The focus of those following the 2016 presidential race of late has been on how the Republican Party is coming apart at the seams trying to deal with Donald Trump.
What you’re missing on the left is the seams of the Democratic Party starting to unravel around its edges.
A group of Black Lives Matter protestors took over a Bernie Sanders rally in Seattle on Saturday, castigating the Vermont senator for supposedly doing nothing to address racial justice issues, to a point where Sanders was forced off the stage.
A similar incident disrupted an event with Sanders and former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley in Phoenix last month.
The surprising success of the two disruptions will surely lead to more protests of this nature, which will serve to bring attention to the cause, for one, but as with everything, there are costs that you can be assured will be incurred.
O’Malley was famously shouted down, and later apologized, after responding to the protestors at the Phoenix event by reminding them that “all lives matter,” which for some reason was perceived as being racist by the protest set.
Black and Latino voters make up sizable subsets of the Democratic Party base, and kudos to those leading efforts to get party leaders to do more than pay lip service to issues important to those constituent groups.
But just as social conservatives who browbeat Republican candidates on abortion and gay marriage as litmus-test issues that force their party too far to the right to get elected, liberal activists run the risk of pushing their candidates too far to the left by enforcing their own rigid orthodoxies.
Shouting down a candidate who makes the not-exactly-controversial comment that “all lives matter” plays about as well to Middle America as candidate after candidate in the Republican debate this week proclaiming their opposition to a woman having a right to an abortion if she is raped, the victim of incest or even if her life is in imminent danger.
So there’s that, and then Hillary Clinton and her bone-headed move to use her own e-mail server as Secretary of State.
Once Donald Trump is done insulting America and leaves the Republican race, Democrats are going to have their own issues to resolve in public.
– Column by Chris Graham
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Chris Graham
