Bad Logic and Circular Reasoning by Democratic "Moderates" (aka Reaction to the End of the Shutdown)
So the government shutdown is over, and eight Senate Democrats did exactly what everyone said they should not do: break ranks and end the shutdown while getting nothing from Republicans. As I put it in September, two weeks before the shutdown began, "the only thing left for Democrats now is to 'win the politics' of the shutdown." But even though the Democrats were clearly winning, with most Americans blaming Trump and the Republicans, these eight geniuses decided that it would be better to let Republicans up off the mat.
Why? One of the defectors, New Hampshire's Jeanne Shaheen, said this: "When I talk to my constituents in New Hampshire, you know what they say to me? They say, 'Why can't you all just work together to address the problems that are facing this country?'" I guess if "addressing" the problems of the country means making sure that they will get worse, then good work, Senator Shaheen!
To be clear, while the media immediately labeled this group of turncoats the Senate's "moderates," that is only accurate in the sense that these eight are among a very large group of Democratic senators who are in no way progressive. (Well, one of the eight was John Fetterman, who is now beyond any coherent political description.) That is, it is not the Democratic moderates who caved. Some of them did. Among those who did not wave the white flag were Amy Klobuchar, Chris Coons, Michael Bennet, Kirsten Gillibrand, Jeff Merkley, and Elissa Slotkin. I could have listed dozens more, but the point is that it is not the Sanders/Warren "wing" of the Senate versus the poor, beleaguered middle-of-the-road punching bags. Even most of the people whose very DNA screams "Stand for nothing!" stood for this shutdown.
As it happens, my Dorf on Law column last Friday focused on the terrible conventional wisdom that drives these mushy-minded career politicians. My larger point there and in my previous column was that the people who say that the 2024 presidential election results were driven by economic issues have embraced some particularly flawed logic. That is, they saw (A) polling indicating that voters were angry about consumer prices; then they saw (B) a few million people flip from Biden in 2020 to Trump in 2024; so they concluded that A caused B. That is obviously fallacious.
And it was worse when even some non-mushy moderates went all in on a rather amusing form of circular reasoning. In response to Paul Krugman's unexamined claim that the big move toward Trump by Latino voters (especially men) was driven by their anger over prices, I wrote this:
If it were about feeling pinched in the pocketbook, why would it be only Latinos who shifted to Trump while no one else did? For that matter, why would Latinas not have "believ[ed] that he would deliver prosperity" as strongly as their male counterparts supposedly did? Is there some unknown social science research showing that Latino men are super-responsive to economic stress, that Latinas are kinda-sorta responsive to economic stress, and no one else cares about economic stress enough to change their votes?
But in the face of facts and logic to the contrary, the reasoning goes like this: (A) People voted based on anger over prices; (B) Some voting demographics flipped to Trump more than others; (C) Those extra-Trump-shifting demographics must have been more angry about prices. Why? See (A).
All of which is bad, but the worst part of it all is that the vaunted moderates, including those who just kneecapped their own party (and the country), have an especially annoying habit of saying that every election result -- win or lose -- is proof that the only thing Democrats should care about is the economy. Everything else is "identity politics," always a "distraction from what real Americans care about," with the underlying argument being so hard to pin down that they never have to back up their claims.
By coincidence (but are there truly any coincidences in this context?), the moderate Democratic senator who drew my attention in that column was Virginia's Tim Kaine, who just so happens to be one of the eight people who squandered all of the political capital that the Democrats had recently amassed. Kaine was tapped to be Hillary Clinton's running mate in 2016 not to balance the ticket but simply to put a mushy, inoffensive nonentity on the ballot. Why scare anyone by choosing a VP candidate who has a pulse?
In Friday's column, I quoted Kaine's comments from an interview after last week's big wins for Democratic candidates in the off-term elections, where he went with the fully stupid "It's the economy, stupid" explanation: "[T]he economy is always the issue that matters the most to the most people. ... Democrats just talk about other stuff. We just can't resist chasin' this or that rabbit, talkin' about other stuff, and we don't make the economy front and center." That was nonsense, but it was actually worse than that.
