The Alpha Female of a Beta-Male Debate
by Mark Steyn
Steyn on America
October 14, 2015
Tonight, Wednesday, I'll be joining Sean Hannity on Fox News coast to coast at 10pm Eastern/7pm Pacific. If you're in the presence of the receiving apparatus, I hope you'll consider dialing us up.
~As for the candidates' debate:
Lincoln Chafee, explaining why he used to be a Republican and is now a Democrat, dusted off the old line "I didn't leave the party, the party left me." Nobody asked Bernie Sanders why an "independent socialist" who's never been a Democrat is running in the Democrat primary, but he could just as easily have said: "I didn't join the party, the party joined me." Last night the Democrats presented themselves an an openly left-wing party, to whose base Bernie's honeymoon in the Soviet Union appears far less eccentric than Jim Webb doing his Scoop Jackson routine 40 years too late. Bernie thinks we should be more like Denmark, Sweden and Norway - just debt-ridden and with more race riots. As far as I can recall, the most pressing priority for the Democrats is free parental leave for illegal immigrants if they happen to have an anchor baby while enjoying their free college tuition. Insofar as foreign policy raised its head, it was something to be avoided at all costs. While crazy right-wing nutjobs worry about footling peripheral trifles like Isis, Putin, and Iranian nukes, smart Democrats are focused on the real global threat of "climate change", which is why they're committed to investing in wind-driven fax machines for all Obamacare sign-ups by 2020.
Bizarre as these concerns might strike one or two of us, it's where Democrats want to be, which is why Jim Webb is wasting his time even running. It was interesting to me how the Dems' single-digit losers - Webb, Chafee, Martin O'Malley - were so incoherent and unimpressive compared to the GOP's single-digit losers - Jindal, Graham, Santorum, even (God help us) Pataki. Last night, to justify their continued presence in the race, one of these guys had to lay a glove on Hillary. Instead, they all wimped out. Tonally, the sub-text of the debate was that these fellows were too scared of her to challenge her: They communicated only their subservience.
I often quote the British SAS motto "Who Dares Wins". Hillary dared - she dared these beta-male "progressives" to get in her face - and they all wimped out. So she wins. And it looks like Joe Biden's let his will-he-won't-he Hamlet routine drift on 48 hours too long. The rationale for exhuming his Chiclet choppers and hair-plugs was that Hillary's looking like a loser. But last night the beta Dems allowed Hillary to look like a winner. She dared, she won. Biden didn't dare, he dithered - and lost.
Also, her cheekbones looked good. I'm being reasonably serious here. Setting aside that ghastly laugh and robotic voice, she appeared in Hillary terms reasonably youthful, energetic and vibrant.
As for Bernie, the we're-all-sick-of-your-damn-emails line was revealing. He took the server stuff off the table permanently last night because he's made a bet that he can win without "going negative" - that his big selling point is the socialism. He prefigured his email bit by saying it probably wasn't "good politics" but it was for him: He's calling for a "political revolution", which is epic and romantic to ditzy millennials in the seventh year of Navel-Gazing Studies, and they resent the way all this grubby stuff about Hillary's scandals corrupts the romance. Bernie's line works as a rebuke not only to Republicans and the media but also, implicitly, to Mrs Clinton for letting all the barnacles on her rusting hulk sully the pristine waters of his beguiling leftie lagoon.
Smart or crazy? The conventional wisdom is that waving your arms and yelling when you're on TV is crazy. But, on the evidence of Iowa and New Hampshire polls, the crazy is working. There are a huge number of Americans - and potentially a majority in Democrat primaries - who do think the United States should be a large Sweden.
So Hillary may well have staunched the poll hemorrhage with last night's performance, and kept a plausible alternative out of the race. As to whether it's a genuine turnaround and she can roll back the Bern in the early states, I doubt it.
See you for more on the telly tonight - and tomorrow on the radio with Hugh Hewitt.
http://www.steynonline.com/7233/the-alpha-female-of-a-beta-male-debate
