‘We’re just not going to vote for the economy when he’s caging children, causing all this racist rhetoric…’
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) With President Donald Trump’s failed impeachment in the rear-view mirror, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., is now looking to tear up Democrats’ old political playbook, according to Politico.
“Impeachment didn’t move the needle … so continuing to focus on that target, you’re not going to convince anyone at this point,” said Rep. Ron Kind, D-Wisc.
Instead, Pelosi intends to pivot to another false claim: that the economy isn’t as great as it seems.
Pelosi reportedly met privately with top former Obama economic advisers for a consultation on how to make the public believe that Trump’s booming market is paltry compared with the “new normal” stagnation of his predecessor.
Some of her more vulnerable party members in Congress were glad to change the subject from the Ukraine embarrassment after months of belaboring it.
“I’m glad that we’re shifting and pivoting to something else,” said Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Texas. “Every time I poll in my area, it’s always the same thing: education, health care and the economy.”
In addition to being more emboldened by his Senate acquittal last week, Trump experienced a bump in his approval rating as a result.
But Democrats must find some way to dispel the booming economic optimism that many Americans feel toward their current financial outlook if they are to successfully sell current presidential front-runner Bernie Sanders as a viable alternative.
Trust Us—You’re Suffering
The plan comes as even the left-wing Associated Press can’t help but speak glowingly of the economy.
On Wednesday, it reported, “Stronger-than-expected company earnings reports and positive U.S. economic data have helped keep investors in a buying mood.”
Economic naysayers who projected that Trump’s election would usher in catastrophe have long since been silenced, and few believe that an economic downturn is possible between now and the November election.
Even a force majeure, like the lingering worries over a health epidemic, can’t seem to drag the markets down.
“You have the continuing good news on the coronavirus potentially slowing and being under control, and that’s obviously powerful,” Tom Martin, senior portfolio manager with Globalt Investments, told the AP.
Notwithstanding, Rep. Kind said he hoped that the new Democratic strategy of touting economic failure would specifically target key battleground states, such as Pennsylvania, Michigan and his home state of Wisconsin.
Trump won the swing states in 2016 by tapping into the outrage of blue-collar voters who felt forgotten and ignored.
“You still see record farm bankruptcies taking place in Wisconsin, a manufacturing recession, stagnant wage growth and no paid family or medical leave policy,” Kind claimed. “These are major problems holding us back economically.”
Trump advocated for paid family leave—one of several popular Democratic talking points—during his State of the Union address while expressing hope for bipartisanship following the impeachment effort.
Instead, it seems, Democrats will try to use the economy as a political bludgeon rather than spending the next nine months working in tandem with Republicans to address any lingering shortcomings.
Ironically, some—including many so-called fact-checkers in the liberal media—had not gotten the message that the economy is bad and, as recently as last week, were continuing their efforts to credit President Barack Obama with ushering it in.
Even Pelosi’s second-in-command, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, struggled to shift gears.
“It would not be a saleable argument to say the economy’s not doing well. It has been doing well, it continues to do relatively well,” Hoyer said at a briefing with reporters, according to Politico. “But, quite frankly, the economy is growing jobs at about 30,000 less than the Obama administration.”
What Impeachment?
Likewise, it seems the Left hopes to deny ever having gone all-in on its previous impeachment effort.
Contrary to the fact that many far-left radicals were vowing during the 2018 election to impeach the president, re-affirming it on their inauguration day, and had actually brought articles of impeachment to the floor on three separate occasions prior to the Ukraine attempt, the left-leaning Politico claimed that Democrats only came to supporting it last fall.
“Pelosi and other top Democrats have never thought impeachment would be a winning political message, fully aware that he would be acquitted by the Senate,” insisted Politico. “They refused to even consider the possibility of impeaching Trump until the fall, when Trump was accused of pressuring Ukraine to investigate his political rivals.”
But during an acquittal celebration with GOP allies last week, Trump—like many others—expressed his doubts that Pelosi’s claims to be reluctant about impeachment were ever genuine.
In March 2019, both she and Rep. Adam Schiff publicly disavowed impeachment, but similar to Schiff’s prior claims that he had evidence of Russian collusion with the Trump campaign, their statements were widely regarded as little more than theatrical posturing to set the scaffold for their inevitable attempt.
Far from being broadsided by the consequences, Pelosi accurately predicted the outcome a full 10 months prior to Trump’s acquittal—and four months before the phone call that Democrats sought to use as the pretense for the impeachment.
“Impeachment is so divisive to the country that unless there’s something so compelling and overwhelming and bipartisan, I don’t think we should go down that path because it divides the country,” Pelosi said last March. “And he’s just not worth it.”
But the eventual case that Pelosi signed off for was neither compelling—with no actual crime having been committed—nor was it bipartisan. Rather, four House Democrats refused to support the articles, with two voting against both of them.
Rep. Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey switched parties shortly thereafter and became a Trump-supporting Republican.
Setting Up Another Failure
Even Politico readily acknowledged that Pelosi’s latest gaslighting effort ran counter to common-sense.
According to polling conducted by the Navigator Research group, “candidates playing the partisan blame game—arguing, for example, that Obama pulled the country out of a recession—would lose in a head-to-head against Trump’s economic message 38 percent to 41 percent.”
It said that the winning message for Democrats was talking to people “about what’s happening in their lives.”
But, yet again, the Left seems only willing to glean from that what it can spin to its existing message of fear-mongering and politically correct identity politics.
Longtime impeachment hawk Ruben Gallego, D-Ariz., doubled down on the need to sell Democrats on the stale message of child separations at the border even as Trump has focused on reaching out to marginalized minorities while effectively fixing the Democrat-engineered border crisis and fighting political crosswinds in the process.
“Black and Latino voters aren’t selfish voters,” Gallego said. “We’re just not going to vote for the economy when he’s caging children, causing all this racist rhetoric, doing all these types of things that I think affect our communities, not just jobs.”