Do Democrats Have a Pulse? Maybe

 

I had just finished reading -- and agreeing with -- Thomas Mills' editorial attacking the Democrats' insecurity about making a big issue out of Trump's 34 felonies -- Democrats look "weak, uncertain, and incompetent," Mills wrote, while Republicans are unified in attacking the justice system itself -- when I also noticed that Joe Biden may also have read Thomas, because Biden went after Trump yesterday as a "convicted felon" at a campaign event: “For the first time in American history a former president that is a convicted felon is now seeking the office of the presidency,” Biden said at a fundraiser in Greenwich, Connecticut. “But as disturbing as that is, more damaging is the all-out assault Donald Trump is making on the American system of justice,” he continued, going on to call Trump “unhinged.”

What set Thomas Mills off was the memory of how John Kerry went into a mute and defensive crouch when he was "swift-boated" in 2004 and that Democrats seems to be similarly unsure how to play Trump's convictions in 2024:

[Kerry's] lead pollsters told us [Mills was working on the Kerry campaign team at the time] that the ads were not affecting Kerry’s numbers and that his war record was still his strongest single attribute. They believed that the controversy would die down and that we would not hear about criticism of Kerry’s heroics going down the stretch in the period from Labor Day to Election Day. They would not respond with attacks on Bush and would address the ad’s criticism mainly through the press.

I thought then, and believe now, that it was the most naive response to an attack I had seen up to that point in my political career.

We know now, after decades of frustrating experience, that Democrats are by nature naive, by nature hesitant, by effing nature always worried what someone -- anyone -- is going to think of them if they do anything to fight back, so I took it as a good sign that Dark Brandon is willing to go nose-to-nose with Trump's fat, felon face.