Years ago I attended an intimate gathering with Speaker John Boehner when he was fundraising for the NRCC.  While we all knew what appeal and strengths the Democrats had, I asked him: What did he identify as their Achilles’ Heel and what were his plans to exploit those vulnerabilities in order to win back Democrat seats. 

He was flabbergasted; he’d never been asked that and hadn’t given it any thought.  As stunned as the remaining guests were with my query, I was even more stunned this had never been given any thought, for, how can you take on a political enemy and not have any inkling as to the vulnerabilities of the party in order to effectively craft a strategy to engage and defeat it?

It’s relatively easy to pinpoint and have a plan of attack for an individual candidate’s shortcomings.  Their records are exposed, often exalted.  They are ubiquitous talking about themselves for months, sometimes years on end.  As invincible as they portray themselves, their deficiencies are usually on full display and there are any number that can be exploited.  Bernie Sanders – an angry communist sympathizer with great appeal to Zoomers who think capitalism has failed; Pete Buttigieg – a novice mayor who talks a big storm about equality but has let his South Bend minority community down;  Liz Warren – an opportunist who will use her minority status as Native American or woman to get ahead, as opposed to any discernible accomplishments.  Joe Biden—need I elaborate?  With oppo research, Republicans can fashion a campaign strategy around any of these qualities and neuter an opponent.

But identifying a chink in a political foe’s armor when they seem to be omnipotent, is a lot harder when that foe is an entity, like a political party, as opposed to a visibly flawed human being.  I am not talking about targeting the individuals in a party.  I’m talking about disrupting and maybe even destroying the party itself—remember Obama saying at one point they were going to destroy the GOP? 

Those qualities are often tangible, but needn’t be.  Just as a person can lack ingenuity or imagination, be arrogant, predictable or overconfident, so can a party.  Those qualities can be enhanced by military strength, political power, control over the population or its institutions. 

With the Democrats, we have a case of a predictable paternalistic party that controls the media, the educational system, and the culture.  We must identify all of their vulnerabilities, which can overlap with their strengths, anticipate their moves, and devise a strategy to defeat them before they even know what hit them. Kind of like what the Democrats have been doing to us for decades.

Trump instinctively understands this.  It is why with a word or two, such as “pencil-neck” or “Fauxcahontas,” he can identify a flaw and almost let it speak for itself.  But Trump has gone beyond the individual and gotten to the heart of the Democratic Party by exposing their double standards, hypocrisy, alliances, inconsistencies, and even insanity.  At the core of it all, Trump has honed in on their overweening arrogance and their sickening paternalism that they know what is best for the rest of us, and he has been chipping away at this chink in the armor, relentlessly.

Time will tell if he and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell have done the same with regard to the impeachment.  For weeks now, I have been exploring, writing, talking to people, and trying to get all of us to think about Nancy Pelosi’s endgame. It is easy to dismiss her as having lost her edge or miscalculated.  But all is never as it seems with the Democrats and Pelosi in particular, even when she appears to be teetering on Joe Biden-style senescence.  I don’t think she is as off her game as some suggest.

There was a point before she announced her refusal to send the impeachment articles to the Senate, when a few people—myself included—speculated this might happen.  As important as it is to anticipate your enemy’s moves, it’s vital to understand motivations or behind-the-scenes machinations that could be in play. The general consensus appears to be that Pelosi intended to squeeze McConnell and dictate the terms of the trial.  On first blush, that appears plausible, but would only make sense if there was a serious possibility McConnell would cave to her demands.  Given his demeanor, existing Senate rules on impeachment, and the Clinton precedent, that appears at best to have been a long shot and she had to know that.

What else did she have to gain?  Time. 

Some of us had suggested that the Democrats would exert untold pressure on weaklings in the GOP – Romney, Collins, Murkowski, Portman, Gardner, etc.—to persuade them to vote with Democrats and against the Republican majority for a “fair” trial and any number of procedural votes that only required a 51-vote majority. 

And that’s exactly what happened.  While smug Republican pundits were scoffing at Nancy’s supposed bungling of the entire matter, Democrats shrewdly targeted our Achilles’ Heel—as evidenced by a MoveOn email sent the day after the impeachment vote, excerpts of which follow:

A majority of senators need to agree on the rules for Trump's impeachment trial, and that means that only four Republican senators need to insist on a fair trial in order to put a stop to McConnell's sham trial.

MoveOn is ready to spring into action to put maximum pressure on persuadable Republican senators to agree to a fair trial. But we've been going all-out on impeachment for weeks now, and we need to sign up 5,000 weekly donors in the next 24 hours to launch billboards targeting these senators, extend the contracts of our organizers on the ground in key states, print more materials for protests and rallies outside senators' offices, and more.

***

Any Republican senator who goes along with Mitch McConnell and the White House will be helping Donald Trump cover up the full extent of his Ukraine scandal. We only need to sway four Republican senators to insist on a fair trial, and we have to give it our all to make that happen.

In addition, they plan to:

Take on Trump's lies directly online and on TV….and need to have substantial resources to reach the activists who are ready to get involved to tell the truth and give them opportunities to act, like protesting, calling Congress, and showing up at their lawmakers' offices….[And,] expand “bird-dogging operations in Washington, D.C.” where [f]or months, MoveOn has been following lawmakers to ask them…Is it OK for a foreign government to interfere in our elections? Now, we must bring that pressure to on-the-fence Senate Republicans. Wherever they run and hide, we must find them. And when they try to wiggle out of answering our question, we must make sure their constituents know about it.  [Emphasis added.]

The appeal makes clear that their hope is “bombshell evidence” will “drop out of the sky” as it did with Nixon and persuade enough Republican senators to abdicate their support for Trump.

If you have any doubt that Democrats have exploited this weakness with their army of community organizers and mob of browbeaters working behind the scenes, embarrassing and harassing senators, long before Republican pundits or pols had even a whiff of it, just look to the recent spate of the usual RINOs calling for a vote on witnesses, distancing themselves from dismissal, and sowing the seeds of possible dissension from McConnell.

You might think that Trump and/or McConnell are ahead of the curve on this and maybe they are.  You might think Trump doesn’t lose sleep over this and maybe he doesn’t.  But the fact is, this is where Democrats outplay us every time.  They knew from the get-go of this impeachment brouhaha that RINOs are our Achilles’ Heel.  They knew that many Republican senators simply tolerate Trump but aren’t really behind him.  They knew many of our senators care more about "principle" than party and are so worried about being the bad guy that they’ll side with Democrats even though they’ll politically shiv Republicans the first chance they get. They might target Mike Lee and Rand Paul knowing they will brazenly defy the president if agreement with him conflicts with a belief or principle they hold, or their views on the Constitution.  

Maybe McConnell or someone else in the Senate is equally as cagey as Wile E. Pelosi, has anticipated this all, and has a plan to be on offense while it appears they are playing defense. 

But…lessons learned.  Do not take anything from the DNC or their leadership for granted.  Ask what is behind what they do and plan accordingly.  At the same time, we should be identifying their Achilles’ Heel(s) and be fully prepared to exploit them.  And we should never assume we have the upper hand, until all hands are played and the results are in.

They might not ultimately remove the president, but they’ll divide senators if they can, impact Senate rules on the trial if they can, and soil Trump for 2020, if they can.  Forget about the Benjamins, baby.   It’s all about the disruption, man.

Image credit: Gage Skidmore, via Flickr // CC BY-SA 2.0