OPINION:
A recent hit piece on Vice President J.D. Vance from a British newspaper reminds me of a real and ongoing image crisis facing Democrats, and it’s largely one of their own making. However, based on everything they have done to this point and what their allies are suggesting they do next, it’s apparent that they have absolutely no idea how to solve it.
It’s not a secret that the rigid behavioral requirements and speech codes the radical left tries to enforce have contributed to the rapid flight of male voters away from the Democratic Party. Perhaps sensing it, heading into the 2024 presidential election, they correctly figured they needed a dose of masculinity on their ticket to remedy the problem.
Presidential candidate Kamala Harris then did one of the funniest things possible: She chose Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate.
As many will remember, Mr. Walz did his best Elmer Fudd impression when he went hunting on the campaign trail and somehow managed to participate in the entire event without firing a single shot. The embarrassing attempt at being an outdoorsman was crammed between rallies in which the governor would flounce on stage while fluttering jazz hands all over the place.
That brings us to The Guardian’s attack on Mr. Vance. The Guardian, a lefty publication from London, published a story that was almost a parody of biased journalism. It was that silly.
It was also an obvious effort to draw blood from the clear favorite for the Republican presidential nomination in 2028. The paper attacked Mr. Vance for doing something outdoorsy (what a coincidence) with his family: a canoe excursion during a trip home to Ohio at the beginning of this month.
To effectively protect the vice president in a canoe that can operate in very shallow water, the Secret Service asked that the water flow in the Little Miami River be increased so that agents could employ motorized watercraft. Neither Mr. Vance nor his office was even aware of the Secret Service request, yet The Guardian blasted away as if it were a terrific scandal.
The story was based mainly on one source, the identity of whom the paper acknowledged it did not know. It included the fact that it “could not independently confirm” the source’s most click-baity claim that the water increase was meant to improve the vice president’s boating conditions. The story also failed to explain how allowing more water to flow from a lake could cost taxpayers anything.
In short, it was a hatchet job, not a particularly good or convincing one.
The point is that the left still knows that it has a problem on its side of the fence, and it remains utterly clueless about identifying any solutions.
Take, for example, a recent piece from the same British newspaper, The Guardian.
Columnist Aaron Timms lamented that the “rightwing sports bro” had emerged as a key voting demographic in the 2024 election to help propel President Trump to victory.
Urging Democrats to do better, he wrote that “it’s possible to be passionate and knowledgeable about sports while eschewing the ugliness of bro culture,” keeping with the great leftist tradition of insulting the very voters they are trying to attract.
Then he really went off the rails, saying that sports “offer a rich canvas for the exploration of many issues about which the left cares deeply: race, gender, class, social mobility and the corrupting influence of money.”
Yes, what better way to win over a 24-year-old male voter than to sidle up to him at halftime of a football game and say, “Hey, how about that first half? Can you believe that the racist patriarchy deprived us of President Harris?”
Yes, Democrats have a problem with men, but it’s probably more accurate to say they have a problem with a lot of humans.
Who among us, male or female, wants to be subjected to hectoring and lecturing all the time? Who wants to be told always to behave and speak a certain way, to be allowed to hold only certain, approved political beliefs?
As for men, they have been told for years by the left that they’re the cause of most of the problems the world faces, which leads the Democrats to the place they are right now, with males fleeing the party.
They will not fix this by attacking the vice president for a canoe trip or by jamming lefty grievance politics down every sports fan’s throat. Democrats can fix it only by being authentic and dragging themselves out of the suicide pact they appear to have made with the radical left.
We all know that’s not going to happen.
• Tim Murtaugh is a Washington Times columnist and founder of Line Drive Public Affairs. He served as a senior adviser on the 2024 Trump campaign and as communications director on the 2020 Trump campaign.
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