A Florida congresswoman whose promising political career will end far too early is departing Washington with some ominous advice for her fellow Democrats, who probably won’t listen.
U.S. Rep. Stephanie Murphy announced late last year that she won’t run for re-election. Considered a moderate in a Democratic caucus dominated by its farthest-left members, Murphy is among at least 31 members calling it quits. Of the retirees, 23 are Democrats.
That’s just one of the reasons everyone expects a red tsunami at the polls next November. The party not in the White House almost always wins seats in double digits during the first midterm elections of a new president’s tenure. Issues of crime, inflation and President Biden’s free-falling poll numbers will probably give Republicans control of the House — and likely the Senate — next year.
But that’s not why Murphy is not running again in her reconfigured Central Florida district. In a blunt interview with Politico’s “Deep Dive” feature, she recently said the Biden White House and liberal forces in the House Democratic Caucus have made it clear that moderates like herself are not welcome.
The “party of the big tent” Hubert Humphrey and Lyndon Johnson built is a distant memory, if it’s recalled at all by today’s Democrats.
OK, the Republicans used to tolerate moderates like Gerald Ford and Everett Dirksen, who would feel like aliens in today’s GOP, but they don’t have as much to lose as the Democrats do, right now.
In her Politico interview, Murphy worries that Democrats are isolating themselves in a small, impractical slice of the political spectrum while GOP forces build momentum.
“I don’t want to hand this country and the agenda over to a party that’s trying to dismantle democracy. But I also don’t want to hand my party over to the faction that wants to dismantle capitalism,” Politico quoted her. “I think both of those forces are dangerous and detrimental to this country.”
But that’s where Washington seems to be headed, if the farthest-right wing elements of the solidly Trumpified Republican Party win control of Capitol Hill and the Democrats are reduced to a noisy, finger-pointing rabble of malcontents sniping at each other for not shoveling money at social issues fast enough.
Too many liberal Democrats, it seems, would rather tilt at windmills than do things that, y’know, might actually win elections.
“I can’t tell you the number of times I said, ‘You can’t keep promising rainbows and unicorns when your political reality is such narrow margins in the House and a dead-even Senate,” Murphy told Politico. “They took the difference between rainbows and unicorns and political reality — which is anger and disappointment — and turned that anger and disappointment against their own members.”
That’s pretty much typical of the Democrats’ circular-firing-squad approach. Dominated by its loudest, most visible, farthest left elements, the party happily ignores that old political dictum, “Never remind me of what I don’t like about you.” And then they wonder why they keep losing elections.
More from Bill Cotterell:
When she defeated a Republican in 2016, Murphy was a political celebrity. The attitude in Washington then, she said, was to “do what you need to do to hold your seat” as the Democrats were clawing their way back to majority. Once they reached majority, though, nobody got any days off when votes were needed.
Republicans aren’t exactly free thinkers, but they’re dominated by one man — Trump — rather than a coterie of liberals and outside pressure groups. A few who can’t stomach Trump have dropped their re-election plans, and fewer still are publicly defying him and trying to survive, but the GOP tends to agree on issues more than the Democrats.
Some Democrats accused Murphy of being anti-immigrant because she supported the Republican-backed “Kate’s Law,” a measure increasing penalties for immigrants who commit crimes after being deported and illegally returning to this country.
Only the Democrats could consider the first Vietnamese-American woman in Congress to be insufficiently sympathetic to refugees.
The late U.S. Sen. Ernest Hollings, D-S.C., tried for years to stem the party’s leftward drift, citing repeated defeats. “There is no instruction in the second kick of a mule,” as he put it.
Maybe if they get kicked badly enough next November — really wiped out in the House and Senate, leaving Biden alone and powerless in the White House — the Democrats will start listening to moderates like Murphy.
Maybe, by 2024, they might decide they’d rather do what it takes to win than to feel virtuous about losing.
Bill Cotterell is a retired Tallahassee Democrat Capitol reporter who writes a twice-weekly column. He can be reached at bcotterell@tallahassee.com
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