Quote:The news outlets that cover Congress obsessively have been reporting that Joseph Crowley, a Democratic representative from Queens, NY, appears perched to succeed Nancy Pelosi as the leader of the House Democrats.

Well, good for him — if he has done the work, he has done the work. But aren’t there a couple of things that are strange about this picture?

The first issue is the diversity angle. Democrats venerate diversity as they do no other value. Yet the party’s Senate leader is a white man, Charles Schumer. Many will wonder whether a party that now gets nearly half of its votes from nonwhite people — 46 percent of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 vote was from nonwhites — should be led nationally by two white people.

To me, though, the diversity issue isn’t even the main problem. Even if two white men ended up leading the Democrats, no one would doubt that the Democratic Party is the multiracial party. That much is well established, and presumably Mr. Crowley (or whoever) would name a Rainbow Coalition-ish leadership team and surely have a woman as his No. 2.

The bigger problem is geographic. If Mr. Crowley became the House Democrats’ leader, the Democrats would be led by two legislators from New York City. And that is deeply weird.

The Democrats are coming off an election in which their presidential candidate won only 487 of the nation’s 3,141 counties. Four years before, Barack Obama won just 689 against Mitt Romney. The party is in severe geographic retreat, and it has happened with alarming speed.

Mr. Schumer is a very skilled legislative leader. So for that matter is Ms. Pelosi, whatever her perceived liabilities. And maybe Mr. Crowley is Lyndon Johnson and William Pitt the Elder rolled into one. But if Democrats charge into 2020 advertising themselves as the party of New York and California, the rest of the country will notice.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/01/opini...oblem.html

WHITE FLIGHT

Yet they say Trump is the dumb one....

When you're the coastal fringe party, your choices are limited.

(05-03-2018 03:42 PM)Kronke Wrote:  When you're the coastal fringe party, your choices are limited.

Exactly.


I was going to say they would love to have leadership from somewhere like Topeka, Kansas but the truth is no they wouldn't. They don't give a damn about Topeka, Kansas or Amarillo, Texas or Columbia, South Carolina.