Sheinkopf Speaks: The Democrats self-inflicted comeuppance

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Hank Sheinkopf

The Democrats are slapping backs and laughing. The show will likely go on they appear to be thinking. Note the smirks and the smiles. Get those Escalantes ready to roll. Make those engines purr, drivers. More shrimp, more fundraisers. We know the  issues. We know what to say. There are just too many of us and too few of them.  So, don’t take those stretched out legs off he desk. 

The maybe every once in a while really smart ones have got it figured like this: Okay. So the little people–who pay the bills and put expensive gas in the tanks of the cars we drive to and from the kingdom and queendom called Albany—only care about a woman’s right to choose, and assault weapons. Local crime increases? Random shootings in every city in the state?  Urban emigres who ran away to suburbia, from what they now see—whether rightly or wrongly—coming too close to them will do  anything to protect their ability to pay off their mortgages, plan on retirement and not have to worry whether the kids get home safe after a night out.

When things start happening where they not supposed to happen, voters shake their heads. When chaos and disorder are daily realities voters react. Examples: Ronald Reagan, and Joseph Biden. Economic disorder? We got Bill Clinton. Riots? Nixon’s the one.

The Democrats—locally, nationally—will pay the price for what we are all paying at the pump, and for supply chain snafus, for shortages of infant feeding formula. National murder rates, and local index crime increases. The party in power gets blamed. It‘s what happens.

 Now if you say such things you will be accused if you are a Democrat of being a traitor. After all, the other party must be responsible for all matters of wrong. However the voters might not see it that way. 

New York State’s statute legalizing abortion became law on July 1, 1970, three years before the Roe V. Wade decision. We’ve had the toughest gun laws in the nation since 1911 with passage of the Sullivan Act. 

If it’s guns and abortion that will keep Democrats’ margins increasing then why are the polling numbers so lousy? Democrat Congressmember and former Nassau County Executive Thomas Suozzi has aired the best produced and most message cogent ads of the season. He gets it. And the retiring state senators particularly from Long Island get it. Trump isn’t running. Animal unhuman active shooters aren’t on the ballot. And those for whom abortion rights are all will certainly turn out to vote in the primary elections, telling their fellows of the same economic class that they stand in solidarity and once the vote is cast in locations where a Democrat can’t lose they will run from the city, far away from the suburbs and complain loudly while others do the work required of democracy.

The late muckraking reporter Jack Newfield said always that Democrats had to do something about crime to be successful. 

He was correct. And they are doing something: they are talking about abortion and gun regulation, both of which were attended to by New Yorkers long ago. 

What they are not talking about is comprehensively fighting street crime. Why should they? They will by all odds still be in majorities in both state legislative chambers in January. What’s a few shot and dead New Yorkers—mostly poor—when you’ve got so much of the Albany life to look forward to.