How short are pundit memories

This piece, Democrats Still Haven’t Come to Terms with 2016 by David Harsanyi, brings to mind an idea which keeps circulating in my mind and which I do not see discussed. I am not focusing on Haranyi's argument. It is merely the proximate catalyst to this recurring thought.

Back circa 2010-2014, there was a fairly persistent but low volume conversation about the enduring damage done by Obama to the Democratic Party. Over the course of his presidency, Democrats lost something over 1,000 elected state and federal elected positions.

Both left and right pundits chattered about it, the right gleefully, the left sotto voce.

I posted about the discussion but cannot find the post. My take was that there was indeed institutional damage being done and that this would show-up in the pipeline of future vetted Democratic candidates. The damage was, in my assessment, exacerbated by the fact that most of the losses were among more moderated Democrats, leaving the smaller bench also a more radical bench. Further, it seemed like many of the losses occurred among mid-career politicians. If they simply lost the older leadership, you would still have a refreshing pipeline. But of the older leadership survives and the mid-career pipeline is decimated, then you have real institutional continuity problems.

While the right pundit analysis tended towards schadenfreude, my perspective was that this would be one of the more enduring legacies of the Obama era - an institutionally weakened Democratic party with a thin bench from which to draw future candidates.

All institutions suffer from challenging recruitment and succession planning. It becomes especially difficult when there are constrained hiring budgets and when there is headcount shrinkage. It is not just an engineering problem, it is a morale problem, a momentum problem, and a branding problem.

The January - February primary debacles have brought that analysis back to mind. We have a large rodeo of highly inexperienced hopefuls, radical extremists, and some long-in-the-tooth establishment relics. And not much in between. Exactly what you would expect from a Party which lost its mid-career bench and its moderate bench.

There is a tendency to cast the whole contest as struggles between the moderate, establishment, and socialist wings of the Democratic Party and that perspective has some insight and value.

Being Democrats, much of the journalistic reporting has focused on socialist-postmodernist concerns about race and gender and distressed analysis as to how the newly designed DNC debate guidelines intended to maximize inclusiveness and youth and diversity has yielded a candidate pool in the Nevada Debate last night of a completely white panel including old white septuagenarian socialists, a septuagenarian authoritarian billionaire with a penchant for fact-based speaking which shatters postmodernist taboos, a young radical with no track record of accomplishments and a relatively low profile senator career lawyer/politician from Minnesota. Oh, and a fossil whose most striking campaign persona is that of a doddering creepy gaffomatic relic from an earlier era.

It is a fair question. And while there have been hypotheses, I haven't seen anyone note that this is actually a predicted consequence of the hollowing out of the Democratic Party in the Obama era. It was at the time observed that the bench of potential candidates was dreadfully shrunk, that the surviving population of candidates were more radical than the average American and more radical than the average Democratic voter.

And now, here we are with a stage full of aged survivors and far left radicals with little appeal to the moderate voter.

The only non-career politician on the stage is, of course, Bloomberg. He is the living embodiment of the coercive, boorish, authoritarian bully which Democrats have conjured for their strawman Trump. While his business successes might draw respect from the right and his inclination towards data-based decision-making will appeal to thinkers and technocrats, I cannot see him being a good fit for the Democratic base nor even as an independent.

The rest? Their sell-by date expired long ago or should never have been offered to the market of voters in the first place. A small bench of radicals from which to draw candidates meant to appeal to a broad spectrum of voters just is not much of a probable outcome for success.

Democratic Party decimation and radicalization during the Obama era is not the single cause of the current conditions by any stretch of the imagination but that it is not discussed at all is a surprise.