Supposedly, the tiresome comedy stylings of Gavin Newsom – he’s the equivalent of a Wednesday night prop comic opener down at the Gooberville Giggle Works – have thrust him into the forefront of the Democrat race for the 2028 nomination. What a sad and pathetic state of affairs that is. He’s trying to claim the Fighter Lane. You see, he fights by hiring a couple of they/them mediocrities to run his social media account, pumping out an endless series of tweets that are nearly as funny as leprosy. They are directed at Trump, who ignores them; if a nitwit tweets in the forest, does it make a sound? This is fighting in the eyes of the Democrat activist class; this is pathetic in the eyes of normal people.
A lot of them are trying to crowd into the Fighter Lane. We need somebody who’s going to fight the perilous peril that is Donald Trump and his authoritarian authoritarianism that’s literally fascist Nazism! Of course, the fighting is entirely performance art. You’ve got Pete Buttigieg out there promising to fight. This Navy veteran – he’s all yours, swabbies! – looks less like a bruiser than someone you want to give a wedgie, and who would eagerly receive it. Illinois governor/behemoth JB Pritzker seeks to waddle into the fighter lane, too, though if he does, he’s going to have to wear a sign on his back reading “Wide Load.” Well, he does have weight on his potential opponents – he outweighs all of them put together – but the dude’s not going to have endurance for the long haul; he breaks a sweat resting.
The Fighter Lane would be crowded just with JB alone, but with Gov. Hairstyle, Alfred McKins-E Neuman, Spartacus Booker, Big Chief Warren, and others potentially competing, the smart play would be to seek another lane. Call it the Sane Lane. That’s the lane where the candidate embraces normality and lets the lunatics tear each other apart over their total dedication to left-wing insanity and hatred of Trump.
What does the Sane Lane look like? Well, it looks a lot like the way we ended up with Bill Clinton. For those of you who weren’t around when Bill Clinton came out of nowhere in 1992 – he had been the governor of a southern state and was known primarily for giving the longest and most boring Democrat convention speech in history. He did it despite having a libido limited only by the angle of his Peyronie’s disease. He did it because he had some charisma, and he took the radical position that crime is bad and people should work instead of getting welfare.
Yes, at the time, most Democrats were saying the same kind of thing that the Democrats now are saying about crime and people working instead of being on welfare. They were for crime and against people working instead of being on welfare. But Bill Clinton understood that normal Americans did not see things that way. He was liberal on everything else, probably driven harder to the left by that hideous shrew of a wife, to the extent he ever interacted with her after allegedly implanting Chelsea. But the fact that he was willing to put criminals in jail and to make welfare cheats work had the effect of making it safe for normal people to consider him. The fact that he had a personality helped, too. After all, the cycle before, candidate Michael Dukakisbot had been unable to manage to say that he would want to off a guy who raped and murdered his wife. You know, if you can’t take the position that you’d want to waste a guy who did your spouse, you’re certainly not going to protect the rest of us.
Bill Clinton won by merging into the Sane Lane. But who’s going to do that this time? The Sane Lane is wide open, just waiting for somebody normal to come along.
Now, it’s not only going to be crime and welfare where the Democrat choosing to race down the Sane Lane is going to have to be a heretic. No, the Democrats have managed to embrace a much wider variety of bizarre social pathologies that normal people totally reject than they espoused back in 1992, and they were pretty sick weirdos then. Today, the Democrats as a whole are on the 20 percent side of 80 percent issues like mutilating kids to conform to their Munchausen mommies’ delusions, allowing perverted dudes in locker rooms and on playing fields with girls, open borders, urban chaos, and DEI, to name a few.
And it’s not just pure policy positions. It’s, if not charisma, at least not being a repellant weirdo. Bill Clinton seemed pleasant, perhaps a bit of a rascal. He did not give the impression that he hated working-class people; instead, he gave the impression that he understood and appreciated them. That’s hard to grasp for the typical smug blue-bubble professional managerial class Democrat whose closest brush with people who work for a living is asking his illegal alien nanny to make sure that Kaden’s steel-cut oats are gluten-free.
