Yet another Democrat has joined the presidential scrum: former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper. And here’s what this self-described “extreme moderate” had to say when announcing his candidacy:
Ultimately I'm running for president because I believe that not only can I beat Donald Trump, but that I am the person that can bring people together on the other side and actually get stuff done.
This means that Hickenlooper, while holed up in Denver, has failed to notice what the Republicans have become over the past, say, 40 years. In his defense, he's been busy keeping the state's oil and gas industry from the receiving end of much needed regulations. On the plus side, he did get a Medicaid expansion through a divided legislature, but so did John Kasich in Ohio, and Kasich is a Republican who had a Republican legislature. And as mayor of Denver before he became governor, Hickenlooper did get the city to adopt universal pre-K for four-year-olds, but the number of rightwing Republicans in the Denver City Council was never very high.
The last Democratic president able to “bring people together on the other side” wasn't Barack Obama or Bill Clinton or Jimmy Carter. It was Lyndon Johnson, who succeeded in getting many Republicans to vote for the landmark civil rights legislation of the 1960s. But that wasn't fundamentally because of “the Johnson touch;” it was because liberal Republicans still walked the earth in 1964 and 1965. Conversely, the failures of Obama, Clinton and Carter to win similar crossovers weren't due to their deal-making deficiencies, but to the fact that the share of Republicans who are liberal, or even moderate, has dwindled virtually to naught.
Corralling people “on the other side” depends on who those people are and what they believe. Before a Hickenlooper or any other Democrat can win their support for anything, those people have to be radically different from who they've become, from who they are today. If John Hickenlooper doesn't understand that, if his grasp of current realities is that flimsy, he has no business running for president.
