Immortal American humorist Will Rogers is credited with this aphorism: "I am not a member of any organized political party. I am a Democrat."
This remark speaks through the ages to two current political dramas: Hillary's refusal to quit, and Mark Dann's refusal to quit. Both speak volumes about the endemic disarray of the Party of Jackson.
In August 1974, a delegation from Congress, led by the esteemed senior Republican Senator Barry Goldwater, visited embattled President Nixon to tell him that with the revelations of the Oval Office tapes that he had participated in a conspiracy to cover up the Watergate break-in, his support from congressional Republicans was gone. Consequently, he resigned immediately, specifically citing his loss of congressional support as the proximate cause. The Republic was spared paralyzing impeachment proceedings precisely because Republicans had the modicum of principle and the power of influence to prevail upon a President of their party who had won a landslide reelection two years before.
Today there is no such Democrat who from a stature of integrity and statesmanship can speak to someone of Mark Dann's stature, let alone Hillary Clinton's, and get that person to accept reality for the good of the party, let alone the Republic.
We less stridently make a further point. We seriously doubt that those Democrats who knew Mark Dann prior to his election as Ohio's attorney general only recently discovered that he lives like a frat boy. We know for sure that lots of Ds understood Hillary Clinton's narcissistic, unprincipled ruthlessness after her decades of public life filled with financial scandals, character assassination, and other acts of self-serving shadiness. Those people never spoke up, publicly or privately (at least to any effect) to dissuade either these candidates or their potential supporters from electoral quests that by the hour are proving more and more damaging to their party's dignity and political prospects.
Granted that scoundrels are hard to identify preemptively and, when the scoundrels are talented, harder still to dislodge from power, we note this phenomenon as another disturbing indicator of the gutlessness of FDR's heirs. These sorry sagas would not have happened in Truman's day.
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