The GOP has had plenty of reason for good cheer in recent months.
\nNothing can compare, though, with the glad tidings of a potential showdown \u2026<\/b>
\nThe GOP has had plenty of reason for good cheer in recent months. Nothing can compare, though, with the glad tidings of a potential showdown between Vice President Kamala Harris and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg to be President Joe Biden\u2019s successor in 2024 should he decide not to run for re-election. Surely, there would be other serious candidates in that circumstance, but there is no doubt that Harris and Buttigieg would be high on the list of potential contenders, as various journalistic outfits noted last week. As it happens, they exemplify the contemporary Democratic Party\u2019s electoral deficiencies, while bringing their own flagrant personal political weaknesses to the equation. If this is really the choice Democrats would face should Biden decline to run, they better hope he defies age, bounces back to robust political health and is prepared to serve again well into his 80s. Harris flamed out in the 2020 Democratic nomination well before the Iowa caucuses, unable to settle on a message or political identity. Her staff was obsessed with the progressive hothouse of Twitter, which is a powerful device for creating a false sense of what real voters, even Democratic primary voters, care about. As VP, she\u2019s basically picked up where her desultory campaign left off. In the l atest USA Today-Suffolk University poll, Harris had a dismal 28 percent approval rating. It\u2019s difficult to rate that low without getting indicted or suffering some other embarrassing scandal. Her allies, of course, complain that she\u2019s being treated unfairly because she\u2019s a woman of color. This fixation on race and gender plays much better with the left-wing activist class than with the public. The simpler explanation for Harris\u2019 woes is that she\u2019s a below-average politician serving as an unpopular president\u2019s VP. Pete Buttigieg has had a happier tenure. With his surprising success in the 2020 Democratic primary, he bootstrapped himself into a Cabinet position and now is enjoying a windfall of resources thanks to the infrastructure bill. He embodies, to a fault, the party\u2019s growing strength among college-educated whites. He\u2019s smooth, credentialed, hyper-articulate and a quick study who knows enough \u2014 sometimes just enough \u2014 to charm and impress journalists and other white-collar creative types. If a management consultant were to design a progressive white Democrat in a bottle, the result would look a lot like Buttigieg, himself a former management consultant. It\u2019s become increasingly clear, though, that the Democratic Party\u2019s new base among college-educated voters is a trap if it is pursued to the exclusion of an appeal to working-class voters. The party\u2019s poor standing with non-college-educated voters has begun to show up in eroding support among Latinos, a constituency that was presumed to be a key pillar of the Barack Obama-crafted \u201ccoalition of the ascendant.\u201d A successful post-Biden Democratic future is more likely to be found in the likes of New York Mayor-elect Eric Adams than Harris or Buttigieg. He is an African-American former cop with a hard-knocks upbringing that gives him working-class street cred. He knows that woke bromides aren\u2019t the way to appeal to African-American voters, who put him over the top in the Democratic primary. He\u2019s a standard progressive in many respects, but he has proved immune to fashionable left-wing causes. He not only defused a hot-button cultural issue \u2014 namely, crime \u2014 he campaigned on it and made it a strength, an ability that most national Democrats have lost as the party has moved left since 2016. It\u2019s far too early to know how Adams\u2019 City Hall tenure will actually turn out, but Adams has the qualities and approach that, in theory, could be fruitful for Democrats nationally. Meanwhile, even if the GOP is on a roll at the moment, it shouldn\u2019t get its hopes up. At the end of the day, a 2024 Democratic primary dominated by Harris and Buttigieg is probably too good to be true.<\/p>\n