As is often the case, Tom Maguire speaks what many of us are thinking. This week, following the Democratic debates and a poll indicating that only 25% of Democrats want a  “bold, new agenda” he tweeted:

“Per this poll, this is not a 'Time For A Change' election; It's a 'Can We Please Catch Our Breath And Have Something Like Normal For Five Minutes, Please, I'm Begging Now' election.

But Dems, transfixed by the Twitterati, aren't listening. Too bad.”

With him, as well, I share this favorite exchange of the last “debate”:

INSLEE: ...I've heard you say that we need a realistic plan. Here's what I believe...

BIDEN: No, I didn't say that.

Jeff Dunetz has his own favorites from the debates, including this one: Weird Lines From CNN's Democratic Debates That Nobody Is Covering -- The Lid.

Whenever I tuned into this week's Democratic debates I'd hear candidates say something weird like the candidate ...

It was astonishing that no one pointed out Elizabeth Warren said something proving she knew little about politics. She said, “I don’t understand why anybody goes to all the trouble of running for president of the United States just to talk about what we really can’t do and shouldn’t fight for. I don’t get it!”  Anybody who’s ever followed politics knows the reason.

In certain respects I sympathize with these candidates. It’s hard to argue against a president whose economic policies have resulted in a far stronger economy with more people earning larger paychecks and more Americans employed than there have been for decades. And then there’s the ridiculous format in which each can only try to distinguish oneself by snappy one-liners or sharp attacks on another candidate.

The Democratic party’s usual spiels -- Russian collusion and racism -- don’t seem to be working. Mueller killed collusion in his report and testimony. Racism seems to be a dud torpedo right now: Rasmussen reports that 49% of Blacks who are likely voters do not consider Trump supporters racist.

Over at the Spectator, Roger Kimball offers up a trenchant summary of the debate:

Someday, footage from the Democratic debates of 2019 will occupy a prized place in the comedy section of our cultural archives, just down the shelf from moldering copies of the Keystone Cops.

I only caught about an hour of Tuesday’s debate, but I could tell from tonight’s performance that I could have stopped after 10 minutes. True, out of the mephitic cauldron of bubbling nonsense, an occasional bubble of sanity rose to the surface and expired in a satisfying eructation. But such little pops were emitted by the debaters of whom no one had heard of before (well, not before the first set of debates a month ago) and surely no one will hear of again. Those voices were shouted down by the hectoring war whoops of Elizabeth Warren -- what an unpleasant person -- and socialist nostrums of Bernie Sanders. ‘Let’s give lots of stuff away!’ Tonight, the bubbles of sanity came almost exclusively from the entrepreneur Andrew Yang, who also had what was perhaps the most amusing line of the evening: in order to beat Donald Trump, he said, you needed someone who was the opposite of Donald Trump. What is the opposite of Donald Trump? ‘An Asian guy who likes math.’ Not bad. But Mr. Yang will not be president in part because he will not be the Democratic nominee.[snip] Here’s a quick cheat sheet. All the Democrats support policies that would raise taxes. They all support policies that would make the country poorer because less energy independent. Some want to give free college tuition to illegal immigrants, all want many more immigrants, legal or illegal. Most think Trump should be impeached. Some want to abolish private insurance, most want ‘Medicare for all.’ Gov. Inslee insisted that ‘it is time to give people adequate mental health care,’ a statement that won a round of applause. Judging from what was said from the platform tonight, I think he may be right.

The big test for tonight was Joe Biden. Could he break free, survive Kamala Harris’s attacks, and give a decent account of himself? I don’t know whether, like the little engine that could, he might have managed it if he really tried. He never quite got into the groove. He was earning about C or C+ until the end of the evening, though: nothing brilliant, but also nothing disastrous. He lost it during his closing statement, alas, when he suggested that Donald Trump might be president for another eight years. That might in fact be a good idea. I do not think it is what he meant to say.

You don’t have to take Kimball’s word for it. Mark Penn, former Bill Clinton pollster, was just as critical:

By the end of this endless debate, spooned out in one-minute dollops, I walked out with a $1,000-a-month check, an extra grand if I’m a female, untold reparations dollars if I am African American, Medicare from birth covering everything I’ll ever need until death, and the right to cross the border without any real penalty if I’m from another country. Prosecuting criminals of any kind generally got a thumbs-down, while white privilege made me immune from racist police who were painted as villains. And there will be no more pointless wars, carbon emissions will be zero by 2030, and it may take 10 years, but the government will run almost all health care.

