The mediocre candidates running for the Democrat nomination

Conrad Black:

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The Democrats placed all their bets on Hillary Clinton, and kept raising the ante in the misplaced belief that President Trump could be driven from office as a traitor, a crook, and an incompetent. They bet everything and will lose everything, and some of their prominent personalities will be doing the tap dance before the grand jury in the run-up to the next election. Their vast media claque will suffer a severe lapse of credibility and ratings, given how heavily invested they are in peddling hatred and contempt of the president, which has vastly exceeded fair comment and any acceptable standard of journalistic professionalism.

It is as these facts impend that this astonishing public marathon of Democratic presidential candidates has swarmed out of the undergrowth. Even highly informed Americans can scarcely have heard of at least half of those who are tossing their headgear into the ring. It seems that the wrong lesson has been drawn from the first election in history of a U.S. president who has never before sought or held elected or unelected public office or a high military command. This has been translated into the theory that anyone can be elected, but it misses the point. Donald Trump had been one of the most famous people in America for 25 years. He had pulled over 25 million people to his television program every week for 15 years, and had gone to great and calculated lengths to be well-known to relatively remote echelons of the voting public, such as the followers of professional wrestling. And he had polled carefully for 20 years and was aware of an immense build-up of voter discontent on bread-and-butter and social issues, and on the defeatism and vacillation of foreign-policy direction. He identified a possible majority of voters and placed himself carefully to be able to pitch to them.

This desultory parade of chipper, chirpy, wildly implausible, and unknown people putting themselves forward as the 44th successor to General George Washington at the head of the American people, as the sun sets on the impossible dream of reeling back and overturning the 2016 election, has proved a teeming breeding ground of completely unfeasible policy advocacy. An absurd ritual has developed, as unknown people pop up on our television screens, apologize for something in their obscure pasts as inadequately politically correct, and then stake out uncharted political waters. Spurred on by the ubiquitous and demiurgically verbose Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, an inexhaustible storehouse of naïve political opinions, these candidates outdo each other in policy fatuities. She proposed 70 percent tax rates on the highest personal incomes, and the venerable Bernie Sanders, two generations ahead of her, chimed in at 77 per cent. He and Ocasio-Cortez still fit the comparison I made recently of them with the old Marxist guru Herbert Marcuse and the Spanish Communist La Pasionaria.
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It is a collection of intellectual lightweights.  Most are running on the false premise that the Trump Presidency has been a failure.  But when you filter through all the noise that surrounds this President, Trump has done quite well at achieving the policies he ran on and those policies have dramatically improved the economy and lifted people out of poverty and dependency to which many of these Democrats would like to return them.