they feel they have to win now.
Rainbow land = Democrat socialism
Joe Biden economy
inflation
Biden cognitive decline
gas prices,
Nancy Pelosi
Biden senile
Kamala Harris candidacy
Donald Trump campaign
Harris Trump debates
J.D. Vance
Kamala vice president
Speaker Mike Johnson
Donald Trump assassination
2022 elections
Donald Trump
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Tim Walz
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