The block quote from which I drew that blather started with this: "Abigail [Spanberger] was very disciplined, and she made her campaign about the economy. ... ." What was in the ellipsis? "There were three pillars: it was affordability, and jobs, and education -- but education is really key to the work force, not just kids, but to the work force." So when a winning Democratic candidate talks about something other than the economy, Kaine assures us that it is "really" about economics. That is not to deny that education has economic effects, especially (but not exclusively) via the work force, but we can just as easily describe all of the "rabbits" that Democrats are supposedly spending too much time chasin' as being about the work force as well. Women's bodily autonomy? Work force and the economy. Racial and ethnic discrimination? Work force and the economy. LGBTQ+ freedom to be fully human? Work force and the economy.
To repeat the larger point, hopefully more clearly than before: When the Kaines of the world decide that an issue is not something that they want to talk (or even care) about, it becomes "other stuff"; but when a non-economic issue is interesting to them, they shoehorn it into being an economic issue. And that is before we even get to the question that I emphasized last Friday, which is that there is never any hint of what counts as sufficient fronting and centering of the economy. In that block quote, Kaine himself says: "Many other issues are really important -- talk about 'em too, but put the economy front and center." Tight logic.
The title of the Youtube video from which I am quoting is "Tim Kaine: Hillary's Biggest Mistake Still Haunts Democrats." The video was of an interview on The Bulwark, which is the NeverTrump conservative channel that continues to laud people like Kaine in a mashup of groups who think that the world would be great if only everyone were a George W. Bush-era conservative. And what was the mistake by the 2016 Clinton campaign that "still haunts Democrats"?
Interviewer: It does sort of remind me of you and Hillary Clinton frankly in 2016, where you're running down the stretch, and Trump presents this unique kind of existential threat, and you feel the need to grab onto that and campaign on it, and that tripped you up in 2016. Is that a fair assessment?
Kaine: I think it's fair. Look, I would get talking points from the campaign every day about what they wanted me to say, and it was always attacks on Trump rather than celebrating the Democratic accomplishments or Hillary's own virtues and accomplishments, and I would always have to add that in, and ad lib that in, because that was not what the campaign was hoping to focus on.
To review, Senator Tim Kaine was on the ticket in 2016, running against the biggest threat to America's constitutional order since the Civil War. Trump became ever more erratic, and the Clinton campaign went after his vulnerabilities. Kaine, however, says that INSTEAD of what the campaign wanted to focus on, they should have been talking about Democrats' accomplishments and Hillary Clinton's "virtues and accomplishments." Were those virtues and accomplishments entirely fronting-and-centering the economy? We can bet that Kaine would pretzel his way into saying that they were! Her foreign policy experience? Ultimately, a strong defense is good for the economy! Or whatever. You get the idea.
Kaine knew better, as he is now eager to tell us. And this is the "biggest mistake [that] still haunts Democrats," per the headline writer. Gee, I thought the problem was that Clinton had not campaigned in Wisconsin enough. No, I am not making that up. In fact, it was such a key part of the post-2016 conventional wisdom that Amy Klobuchar began her doomed 2020 presidential campaign by throwing shade on Clinton about it.
Any thought about the possibility that maybe it was a result of Russian interference, Comey's last-minute intervention, or anything else? Not at all. Kaine is sure that he was smart to ad lib something other than what he was being told to emphasize, because he just knows.
I am slamming Kaine here because he is probably the most prominent of the octet of political dunces who decided to take the wind out of their party's sails at the worst possible time. And even though his comments about the 2016 and 2025 campaigns are somewhat inconsistent, everything that he says fits into the idea that if only Democrats would become more even timid and narrow their focus even more, voters will reward them for standing for nothing.
In his monologue last night, Stephen Colbert answered Senator Shaheen's question -- "Why can't you all just work together to address the problems that are facing this country?" -- with this: "Because the country is being run by insane people." And thanks to Shaheen, Kaine, and the other six deserters, it is now even more difficult to hope that that will change.
- Neil H. Buchanan