What the Democrat Establishment Thinks About 2020 (They’re Fooling Themselves)

Democrat politicians run an echo-chamber operation. They rarely expose themselves to real Americans or contrarian viewpoints. They use focus groups to test how to best phrase issues to advance their political cause, and then they endlessly repeat those phrases in public statements that are propagated by Democrat operatives in the legacy media. One has to listen very carefully to discover the occasional kernel of truth that is contained within the avalanche of their repetitious rhetoric.

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Some Democrats are more equal than others in terms of their predictions on elections and other matters. Within the Democrat cocoon, a few of the insects set the tone for the rest by virtue of “successful past performance” in service of the Democrat Party. One of those queen bees is Rahm Emanuel, a ranking member of the “Chicago Democrat mafia.” Here are a couple of bullet points that summarize his political career; note that the sourced article even refers to him as a “Democrat Party Prodigy”:

  • In 1988, Emanuel served as the national campaign director for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee
  • In 1989, he became the senior advisor and chief fundraiser for Richard Daley’s campaign for the Chicago mayorship
  • [D]irector of finance for Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign in 1992
  • In 2000, President Clinton named Emanuel to the board of directors of the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation, best known today as Freddie Mac. During this time, it is estimated that Emanuel made more than $18 million. [Me: this is how Democrat operatives are paid back for their services – on the taxpayers’ dime!]
  • In January 2007, … Emanuel [was elected] to serve as chair of the Democratic Caucus
  • On November 6, 2008, Emanuel accepted the position of White House Chief of Staff for … President Barack Obama
  • On February 22, 2011, Emanuel was elected mayor of Chicago
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Emanuel straddled and served two important Democrat tribes: the Clintons and the Obamas. He is as well-connected and well-regarded as anyone within the Democrat Party, and when he speaks publicly, other Democrats listen because he is a ranking member of the Democrat establishment and conveys their views.

Emanuel appeared as a member of George Stephanopoulos’s roundtable on his Sunday morning news show on ABC. Apparently, Emanuel is a regular contributor to ABC. He made several comments that illuminate Democrat establishment thinking about the upcoming 2020 congressional elections and the Senate impeachment trial. Let’s take a look at what he said in response to Stephanopoulos’s first question about comparing the Clinton to Trump impeachment proceedings.

Emanuel: Well, here’s how I take a look at it. This is totally different than ’98, and the reason is, Newt Gingrich pursued the case and lost six seats in 100 years. It never happened before.

Stephanopoulos interjected: And trial then after that.

Emanuel: Right, but — and he got booted. We’ve have had four elections while the impeachment had gone on, governor in Louisiana, Kentucky, Virginia and Delaware County in Pennsylvania. This is no problem for the Democrats. They have cleanly swept all of those areas. What actually is a problem here, politically, is for the Republicans in the Senate. We know what’s going to happen with Trump. The fact is if you vote no on witnesses, that’s going to come back to haunt you. You vote no on fact — on documents, that’s going to come back to haunt you. We’ve had a test case already, four elections — Kentucky, Louisiana, not blue states, Virginia, purple state, Delaware County in Pennsylvania, which has five Republicans, all got swept out. You already know the electoral impact of the impeachment. Democrats are not losing like the Republicans in ’98 did, …

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Me: Emanuel provides a false comparison between Republican losses in the midst of the Clinton impeachment in 1998 versus Republican losses during the Trump impeachment proceedings in 2019. The circumstances were entirely different. He implies that the Democrat wins in local elections in Louisiana, Kentucky, Virginia, and Pennsylvania “prove” that the Democrats are going to carry that trend through the 2020 congressional elections. All of those elections won by Democrats last year were not congressional elections, and they were decided on local issues, not on the subject of impeachment, e.g., the incumbent Republican governor in Kentucky was not well-liked, and the Virginia Democrat sweep was made possible by massive Soros campaign donations, whereas the Republican congressional losses in 1998 were expressly due to Democrat candidates running on the topic of impeaching Clinton. Does Emanuel seriously believe the Democrats will gain seats if they run on impeaching President Trump, the most successful president that many Americans have ever seen? Furthermore, the Democrats owned the legacy media in 1998 and convinced the American people that Clinton’s impeachment was “all about sex” when in reality he committed 11 felonies that were described in the Clinton articles of impeachment. While the Democrats own the legacy media nowadays, too, the American people have seen through the Democrats’ impeachment farce thanks to the reporting of independent media, what they personally observed during the House star-chamber hearings, and the absence of any impeachable crimes in the Trump articles of impeachment. Finally, unlike 1998, the President will be at the top of the ticket in 2020, and the “down-ballot effect” will be substantially in favor of House and Senate Republican candidates, particularly after the President is acquitted by the Senate.

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Emanuel continued: … and the fact is the Senate majority is at risk here as you vote no, where 75 percent of the American people ready to say they want witnesses, and that’s going to come back to haunt them. … [H]ere’s the thing. You’re going to have a vote; 75 percent of American people are for witnesses. You vote no, that’s going to be a rendezvous with your record when you’re up in the Senate. Number two, if the Democrats were smart, once they vote no on the witnesses, bifurcate and say, OK, we want the documents. Then how do you back up into that? You got to parallel park into that position. And now the other thing is, in the last three months, tell me one piece of evidence that has come out that has worked to Donald Trump’s point that I was actually worried about the Ukrainian corruption.

Me: Emanuel then lets the cat out of the bag on the Democrats’ real impeachment strategy. They know that the Republican-controlled Senate won’t vote to remove the President, and although they’ll never say so publicly, I am convinced they know that they have virtually no hope of defeating the President in November; what they’re after is defeating enough Republican senators in 2020 such that Democrats gain control of the Senate during President Trump’s second term. That strategy centers around selling the public on Republican’s “unfairness” in voting against allowing new witnesses to testify. Notice the use of the oft-repeated “75 percent of the American people want witnesses” phrase as a means to pressure Republican senators and plant that false seed in the minds of the viewers. The Democrats always use media polls to advance their political positions; it’s about influencing the American people in the 2020 elections. What the American people want is a fair trial according to the commonly understood definition, i.e., impartial jurors (virtually no Democrat is impartial by their own public statements), due process for the accused (not the prosecutors), and the right of the accused to cross-examine the state’s witnesses. If Emanuel and the Democrat establishment ever talked to real Americans instead of only to Democrat focus groups, they might learn that truth. Emanuel then joins the Democrat chorus to caterwaul about the need for new witnesses and new documents, yet the Democrats all claim that the enormity of the existing evidence compiled by the Democrat-run House is conclusive of the President’s “guilt” and is “uncontroverted.” It would appear that intellectual incoherence is a common condition shared by all the insects in the Democrat cocoon.

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For the first time, the American people will watch the President’s pushback on the Democrat’s flimsy case for impeachment and removal that will be presented by the House managers. That flimsiness will be evident to the Republican senators, too, and they will vote accordingly on witness resolutions thereafter despite the exhortations of Chuck Schumer and other Senate Democrats.

The President has had the kitchen sink thrown at him since being elected in 2016: a long line of false allegations by people who popped up for a while and then disappeared from the scene after their allegations were proven to be lies and their political usefulness to Democrats ended. All of those false allegations were amplified by the Democrat-run legacy media in thousands of related stories to the tune of greater than 90% anti-Trump reporting, just as they were amplified by Stephanopoulos’s show this past Sunday. And yet, we see the President’s favorable ratings going up during this impeachment process. The American people see right through the sham despite what Rahm Emanuel and the Democrat establishment are continuing to spin.

The end.

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