The Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin:

President Obama has been rotten for the Democratic Party. Under his presidency, both the Senate and House majorities were lost. Democratic governors went from 27 in 2009 to a measly 16. Democrats control only 11 state legislatures, the smallest number since the 1920s.  Jon Thompson, spokesman for the Republican Governors Association tells me, “Under Obama, Republicans have increased their number of governors from 22 in 2008 to 31 in 2015, the most for either Party in 16 years. Nearly 200 million Americans will live in a state with a Republican governor in 2015, almost 2/3 of the country.” If not for New York and California, the Democratic Party would nearly be a bit player on the national scene. (Those two states give the Democrats an almost automatic 4 Senate seats, 84 electoral votes, two governors and nearly 58 million people.)

 

And the numbers go beyond seats won: The Democratic Party has lost the advantage according to polls in its ability to handle top issues ranging from the debt to foreign policy. Overall the party is at an all-time low in favorability at 36 percent. According to Gallup, Democrats are in trouble in affiliation as well. “Prior to the elections, 43% of Americans identified as Democrats or leaned toward the Democratic Party, while 39% identified as or leaned Republican. Since then, Republicans have opened up a slight advantage, 42% to 41%, representing a net shift of five percentage points in the partisanship gap.”

Can one president do this much damage to a party? There is another way of looking at this. It is not so much that Obama has been bad for the Democratic Party as the 21st century has been bad for liberalism. Faith in government has declined. The liberals’ historic national healthcare plan turned out to be an albatross around the necks of Democratic lawmakers. Only 37.9 percent of Americans approve of the Democratic Party while 52.5 percent disapprove in the RealClearPolitics poll averages.

The parties have become so ideologically polarized that for all intents and purposes the GOP is the party of conservatism and Democratic Party that of liberalism. With respect to the latter it is not so much the liberalism of FDR with a coalition of immigrants, workers, farmers and the poor but of green activists, media elites, trial lawyers, public employee unions and Silicon Valley and Hollywood moguls. (Jim Webb put it: “The Democratic Party has lost the message that made it such a great party for so many years, and that message was: Take care of working people, take care of the people who have no voice in the corridors of power, no matter their race, ethnicity or any other reason. The Democratic Party has basically turned into a party of interest groups.”)

Just as the political glue that united the party has dissolved, the intellectual backbone of the left has crumbled. Its most prominent think tank, Center for American Progress, has been hobbled by controversies and is seen as a political adjunct to the White House. (Much criticism comes from the left: “One former CAP staffer described ‘total synchronization’ between the administration and the think tank, which he said routinely allowed Team Obama to vet reports prior to publication. ‘We were constantly in touch with the White House,’ this person said. ‘Once I was on the phone with four White House lawyers who wanted to know what I was going to say [in an upcoming report].’”) It has been overshadowed by a bevy of conservative think tanks (while Brookings has become decidedly centrist on everything from defense spending to anti-poverty measures to the law of war).

The literary left has gone through convulsions. The New York Times was racked with accusations of sexism when it fired editor Jill Abramson. Newsweek failed on liberal doyenne Tina Brown’s watch. And now The New Republic – whose owner Chris Hughes won’t even call it a magazine – has eaten its own, laying off journalistic stars and earning scorn from both ends of the political spectrum. Commentary’s John Podhoretz recalls that the Weekly Standard, still going strong, was formed consciously as an intellectual opponent to TNR. There is no competition now. He vividly describes the pattern: “So I’d argue that what has befallen the New Republic is, in some ways, what has befallen liberalism writ large. It became unserious, and is about to become more unserious still, because that it what has happened to liberalism as a governing philosophy.”

And then there is the other great bastion of liberalism — higher education. Between speech code controversies, sexual assault allegations, sports and cheating scandals, their ongoing spasm of thinly disguised anti-Israel propaganda and discrimination it is evident once prestigious institutions have lost their intellectual and moral bearings.

What happened? Three trends are evident.

First, liberalism’s moral superiority led to intellectual laziness, a refusal to look at the way the world is (e.g. the failure of Keynesian economics, the nature of Islamic fundamentalism, the shortcomings of the liberal welfare state, disregard for the benefits of free markets). With that laziness came a distasteful tone. Twitter seems the perfect medium for the snarly left — filled with one-liners, personal attacks, snap judgments and just plain meanness. Identity politics, the last refuge of a movement with few policy innovations to offer, becomes the default mode for the left.

Second, the faults in liberal ideology became more acute as society became more complex. Yuval Levin (conservative philosopher, policy wonk and editor who has no liberal counterpart) writes: “But the size and cost of the liberal welfare state are a function of its basic character, and it is that character that is really at issue in most policy debates between liberals and conservatives. The fundamentally prescriptive, technocratic approach to American society inherent in the logic of the Left’s policy thinking is a poor fit for American life at any scale. The liberal welfare state ultimately cannot be had at an affordable price. It is not the architecture of one or another particular program that makes it unsustainable. It is unsustainable because the system as a whole must feed off of the innovative, decentralized vitality of American life, yet it undermines both the moral and the economic foundations of that vitality.” To be blunt, a set of assumptions about society and the world that were wrong but passable in 1960 are an obvious debacle in 2014. Giving the left power in the form of their dream president proved a fatal move, allowing all to see its gross shortcomings.

Third, the left’s disdain for limitations on its quest for power (the rule of law, factual accuracy, due process, personal civility) has proven to be unwise and self-destructive. Smash-and-grab politics cannot sustain itself. The president can’t simply make up facts and seize power from the legislative branch to achieve what he wants. The narrative cannot be accurate if the facts are wrong. Fair-minded people revolt against kangaroo courts and institutional railroading. And loss of polite debate and respect for opponents erode the public square and obviates the requirement for much needed self-reflection and reasoned argument. As universities fall down on their job of instilling ethical and intellectual excellence the failures of other liberal institutions (the media, the think tanks) leave a movement adrift and shallow.

This is analogous to Obama’s continuing to get awards from gun sales organizations as the Salesman of the Year, thanks to his continuing rhetoric against our Second Amendment rights.

The same situation has occurred in this state. When Obama was inaugurated president in 2009, Wisconsin had a Democratic governor and Democratic control of both houses of the Legislature, two Democratic U.S. senators, and four Democrats in the majority party in the House of Representatives. Since the 2010 election, Wisconsin has had a Republican governor and Republican control of both houses (except for the brief Democratic Senate majority during Recallarama) of the Legislature, one Republican U.S. senator, and five Republicans in the majority party in the House.

Democratic candidates tried to talk about the middle class and working families this fall. Apparently voters weren’t buying it, and it’s not hard to see why when your party is in fact in thrall to “green activists, media elites, trial lawyers, public employee unions and Silicon Valley and Hollywood moguls.” Wisconsin has neither a Silicon Valley nor Hollywood, nor many moguls, but certainly the rest applies to this state.

Predictions of the demise of a political party based on one bad-for-them election are foolish. (You may recall the GOP was supposedly dead after 2008 — and for that matter 1992 — and some people still feel that way for spurious demographic reasons.) It took the Democrats three losing presidential elections to think differently a quarter century ago. Neither Hillary Clinton nor Elizabeth Warren look like saviors.