If there is one thing for which you can always count on Democrats, it’s their penchant for rewriting history when it suits their political needs.
In an op-ed for The Atlantic, author David A. Graham made the dubious claim that Democrats are no longer taking the high road against Republicans as they supposedly have in the past and are just now getting into the mud, so to speak.
It’s okay to take a few seconds if you want to finish laughing before you continue reading this.
Okay, let’s get back to it.
In the piece, the author recalls how former First Lady Michelle Obama exhorted Democrats during the 2016 campaign to stay above the nasty rhetoric characterized by the Orange Man What Is Bad™.
During Donald Trump’s crude and shambolic first run for president in 2016, Michelle Obama offered a mission statement for the Democratic Party that doubled as a pithy summary of her family’s political project: “When they go low, we go high.” A decade and a half before that, Barack Obama announced himself as a major figure by declaring at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, “There’s not a liberal America and a conservative America; there’s the United States of America.”
Neither of those statements seems true today. The country is more divided than it has been in generations, and when Republicans go low, Democrats are willing to be snarky and insult the Republican ticket of Donald Trump and J. D. Vance right back. The party has changed during, or been changed by, the Trump years.
At the Democratic National Convention in their hometown of Chicago last night, the Obamas showed that they, too, are ready to get their hands dirty, but also that they haven’t given up on a rosier vision of what things can be.
The notion that Democrats are just now resorting to mudslinging has been pushed by others as well. I highlighted a New York Times editor who made a similar argument in July.
Yet, Graham’s assertion that it was the Trump era that finally pushed Democrats over the edge is about as laughable as it gets. Apparently, the author appears to believe his readers were all born after 2016. Luckily, I’m here to take us down memory lane to the pre-Trump era.
First, let us journey back to the 2012 campaign when Mitt Romney was trying to unseat Obama. Democrats pulled out all the stops against him, especially then-Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid falsely accused Romney of not paying taxes for 10 years, claiming that a “credible” source gave him the information. The Republican candidate later released his tax records showing that he had been paying taxes and that Reid was lying.
Reid expressed no remorse for spreading that particular falsehood.
Yet Reid (D-Nev.) not only refused to retract the allegation [in a 2016 interview], but also seemed to take great pride in it. When pressed by CNN's Dana Bash last year about continuing to defend a statement that is not true, Reid responded, "Romney didn't win, did he?"
Now, in a new interview with WaPo's Ben Terris, Reid echoes those sentiments. Here's Reid's full response to Ben's question about the Romney attack:
People bring that up, it’s one of the best things I’ve ever done. Why? Because I knew what he had done was not be transparent and forthright about his taxes and to this day he hasn’t released his tax returns. … Did I want to do that? No. I had the information, I tried to get somebody else to do it. I tried to get somebody in the Obama 'reelect,' I tried to get one of the senators, I tried to get one of the outside groups, but nobody would do it. So I did it. And with that, like everything, I think in life, here’s something I learned from my father, if you’re going to do something, don’t do it half-assed, don’t play around. With the Mitt Romney stuff, I didn’t play around. ...
This doesn’t exactly sound like taking the high road, does it?
The Chairman of the Democrat Party and former presidential candidate, Howard Dean, later tried to walk back the remarks, claiming they were taken “a little out of context.” Interestingly enough, Dean never gave up his incendiary rhetoric.
He said in 2021 that the GOP is now a “neo-fascist” party that believes in “autocracy not democracy.”
“These people are crazy. They’re conspiracy theorists, they’re whack jobs. They’re embedding their own reality. I mean, if they ever really run the country, it’s going to be a disaster for us. ’Cause you... this is why autocrats don’t run good economies because they start believing in their own BS,” he said.
“You have a Republican Party, which emotionally, essentially are neo-fascist. They fundamentally do not believe that another legitimate point of view exists other than theirs.”
Former MSNBC host Keith Olbermann, who is everything The Atlantic's writer Graham accuses Republicans of being, also used this type of rhetoric, referring to George W. Bush as a “fascist.”
We would also be remiss to leave out Joe Biden’s comments about Republicans during the 2012 race. While addressing a crowd of black Americans, Biden claimed that if Romney was elected, the GOP was going to “put y’all back in chains.”
This is but a smattering of the foul, vile, and incendiary things Democrats have uttered in the years preceding Trump. This is the rhetoric Graham would rather his audience forget. Unfortunately for him, the internet is forever and it shows that Democrats back in the day were just as nasty as they are today.
