It’s all too easy to get caught up in the Social Media wars between Trump and his enemies where it’s 24/7 flame-throwing. So I wanted to wait a while for things to develop on two fronts: The Great Impeachment, and the report from the FBI Inspector General on the Great Russia Collusion Hoax, which is going to need a separate OP treatment.
For that matter the Impeachment thing has so many strings to it that it’s hard to cover in one hit, so I’m going to split this up into three OP’s:
An overview of Democrat strategy and problems
The stages and tactics at each stage
The arguments
Democrat Drivers and Strategy
The whole exercise has seen Pelosi involved in not one but four balancing acts over the last two years.
First, she’s been trying to keep the Far Left of the Democrats engaged with rage so they’ll be good little foot soldiers and voters in the 2020 election – while also not burning off the “moderates”. There’s no major wars, recessions or social issues outside of the usual grumblings and worries about the Supreme Court, and also no big ticket policy to fight for yet.
Second, trying to keep together the House and Senate Democrats, who have different risk exposures to the GOP and Democrat partisans.
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Third, and related to the first two, getting her party to beat Trump in 2020 whilst not being a candidate herself in the next election cycle. As House Leader she would normally be taking a step back at this stage and leaving it to the campaigns of her Party’s nominees. The trouble is those nominees look increasingly hopeless, so Pelosi has had to step out on the wire with them and use the House to damage Trump.
Fourth, she’s trying to get things done in Congress so that Trump can’t run a Harry Truman “do-nothing Congress” campaign, while at the same time stopping Trump taking credit for things he has pushed, while also pushing impeachment.
Democrat Problems
First are the ones arising naturally from her four balancing acts.
The “moderate Democrats” and their “purple” districts are why she downplayed impeachment during the 2018 election campaign. Having lived through the 1998 impeachment she’s always known how this could hurt her party as it hurt the GOP when they had a swing against them and lost House seats, though not the House or Senate. The GOP have already begun pouring a lot of money into attack adverts in those swing districts won by Democrats in 2018. That’s already raised Democrat concerns and the attacks will only increase from here. It could be a repeat of the “Blue Dog” debacle of 2010.
And enraging your own voter base is a double-edged sword here. Impeachment might end up actually helping Trump by enraging his base to the point where they’d crawl across broken glass to vote for him, as well as getting independents to sympathise.
The same problems apply in the Senate, though to a less intense degree. But so far there’s nothing that could be weaponised against GOP Senators voting down impeachment, beyond the usual Trump-hatred / you must-be-ashamed-and-guilty tactics that failed so badly in 2016.
With regard to the Democrat 2020 nomination, the timing is awful. Centrist Dems want to go slow in order to show right-leaning and independent voters in their home districts that they’re taking this seriously and not rushing to conclusions about Trump. But even aside from endless hearings and news sucking the oxygen away from the Democrat nominee debates there’s the god-awful spectacle of having several candidates forced to vacate the campaign trail to sit silently through the Senate trial from January to March while their primaries are happening. It was for this reason that way back in September there came this quote:
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“Very few hearings, if any,” said a senior Democratic aide, who said the coming investigative work will largely take place in closed-door interviews.
The flip side being that if the hearings are rushed you’re not only going to look like a kangaroo court to swing voters but also end up with a weak case to take to the Senate. There’s actually no good solution here for Pelosi.
In terms of House work, a classic example of Pelosi’s dilemma is the new US-Mexico-Canada-Trade Act (USMCA), which even the Democrats have no problem with but which Nancy has sat on for months. It will look like a big win for Trump, who was the one who pushed hard for a revamp of NAFTA. But not passing it, and other items, will make the Democrats look like they’re obsessive about impeaching Trump – which they are of course, but they can’t admit that to non-partisan voters.
As if those were not enough Pelosi has many other big problems.
The biggest being the incredible weakness of the Ukraine charges. It had long been expected that impeachment would key off the Mueller investigation’s two years of work, supposedly with huge amounts of evidence as well as the spun-off prosecutions of Trump associates, even if none of them were for Russia-collusion “charges”. It was can’t miss stuff.
But with that having died a public death the Democrats were desperate to find something else – which is when the “whistle blower” turned up with tales of dirty deeds by Trump with regard to Ukraine in a phone call. However when Trump simply released the transcript a lot of the air went out of the charges immediately. This was not how he was expected to react; the Democrats had thought he’d go for Executive Privilege and keep the contents secret, enabling them to spend months talking about what secrets he was hiding and cover-ups. When anybody could read the transcript and draw their own conclusions the Democrats were reduced from simple assertions to argument, which they’re not good at, especially when they had to throw them together in just weeks.
Moreover the weaker the case the easier it would be for Cocaine Mitch to just turf the thing the moment it arrives in the Senate.
But McConnell will be as keen as Pelosi to get this behind them and move on to the election.
Then there is the hyper-partisanship of the entire nation. Appeals to Good Will, the Rule of Law and all that are simply falling flat in the face of two largish groups of voters who don’t believe that their opponents believe in any of that. It’s political warfare down to the last, unbroken bone, pure and simple. Impeachment has to be bi-partisan to have any impact – right Mr Nadler, Ms Pelosi, et al….?
1998 vs. 2019 Impeachment Mashup
“The Republicans in the House are paralysed with hatred. Until the Republicans free themselves of this hatred, our country will suffer” – Nancy Pelosi, 1998.
“There must never be a narrowly voted impeachment or an impeachment supported by one of our major political parties and opposed by the other. Such an impeachment will produce the divisiveness and bitterness in our politics for years to come and will call into question the very legitimacy of our political institutions.” – Jerry Nadler, 1998
Chuckle! Politicians eh? I can see the crocodile tears from here.
There’s also the general disengagement of the voting public from this shitstorm, probably because there’s nothing there as catchy as Nixon’s secret Whitehouse tapes and because this looks like just another lump in the three year old soup of Trump-Hate.It’s just not registering despite the MSM’s best efforts at placing the news front and centre. Here’s the Minneapolis Star Tribune “Most Read” items from just a few days ago.
And that’s the final big problem that hurts the Democrats as they try to build the case with voters: the MSM is dead. In 1974 there were only four national broadcast channels and a few extra broadcast channels in local areas. If you tired of Days Of Our Lives or All My Children then endless hours of Impeachment testimony might tempt you. But nowadays such coverage is fighting against hundreds of cable and satellite TV channels, plus thousands of YouTube and Vimeo channels, Twitter pages, Facebook, etc, etc. And that’s before we consider the incredibly low trust in the MSM that the public now evinces.
ATTN: Metaphor alert.
It’s no wonder that the whole thing has made no headway with anybody but Democrat partisans.
No Minister 