Last Call For The Douthat Bubble

Here's a free piece of advice:  if you're a professional Beltway columnist, and you write a story about how any politician is disconnected from the reality of average Americans, you're destined for mockery for the precise reason that professional Beltway columnists are quite literally the least-qualified people in America to have any actual idea what Americans are thinking outside the Beltway.

Hence today's contestant, Ross Douthat.

After all, gun control, immigration reform and climate change aren’t just random targets of opportunity. They’re pillars of Acela Corridor ideology, core elements of Bloombergism, places where Obama-era liberalism overlaps with the views of Davos-goers and the Wall Street 1 percent. If you move in those circles, the political circumstances don’t necessarily matter: these ideas always look like uncontroversial common sense. 

Step outside those circles, though, and the timing of their elevation looks at best peculiar, at worst perverse. The president decided to make gun control legislation a major second-term priority ... with firearm homicides at a 30-year low. Congress is pursuing a sharp increase in low-skilled immigration ... when the foreign-born share of the American population is already headed for historical highs. The administration is drawing up major new carbon regulations ... when actual existing global warming has been well below projections for 15 years and counting.

If Ross had been paying attention, he'd realize that gun control really is an actual priority with a vast majority of Americans, along with a vast majority of non-Beltway scientists on climate change and yes, ordinary Americans are backing immigration reform.  

But Bubble Boy here seems to think that climate change is a myth, along with gun control and immigration reform...and he's so deluded that he thinks Americans don't care about that either.  He goes on to bleat about jobs, but fails to mention Republicans have blocked job legislation at every opportunity.

And in the end, Douthat has to admit his team are losers.

But so far, Republicans have mostly used liberalism’s relative weakness as an excuse for not moving much at all, and sticking with an agenda that’s even more disconnected from the anxieties of the average voter than the White House’s second-term priorities. 

Their assumption seems to be that eventually the public will simply have to turn to them. But their obligation should be to address both parties’ most conspicuous failure, and actually meet the voters where they are.

That's funny, Ross.  Every time the Democrats try to do that, the Republicans block them.  Pay attention.