How Democrats efforts to retool their message have become cartoonish

Wars seemed to be breaking out everywhere this week — in Kashmir, Congo, and in a new phase in Gaza.Closer to home, Democrats appear to be opening a hot civil war of their own.  Political veteran James Carville was punching down to the ingénue David Hogg, scolding him for ham-handedly seeking to primary party elders. AOC and Bernie Sanders want to declare war against oligarchs who, ironically, mostly support Democrats and their causes. The portly Gov.

Pritzker is now competing in a speech to New Hampshire Democrats to be the party’s angriest man in the room (of course, when his family is not running Harvard University into the ground with the anti-Western pedagogical trash and open tolerance of campus bigotry). But there is a certain self-defeating, almost Elmer Fudd quality, overlying these Democratic party contretemps.In large part, progressives still don’t get why their brand is so toxic, with about only 1 in 5 voters approving of Congressional Democrats. No, it’s not the message, and no, it’s not the messenger.

Voters don’t like the product Democrats are selling — a bigger welfare state, cultural extremism, anti-merit identity politics, shamefully failing public schools, and maximal rejectionism of everything Trump.  And they don’t like the party-wide gaslighting, which Biden’s re-emergence on BBC reminded them of this week. So, back to Elmer Fudd. Fudd could never catch Bugs Bunny and often wound up shooting himself in the face. Keep this image in mind as you consider what’s happened in the last week or so. Democrats breathlessly predicted economic apocalypse resulting from tariffs, only to find an economy far more resilient than many experts predicted and clearly able to withstand the temporary tariff stomach-punch.

They swooned to repeal Trump’s tariff authority that they gladly overlorded when Biden employed it. Meanwhile, Trump started triangulating two key Democratic constituencies — labor and Hollywood, who, in vary...