While these same candidates earlier this week expressed outrage at President Trump for tweeting that Baltimore was a rat-infested mess, they all seemed to portray our entire country as in far worse shape than that Maryland oasis. America, it seems, is not the land of full employment, rising wages and decreased poverty. It’s not a country in which 90 percent have health insurance, almost everyone has a smartphone, and 64 percent own their home. It’s at heart a racist, misogynistic country dominated by fat cats and big corporations sucking the life out of us all. According to these candidates it’s a dark, dark place and, unless we usher them into office and save it through these programs and policies that start at a mere $30 trillion, America will continue to be a lost country.

Nearly every one of the candidates called for the impeachment of President Trump, and yet none of them called out a specific act that the president did to merit impeachment. They just said that former special counsel Robert Mueller outlined 10 of them and left it at that, ignoring that the Justice Department declared that these actions did not rise to obstruction of justice. Russia collusion as a theory has been abandoned.

Seven of the candidates have qualified for the next debate in September; three more look close enough to make that cutoff. So we can expect the same kind of format, and wrangling in the next round. Maguire’s plea for “something normal” is likely to go unanswered.

In the meantime, flying largely under the radar, it seems to me that the president’s re-election campaign is focusing not only on job creation but as well on attacking big city corruption in places long uni-party Democratic strongholds. FBI investigations (and some indictments) have been taking place in Los Angeles, Illinois, Washington, D.C., and Baltimore. The President responded to Congressman Elijah Cummings’ attack on him by noting what a miserable rat-infested area his home, Baltimore, is despite billions of dollars being granted to it by the federal government for improvement (almost $16 billion to this city of 600,000 people in the last year alone). There’s some indication that violating the unspoken no-no of criticizing Black politicians has actually helped him win over more votes from the Black victims of these awful policies and maladministration.

President Trump triggered a media firestorm when he criticized a longtime Democratic congressman’s job performance, saying his Baltimore district is “a rat and rodent infested mess” and “the worst run and most dangerous anywhere in the United States.”

The president has since pointed out that many of the country’s major cities have similar problems, and nearly all have been run for years by Democrats. Democratic leaders responded by calling Trump a racist, but media interviews in Baltimore and elsewhere found black residents asking the same questions the president is asking.

Like most Republicans, Trump has struggled to attract black voters, but this week’s surveying for the Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll has found a bump in black support for the president. Even with the +/-9 margin of error for the smaller sample, it’s a bump that has held up nearly all week.

In like measure, Democrats who espouse open borders hoping to pander to Hispanic voters, must not be happy to learn that his support among Hispanics has grown. 

In a new Harvard/Harris poll released this week exclusively to The Hill, President Trump’s overall approval rating rose to 47 percent, just two points shy of the highest level of his presidency, per that survey. The main driver of his growing popularity now: a stunning 10 percent rise in Trump approval among Hispanics. 

That growing support among Latinos would surely surprise many Trump critics in Washington and the legacy media, who remain fixated on border issues.  So intense is their hysteria regarding border enforcement that people like former CIA Director Michael Hayden compared our detention policies to the Auschwitz concentration camp in a tweet and MSNBC’s Donny Deutsch proclaimed on “Morning Joe” that ALL Trump voters are essentially Nazis.

It was no surprise either that Harris, de Blasio, Warren, and Biden rushed to defend and support Al Sharpton the target of another Trump tweet. Since its takeover by the extreme left, with its fervent adoption of identity politics, the party has has become markedly anti-Semitic and the debate was on almost the very anniversary of the first Jewish pogrom in America, a pogrom led by Al Sharpton. Jeff Dunetz related the events as well as anyone could.  These facts are no more obscure than Sharpton’s lies about the make-believe rape of Tawana Brawley, then a fifteen-year-old runaway who concocted a fantastic story which Sharpton promoted to fuel racial tensions and advance his own career. 

Sharpton’s career is one of race baiting, Jew hatred, and grifting, and every one of the Democratic candidates who rushed to defend him knows and does not care. Not only do I think that these candidates fail to offer up a realistic plan for the country, I also think they have no realistic plan for beating the president.