In a Saturday Night Live skit spoofing the 1988 presidential debates, Dana Carvey portrayed George H.W. Bush emitting a word salad of campaign slogans while trying to fill his allotted time: “On track… stay the course… a thousand points of light… stay the course.”
Jon Lovitz, playing that year’s Democratic nominee, Michael Dukakis, shot back, “I can’t believe I’m losing to this guy.”
(Thomas Fluharty for the Washington Examiner)
Democratic strategists find themselves expressing similar sentiments about this year’s race for the White House and former President Donald Trump, except they are not at all amused. Some are shocked. Many profess to be terrified, regarding Trump as an authoritarian threat to the entire political system. Trump is also now a convicted felon. Democrats are reportedly circulating worst-case scenarios among themselves, though the guilty verdict could change the fundamentals to their benefit.
“How is this even a close race?” a Democrat working on congressional campaigns this year told the Washington Examiner when asked to sum up the prevailing sentiment. “Much less, how can we possibly be losing?”
Yet a considerable amount of their angst is directed at the Democrat sitting in the Oval Office, President Joe Biden. The New York Times’s Ezra Klein, a plugged-in liberal pundit, cranked out a list of seven theories for why the man at the top of the ticket is losing. And he did ultimately place the blame squarely on Biden.
“The electorate hasn’t turned on Democrats; a crucial group of voters has turned on Biden,” Klein wrote. New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait said much the …