RUTHFULLY YOURS

With another Democrat debate coming next week, it’s impossible for a conservative not to enjoy watching Democrats agonize over their candidates’ whiteness, ignore their affluence, and pretend that there’s a groundswell of support for any of them. The excitement surrounding Trump is completely absent.

At the Washington Post, Annie Linskey, shares Democrat worries that their primary debate next week will have only white faces on the stage:

Only white candidates have qualified for next week’s Democratic presidential debate, the first time in this election cycle that no minority contender will make the stage. It’s a dynamic that critics say threatens to undercut the party’s rhetoric of inclusivity.

The race for the 2020 Democratic nomination kicked off last year with a historically diverse pool of candidates, including two black senators, a black mayor, a Hispanic former Cabinet secretary and an Asian businessman. Since then, all have either dropped out or failed to qualify for a spot on the stage, determined by poll numbers and donations.

Now the specter of an all-white debate in the mostly white state of Iowa is prompting concern among party activists.

Live by identity politics, die by identity politics. The irony, of course, is that the politically incorrect people who refuse to give their votes to minority candidates are Democrats.

As well as being white, the people on the stage next week will range from rich to super rich. Even if one ignores the millions of dollars from China and Ukraine that Joe Biden steered to his son and his brother, he’s still worth around $3 million (including his house). Amy Klobuchar’s net worth is guesstimated to be around $2 million. Bernie Sanders, who used to inveigh against millionaires, is worth around $2 million. Elizabeth Warren, another person who dreams of taxing the rich is worth approximately $12 million. Tom Steyer is worth around $1.6 billion.

Pete Buttigieg, at 37, will be both the youngest and poorest person on the stage, with a net worth estimated to be between $100,000 and $500,000. Give him a few years in Democrat politics (i.e., let him write a book and give speeches) and he’ll enter the millionaires’ club too.

As Charlie Kirk tweeted:

The Democrats also have a charisma deficit. We’ve seen this with the declining viewership for the debates. The first debate attracted 15.3 million viewers and the second debate popped up to 18.1 million viewers. By the most recent debate in December, though, the Democrats managed to capture only 8.7 million viewers.

That’s bad, but what’s even worse is the individual candidates’ lackluster showing on the ground. A year ago, on January 13, 2016, while the Republican primaries were still in full force, Donald Trump drew 10,000 people to a rally in Pensacola, Florida. Five days later, in Lynchburg, Virginia, he drew another 10,000 people. A month later, in February, he held a rally in Beaufort, South Carolina, that drew 20,000 people – and the numbers kept going up. Sure, there were smaller venues too, but people wanted to see Donald Trump.

Now that he’s president, Donald Trump is still an incredible draw. The same cannot be said for the Democrat primary candidates. Although the media is coy, one can get a sense of how poorly attended events are by looking at the videos.

Elizabeth Warren held a rally Friday night at the Hampshire Hills Athletic Club and Event Center in Milford, New Hampshire. The Fox News Facebook page covering the event carefully shows closeup shots of Warren bouncing around before a “crowd.” One man, however, was not impressed:

At the end of December, Joe Biden held a rally in New Hampshire. The tight camera angle indicates that it was poorly attended and the audience in the following clip is quietly polite to the point of unconsciousness:

At least some of Pete Buttigieg’s rallies are better attended, but they’re so gosh-darned melanin-deficient. No matter how much money people excited by the first openly gay candidate pour into his campaign, if he cannot attract black voters, he cannot win.

And then there are the Trump rallies. They have the feel of revival meetings, with a mesmerized audience hanging onto, and responding, to every word. No matter how far the cameras pull back, they cannot possibly get a single shot of all the attendees. No matter what the polls say, if Trump continues to have this kind of attendance, it’s only a fear of hubris that holds one back from saying it’s hard to imagine him losing in November.