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John from FL's avatar

It takes courage to be a leader. And it seems our elected representatives, save for a few notable exceptions, lack courage. Only seven Republican Senators voted to convict Trump in 2021 (Burr, Cassidy, Collins, Murkowski, Romney, Sasse, Toomey), while the rest looked at the evidence of his wrongdoing and chose cowardice.

Nancy Pelosi had the courage to state the obvious that Biden was incapable of a second term. But where was the courage from his Cabinet (and his Vice President) to expose his decline long before the debate?

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Xantar's avatar

It's striking that MY does not use the word "coalition" anywhere in today's interesting column. I think that a lot, albeit maybe not all, of the phenomena that he is pointing out arise out of the fact that the Democratic Party is now, and really, is now obliged to be, the biggest-tent party anywhere in any democracy. If you are trying to manage a coalition that runs from the Cheneys to proto-Maoists, through a variety of loyalists and funders spread across a relatively wide part of the political spectrum, there will be lots and lots of coordination issues, mysterious process dead-ends, responsibility-diffusion and temporary repositories of power in sometimes hard-to-understand places. That is sometimes going to risk looking incoherent - goes with the territory. If the Republicans were magically transformed back into business-friendly center-right normies uniting behind Nikki Haley (or Brian Kemp or Chris Sununu or Glenn Youngkin (although I have some candidate-specific doubts about his staying power even in an entirely re-normed GOP)), with the MAGAs relegated to a few social-media swamps, the Democrats would look significantly different - and maybe less "hollow", in MY's terminology here.

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