The Washington Post reports:
A senior House Democrat said Thursday that it’s time for House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and two top lieutenants to prepare to step down and make way for the next generation of lawmakers in her caucus.
The comments by Rep. Linda T. Sánchez (Calif.), who as vice chairman of the House Democratic Caucus ranks fifth in the 194-member body, are the most explicit to date by a senior congressional Democrat and a member of the California congressional delegation about Pelosi’s political future.
The remarkable thing is not this being said, but that there is any possibility of the senior leadership remaining considering how miserably they have failed. Since the election of Barack Obama, when the Republicans looked like they were destroyed as a national party, the Democrats have lost the White House to a candidate as terrible as Donald Trump. have lost both houses of Congress, and have lost over one thousand seats at the state level.
The Democrats have ceased to stand for anything other than trying to win elections, and their main strategy has to move right and be slightly less conservative than the Republicans. This has repeatedly failed.
There were moments when some in the Democratic leadership questioned the wisdom of nominating Hillary Clinton. This was not because she was a warmonger who spent her career undermining liberal values and used her government positions to enrich herself while violating basic principles of government ethics. They only questioned the nomination of a candidate as unfit for government office as Hillary Clinton when they thought she was vulnerable. When she did well in the first Democratic debate, and briefly looked like a stronger candidate, they had no qualms about breaking the party’s own rules to rig the nomination for her.
When Republicans lost in a landslide in 1964 they did not abandon conservatism. They continued to promote their beliefs, understanding that it could take more than one election cycle to build an electoral majority. They have gone on to win the majority of presidential elections despite Watergate and the fiasco of George W. Bush’s administration.
Democrats, in contrast, have refused to stand for anything, giving many people no reason to vote for them. They have repeatedly ran as a Republican-lite party, failing to try to build their party around principles as the Republicans have done (even if the wrong principles). When a strong candidate surprisingly did come along in 2016 who could bring in the votes of both independents and even many Republicans, the party rejected Sanders. By sticking with Clinton, the Democrats not only lost the White House, they also lost a strong chance at control of the Senate due to losses by Democrats dragged down by Clinton heading the ticket.
Party leaders responsible for the fiasco of nominating Clinton, along with the other mistakes in recent elections, deserve to be replaced.
