The odd characters now running on the Democrat ticket these days evoke Wall Street Journal opinion page editor Paul Gigot’s description of the Reform Party in 1999: A Halloween party and not a political party. While the Reform Party’s oddities doomed it to become yet another trivial part of American politics by the early 2000s, the question for Americans now is whether Democrats will fade away or simply become more radicalized.
The Reform Party, which had produced some shockingly successful results, including two significant bids for the presidency by Ross Perot, was starting to get weirder by the time Gigot made his comments. But that didn’t stop former professional wrestler Jesse “The Body” Ventura from rebranding himself as “The Mind” and winning the 1998 governor’s race in Minnesota.
While Donald Trump announced an exploratory committee and Pat Buchanan entered the race for president under the Reform Party tent, its increasingly kooky and scary character was demonstrated by its new members such as (real) white supremacist David Duke and psychotherapist and left-wing activist Lenora Fulani. In early 2000, Trump decided to pull the plug on his nascent campaign, observing, “This is not company I wish to keep.”
Today’s Democrat Party includes plenty of scary kooks of the, ahem, quality of those Reform Party days.
Graham Platner, who recently was forced to pull the plug on his Senate bid to defeat Republican Susan Collins in Maine, was known from the beginning to have the Nazi stormtrooper death’s head tattoo on his chest and to have made derogatory remarks about wounded American soldiers. Yet despite a cascade of accusations of lewd and weird behavior, he was given a pass, even when conservative Lyndsey Fifield accused him of physical violence and non-consensual sexual behavior. It was only when Democrat Jenny Racicot accused Platner of rape that he was forced (eventually) to drop out of the race.
The dozen candidates vying to replace Platner on the Democrat ticket are just as bizarre as he is. Perhaps the oddest is Ashley Webb, a man who self-identifies as a “transgender intersex” person and claimed to experience menstrual periods through his rectum. He also claimed in a debate this week that his greatest quality is his refusal to “lie” or “deceive” anyone.
If you have a bleak sense of humor, there is something quite hilarious about the Barnum-and-Baileyesque quality of candidates for Democrats these days. To be sure, Republicans have suffered from their own oddball candidates over the years, but the Democrats are… something else these days.
What is noteworthy about candidates such as Platner, however, is how much they are simply the creations of campaign consultants. In a June podcast, liberal journalists Ezra Klein and Chris Hayes discussed how Platner’s candidacy came about. Klein observed that those who recruited Platner had been looking for somebody with an appealing occupation who had donated to far-left populist candidates.
“This group,” Klein asked Hayes, “they were like: Who could run in Maine? A lobster farmer, oyster farmer, some kind of fisherman.” Klein added that, though we think of people recruited for political office because of something they’ve done (running a business or a hospital, practicing law), this was different: “Graham Platner was cast, right? It was like Hollywood was looking for somebody to fill a role.”
Hayes responded that this is exactly what it was, but added, “There’s a long history there.” In other words, Democrats have been doing this for a while. What the podcast made clear was that Democrats are primarily recruiting for “charisma” to succeed in the “attention economy” and raise money.
This is exactly what we see in the rest of the Democrat world these days. Did Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a former bartender, have any real experience doing anything? No, she’s just good at social media and knows all the right progressive talking points.
Democrat politicians are mostly actors and actresses these days, many inventing new personalities (or should we say “characters”) to play in front of audiences. While the cringe-worthy attempts of politicians such as Hillary Clinton, Kamala Harris, and even Ocasio-Cortez to mimic southern preachers are bizarre, at least they don’t play these characters all the time.
Many of the Democrat candidates these days, Platner included, are simply phonies. While the real Platner is no doubt as crude and disturbed as his public persona, his blue-collar shtick is far less authentic. As investigative journalist Daniel Greenfield observed, the supposed working-class hero Platner is different from “the real Graham Platner, son of a prominent local attorney, grandson of a major modernist architect, whose business was funded by a nonprofit grant meant for black people.”
But Platner is hardly the only Democrat cosplaying as coming from a hardscrabble background. Jasmine Crockett, who recently lost to James Talarico in the Texas Democrat Senate primary, is famous for her transformation from a rich, well-mannered prep-school kid into a kind of street-tough black woman who can connect to ordinary people.
Ocasio-Cortez’s recent foray into southern homiletics imitation came while campaigning for Justin Pearson, a state legislator running for Congress in Tennessee’s 9th Congressional District who does his best (but still shamefully lackluster) “black preacher” impression every time he’s in front of a microphone.
While Pearson’s father actually is a black preacher, videos show that Justin has changed his presentation over the last decade. In 2016, Pearson was a young, clean-cut politician who displayed an astonishingly calm and reasonable demeanor. But he would soon recast himself as a radical black activist-preacher of 1970s vintage, complete with a big afro and a shouting oral delivery reminiscent of Chris Rock’s old SNL “Nat X” character.
Of course, even more bizarre is Haley Stevens, running in the Michigan Democrat Senate primary. While Stevens had a normal Midwestern accent before, she gained attention this week with a bizarre stump speech that appeared to be an impression of Chris Farley’s old motivational speaker character Matt Foley, who “lived in a van down by the river.”
However frightening, weird, or simply fake these Democrat candidates are externally, the reality is that, as the left-wing magazine The New Republic observed of the candidates seeking to replace Platner, they all have the same left-wing views.
Democrats these days are certainly a Halloween party if you look at their candidates donning costumes, adopting accents, and copying old comedy sketch characters. The scary part is that they often have a chance to win.
No matter how down-home they pretend to be, Democrats are not the characters they pretend to play – and their votes will prove that if they ever get that far. Americans can enjoy the show, but it’ll become a lot less amusing if Democrats’ cast of frauds and misfits wins power.
David P. Deavel teaches at the University of St. Thomas in Houston. A past Lincoln Fellow at the Claremont Institute, he is a Senior Contributor at The Imaginative Conservative. Follow him on X (Twitter) @davidpdeavel.
