According to The Daily Beast’s Michael Tomasky, Democrats shouldn’t feel lucky that they haven’t dealt with a loose-cannon celebrity candidate à la Donald Trump. Rather, they should be proud that their party wouldn’t come close to nominating anyone like that in the first place.
“I feel for conservative pundits and thinkers to some extent, I really do,” wrote Tomasky in a Monday column. “I’ve wondered many times what I would do if the situation were reversed. But here’s the thing: The situation is not reversed. And it would never be reversed. The idea that the Democrats would nominate Sean Penn or, I don’t know, Alan Grayson (who probably isn’t even going to win his primary) or Charlie Sheen or Susan Sarandon or whomever is totally insane.”
Tomasky argued that Obama-bashing turned up to eleven essentially created the Trump phenomenon: "Democrats have cantered a bit to the left, but the Republicans have galloped to the right like Secretariat on crack. And over these past eight years of birther conspiracies and racially coded barbs at the moocher-class president, they’ve led their voters to the point where those voters thought voting for Donald Trump was a sensible and defensible thing. If I were on the right, I’d spend a lot more time examining why that happened than I would analyzing Hillary’s imperfections."
In Tomasky’s opinion, “the only principled position for conservatives to take in this election” is to “say that while they can’t vote for Clinton, Donald Trump should never be president of the United States, ever.”
