Democrats are ill equipped to unite the country

Madison Gesiotto:

For a party that regularly claims it wants to remove President Trump from office in order to “unite” the country, there was an awful lot of pressure for absolute partisan loyalty on the Democrat debate stage Wednesday night. Senator Kamala Harris, for example, announced her run for president promising to be a president “for all the people” because Americans “have much more in common than what separates us.”

On Wednesday, the aspiring “president for all the people” stood on the debate stage and claimed that one of her rivals, Representative Tulsi Gabbard, is not qualified to be the Democratic nominee because she has appeared on Fox News, the most popular cable channel in America, and has occasionally criticized other Democrats.

It’s somewhat difficult to be the president for “all” the people if you deliberately ignore half the country while insisting on absolute fealty to a party line, but Harris didn’t see the irony. She closed her attack by saying the Democrats need someone who can “bring the Party and the nation together.”

Vanity candidate Andrew Yang has also tried to position himself as “non ideological” and “not left, not right, but forward.” He’s even courted the wrath of the #resistance by saying he doesn’t have a problem with Trump supporters. But on Wednesday, he quipped that if he won, the first thing he would tell Russian President Vladimir Putin would be, “sorry I beat your guy.”

Calling Donald Trump Putin’s “guy” is an insult to the 63 million Americans who sent him to the White House in an Electoral College landslide. It’s quite a stretch to claim that you’re non ideological when you spout hyper-partisan conspiracy theories that were invented by resentful campaign operatives to deflect the blame for their crushing defeat.

Even the “top tier” candidates couldn’t resist disparaging huge portions of the American electorate while trying to tout their ability to unify the country. South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg, who has tried to position himself as a moderate perhaps more aggressively than any other candidate, melodramatically claimed he "sometimes feel[s] like a stranger in my own country” because he is gay. That’s certainly the way far-left activists tend to view America, but it’s totally at odds with the country most of us know.

The rhetoric, of course, underscores a darker reality. The Democratic socialist agenda is, with few exceptions, broadly unpopular outside of activist circles. Public support for “Medicare for All,” for instance, plummets once people learn that it means they’ll be forced to give up their current health plan. Elizabeth Warren’s “wealth tax,” meanwhile, is coming under fire from all directions, with economists pointing out that wealth taxes are notoriously inefficient and difficult to administer, producing far less revenue than projected.

Then, of course, there are the truly insane proposals that don’t even require a rebuttal because their flaws are so readily apparent, such as taxpayer-funded healthcare for illegal aliens or raising taxes on middle-income Americans. After three years of fanatical opposition to Donald Trump, the activists are in the driver’s seat of this primary process. Passing their partisan purity test is putting the candidates in an awkward position, forcing them to argue, in effect, that the only way to unify the country is through rabid partisanship and far-left Democratic socialism.
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Democrats seem eager to insult all Trump voters and yet claim they want to unite the country.  Their idea is to unite the country like despots do by attacking the "other" and demonizing them.  In the process, most Trump voters would rather vote against all Democrats than support those who hate them.