A MODERATE DEMOCRAT SPEAKS – AT 1:37 P.M. ET:  There are moderate Democrats.  I think I saw one at the local mall yesterday.  I asked for his autograph, but was turned down.

Now a prominent moderate, Doug Schoen, speaks out against what is happening at the extremes of his party.  From Fox: 

As Democrats campaign for the Nov. 6 midterm elections, they have plenty of legitimate criticisms to level at President Trump and Republicans who control the House and Senate. But Democrats were hurt in recent days by amazing and disgusting comments made by Hillary Clinton and former Attorney General Eric Holder.

As a Democrat, I want my party to win as many seats as possible in the House and Senate and to capture as many governorships and other state offices as it can. But the Clinton and Holder remarks do not advance that effort – they hurt it.

Former Secretary of State and 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Clinton said Tuesday that “you cannot be civil with” the Republican Party because it “wants to destroy what you stand for, what you care about.” She added that “if we are fortunate enough to win back the House and or the Senate, that’s when civility can start again.”

But even worse than Clinton’s comments were those of Eric Holder, who said at a recent campaign event in Georgia that Democrats should abandon the advice of former first lady Michelle Obama, who said at the 2016 Democratic National Convention that her party and mine should respond positively to negative attacks from the GOP.

Mrs. Obama said that “when someone is cruel or acts like a bully, you don’t stoop to their level. No, our motto is, when they go low, we go high.”

Holder argued just the opposite, saying: “When they go low, we kick them. That’s what this new Democratic Party is about.” He later said he wasn’t advocating violence – not literal kicking.

I beg to differ with both Clinton and Holder.

The only way the Democrats can regain the majority in either or both houses of Congress is by being civil, and pointing out the differences between Democrats and Republicans on the issues.

And...

We should have learned from the Senate confirmation hearing for now-Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh that resisting for the sake of resisting doesn’t work. In fact, Democratic attacks on Kavanaugh may well have backfired, recent polls show.

The Democratic Party itself is lost now, without a message, a direction, a strategy, or agenda to confront a Republican Party that is seen as in many ways as having let the American people down.

We need change – but it must be constructive change. This Democrat believes that the comments that Eric Holder and Hillary Clinton made are wrong, counterproductive, and deserve to be rejected by the leadership of the Democratic Party.

American voters generally don’t support extremists. In 1964, Republican presidential candidate and Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater famously said “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.” He won 52 electoral votes, compared to 486 for Democratic President Lyndon Johnson. While Goldwater was a conservative, Democratic extremists on the left have not and likely will not overcome the reluctance of voters to support one extreme or the other.

COMMENT:   Read the whole thing.  I don't agree that the Republicans have let the American people down.  Quite the contrary, the party has delivered.  But that error does not detract from Schoen's accurate point that Democratic anger and fist-banging is getting the party nowhere.

October 14, 2018