Michael Barone‘s latest column for the Washington Examiner takes both major political parties to task.
Important parts of our two great political parties seem bent on demonstrating that their parties are incapable of governing coherently.
House Republican rebels have pushed Speaker John Boehner out the door without advancing a plausible successor and have risked leaving the speaker’s chair vacant. Hillary Clinton has backpedaled and flip-flopped to fortify her flagging campaign that she risks making the still most likely Democratic nominee a figure of fun.
The House rebels are understandably frustrated after five years in the House majority without as many accomplishments as they’d like. They overlook the four-year flatlining of federal spending obtained by their acceptance of the clumsy sequester limits.
They overlook as well the public response to the impasse over the budget — invariably dubbed a “government shutdown” — in October 2013. Republicans, as the party of less government and one despised by mainstream media, are invariably blamed for shutdowns. …
… But the combination of an unruly field of presidential candidates—with the three who have never held elective office outpolling the 12 who have — and internal turmoil in the House may discredit the party as a governing force.
Unless Democrats discredit themselves even more in the interim. Which may be happening.
Hillary Clinton was expected to enjoy a stately progress back to the White House, where she worked as first lady or conferred as secretary of state for a dozen years. But the leftward lurch of Democratic voters — at least as pronounced and arguably more politically perilous than the rightward lurch among Republicans — has made the march much less stately.
Behind in polls in New Hampshire, beleaguered in Iowa, effectively matched in fundraising in the last quarter, Clinton has obviously concluded that she must respond to what initially seemed the quixotic challenge of the 73-year-old socialist Bernie Sanders.
And as her poll numbers fall, the chances increase of a threat from the 72-year-old Vice President Joe Biden. Her response has been to skitter as rapidly as possible to the left on multiple issues from her previous positions and from those of her husband.