‘Morning Joe’ Takes Break from Trump-Bashing to Fault Democrats’ Divisiveness

MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough criticized the Democratic Party’s enthusiastic embrace of identity politics on Thursday morning, effectively warning that the party will continue to lag far behind the GOP in terms of funds and votes until and unless it presents a unifying message.

“What is wrong with this party?” Scarborough asked MSNBC political analyst Mark Halperin in reference to the DNC’s lackluster fundraising efforts.

“It’s always hard to compete with the megaphone of the president, but when your party is lacking leaders, big ideas, and a strategy it’s impossible,” Halperin responded.

But Scarborough stressed that “being inclusive” is another area the Democratic Party has yet to master. “This just shows you the trouble Democrats are in,” Scarborough began. “Every time I say they need a message for all Americans — they need to stop with the Balkanization of America — and a message for all Americans [sic], and suddenly somebody will tweet at me or somebody will, say, e-mail to me, ‘Oh you’re just being a racist.'”

“I go, ‘Wait a minute,'” he said. “I’m being a racist because I’m saying you need a unifying message?”

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“Scarborough is right,” Eddie Zipperer, a political science professor at Georgia Military College, told LifeZette. “The divisive identity politics don’t work. Leftists have smeared half the country as racist for years, and nobody is buying it. The only people who like this tactic are the far-left donors who fund the party and the far-left base of the party. It’s hateful, and it exploits real concerns that people have.”

Fortunately, for Republicans it is unlikely the DNC is going to take Scarborough’s advice.

“I’ve been on Tim Kaine’s team for a long time now, and as our campaign to re-elect him ramps up, I wanted to share with you a bit about why,” began a Wednesday email from Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine’s campaign manager, Karen Charles Dongo.

“As an African-American woman, I care about a lot of issues right now — like closing the achievement gap, making sure we move forward, not backwards, on civil rights and voting rights issues, protecting a woman’s right to make her own health care decisions,” it continued, being sure to point to race and gender, rather than focusing on concerns felt by all Virginians.

Apparently not wanting to leave out class warfare, a DNC fundraising email also went out on Wednesday, in which chairman Tom Perez explained ominously that “We’re being outraised and outspent by the GOP” because the “Republicans can have the President of the United States, the Senate Majority Leader, and the Speaker of the House call up millionaire and billionaire donors, make all kinds of promises, and collect big checks.”

Two days in a row this week, Monday and Tuesday, the DNC sent out a fundraising blast proclaiming, “It’s not enough to reject hatred — Republicans must denounce Donald Trump for enabling white supremacists.” The email provides absolutely no evidence to back up its allegation that the president was enabling white supremacists.

And of course the DNC itself is still driving hard its “Resistance Summer” fundraising efforts, which are front and center on the Democratic Party’s website. Nothing says “unite Americans” quite like telling progressives to “resist” half their fellow citizens.

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Zipperer said: “The ax of identity politics [also] becomes more difficult to wield as the Republican party becomes more diverse. It’s hard to maintain that conservatism is sexist when so many of the movement’s ideological leaders are women. It’s hard to make an intelligent argument that Laura Ingraham is anti-women. That Mollie Hemingway or Michelle Malkin is anti-women. It’s hard to argue intelligently that Larry Elder, David Webb, Ben Carson, Herman Cain, Star Parker and other black conservative leaders are racist.”

“Identity politics aren’t about anything except ideology. Labels like ‘racist,” ‘sexist,’ ‘xenophobic’ are tossed around as freely and randomly as parade candy until they lose all their power,” he explained. “In 2017, we’ve seen the results of the Left’s massive identity-politics campaign. Over eight years they’ve lost over 1,000 seats nationwide and all three branches of the federal government.”

“Everyone with a brain sees right through it. Everyone can look at cities like Chicago and see what the Democratic Party has done for minorities,” Zipperer added. “False labels aren’t a better deal. They don’t create better jobs, better skills, or better wages. All they do is keep the leftist base angry. If the Democrats don’t abandon this mass smear tactic, they will continue to alienate good people and lose what little power they have left.”

(photo credit, homepage and article images: MSNBC)