There are some other candidates who might try the Sane Lane. Gretchen Whitmer is one (HT @NanHayworth). Sure, Michigan sends out mos def Stepford Wife vibes, but she knows her state and understands that she needs the votes of people who used to be Dems but voted for Trump. Still, it’ll be hard for her to distance herself from the obsessions of her suburban Chardonnay lady demo – assuming she tries to.
I recently wrote about Ro Khanna, the Silicon Valley congressman who makes an effort not to come across as hating the normies. That’s his selling point, and it’s a big one. But lately, he’s signed onto every leftist shibboleth that’s undulating out there in the ether. One of the things you’ve got to do if you’re going to be in the Sane Lane is have a Sistah Soulja moment. She was the third-tier rapper who wondered aloud why we didn’t have a Kill Whitey Week back in 1992. Today, that’s pretty much a plank of the Democrat platform; no one in the Fighter Lane would ever stand up and say, “No, I don’t think you ought to murder white people.” Trump would be against murdering white people, so most of them would have to be for it. But Bill Clinton said it, and that put him on the map. He went against the hard left of his party, solidifying the feeling of security normies had voting for him.
I expect Ro Khanna would concede that no, you shouldn’t murder white people, and since he’s a smart guy, he wouldn’t add a bunch of qualifiers to that like most of the other Democrat dummies would. But that’s about all you’re getting out of him. He doesn’t seem to hate MAGA folks. Everything else on the Democratic agenda he’s on board for, from DEI to taxing you into the poor house. Khanna makes a very good first impression – I found him likable and intelligent – but it’s the second impression that’s going to be a problem when he has to start explaining why he thinks some men menstruate, especially since he’s obviously too smart to believe that nonsense.
Rahm Emanuel is another Democrat who could conceivably try out a test ride in the Sane Lane. He’s recently been on with Hugh Hewitt and Megyn Kelly, and he tries to come across as reasonable. He agrees that boys should not play in girls’ sports and concedes that this is going to put a target on his back from his left. But that’s as far as he goes. When you start pushing him on whether he thinks children should be castrated to conform to delusions of being the other gender, he’ll pivot to tell you the real problem is that we don’t give enough money to public school teachers. It’s going to be hard driving in the Sane Lane if your party’s enforcers require you to embrace insanity.
But what if there was a sane Democrat candidate, one who could pass as normal, one who could forthrightly say that crime is bad, that we shouldn’t discriminate against anybody based on immutable characteristics, and that the trans stuff has gone from treating weird people with respect to putting them on a pedestal at the expense of everyone else? One who could say, “You know, Trump is right not to want black and other people to get murdered in our blue cities.” What if you had a Democrat who just wanted things to be normal, which is what Joe Biden said he wanted but didn’t deliver – though, in his defense, he was a human eggplant who was too senile to form a coherent sentence. And what if this hypothetical candidate came out and said that he opposes Trump, but he doesn’t think Trump is Hitler, and he doesn’t think Trump's supporters are Nazis?
That’s one heck of a needle to thread, adhering to Democrat ideology at some level while repudiating enough of it to win normies without alienating the blue hair brigades. The Democrats are coming off the 2024 defeat that they still don’t understand. They think it’s because Kamala was a drunken mid-wit trollop, which is true, but not the reason she lost. America would be happy to have a drunken mid-wit trollop who created a booming economy, security, and a sense of normalcy. Kamala lost because a majority of Americans despise the kind of cultural, economic, and political nonsense the Democrat Party stands for. But the Democrats are stuck in a Seymour Skinner death spiral: “No, it’s the voters who are wrong.”
This means the Democrats are going to think that the answer is to go harder left, and you find that in the Fighter Lane, not the Sane Lane. What needs to happen is what happened in 1972 and 1984, elections following the loss of an alleged moderate. They need to get beaten so badly that their desire to win overcomes their desire to please the left. And for that reason, in 2028, the Sane Lane is probably going to dead-end.
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