James Carville says this will take care of itself
Indignity Vol. 5, No. 36
THE WORST THING WE READ™
Are Democrats in a Winning Position?
WHERE ARE THE limits of Donald Trump's grab for authority? Yesterday, the American Prospect's executive editor, David Dayan, declared that they've already been reached. The question, Dayan wrote, was—or had been—"whether he would bully the country into an effective monarchy, or fall prey to the laws of political gravity."
His answer ("I'm taking a pundit risk") was "Trump's cooked." Inspired by the rapid deflation of Trump's trial balloon about firing the Postal Service board and absorbing the Postal Service into the Commerce Department—along with the spectacle of some sagging poll numbers, weak economic prospects, and Republican grumbling—Dayan concluded that even though "terrible things are going to happen," the republic was on its way out of the danger. "[W]hen Trump disgracefully walks out of Washington in 2029," he wrote, "I’m far more inclined to believe that we will have a government to return to."
This optimistic interpretation of the situation was not confined to the earnest, liberal pages of the American Prospect. In today's New York Times opinion section, James Carville— the cynical long-ago campaign strategist for Bill Clinton turned pundit of the imagined dissatisfied American middle—declared that the key to a Democratic comeback against Trump would be to simply "let the Republicans’ own undertow drag them away":
With no clear leader to voice our opposition and no control in any branch of government, it’s time for Democrats to embark on the most daring political maneuver in the history of our party: roll over and play dead. Allow the Republicans to crumble beneath their own weight, and make the American people miss us. Only until the Trump administration has spiraled into the low 40s or high 30s in public approval polling percentages should we make like a pack of hyenas and go for the jugular.
As with Dayan's "laws of political gravity," the underlying metaphors for Carville were physical, rational, inexorable: the Trump movement dragged by the undertow, crumbling under its own weight, spiraling downward. Politics and public opinion will rebalance themselves, and power will follow.
What if power goes its own way, instead, though?
