HAS THE LEFT REALLY HAD IT? – AT 11:31 A.M. ET:  You'll get quite a debate on this, especially given the dogged resistance by the left in the media and on college campuses.  But Michael Barone believes it may be time to write the obituary.  From the Washington Examiner: 

It's been a tough decade for the political left. Eight years ago a Time magazine cover portrayed Barack Obama as Franklin Roosevelt, complete with cigarette and holder and a cover line proclaiming "The New New Deal." A Newsweek cover announced "We Are All Socialists Now."

Now the cover story is different. Time has just announced, inevitably though a bit begrudgingly, that its Person of the Year for 2016 is Donald Trump. No mention of New Deals or socialism.

It's not surprising that newsmagazine editors expected a move to the left. The history they'd been taught by New Deal admirers, influenced by the doctrines of Karl Marx, was that economic distress moves voters to demand a larger and more active government.

There was some empirical evidence in that direction as well. The recession triggered by the financial crisis of 2007-08 was the deepest experienced by anyone not old enough to remember the 1930s. Barack Obama was elected with 53 percent of the popular vote—more than any candidate since the 1980s—and Democrats had won congressional elections with similar majorities in 2006 and 2008.

Things look different now, and not just because Donald Trump was elected president. It has been clear that most voters have been rejecting big government policies, and not just in the United States but in most democratic nations around the world.

Leftist politicians supposed that ordinary voters with modest incomes facing hard times would believe that regulation and redistribution would help them. Evidently most don't.

The rejection was apparent in the 2010 and subsequent House elections; Republicans have now won House majorities in ten of the last 12 elections, leaving 2006 and 2008 as temporary aberrations. You didn't hear Hillary Clinton campaign on the glories of Obamacare or the Iran nuclear deal, and her attack on "Trumped-up, trickle-down economics" didn't strike any chords in the modest-income Midwest.

Republican success has been even greater in governor and state legislature elections, to the point that Democrats hold governorships and legislative control only in California, Hawaii, Delaware and Rhode Island. After eight years of the Obama presidency, Democrats hold fewer elective offices than at any time since the 1920s.

COMMENT:  And still, the Dems can't figure out what's wrong.  The party of Roosevelt, Truman and Kennedy is gone, replaced by the party of Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama.  Americans don't like the new model.  The old ones were built better.

Today's leftist Democratic Party is an elitist institution whose intellectual leaders refer to the former base of the party as "the flyover people."  I wonder how many of these leaders have ever handled a set of tools, or even seen a cow.  A real cow.  The moo kind. 

The Dems will never solve their problem unless they identify it.  This they refuse to do.  Nancy Pelosi actually said last week, with a straight face, that the Democrats don't want change.  She's right.  In their decline they feel morally pure.  They're also boring and irrelevant.

December 9,  2016