Atlantic: ‘Nobody Talks About Impeachment on the Campaign Trail’

Democrats in Washington are obsessed with the “impeachment inquiry” against President Donald Trump. They continue to point to poll numbers, hopeful that enthusiasm for impeachment will rise.

But the Democrats’ presidential candidates see impeachment as a weak issue on the campaign trail, writes the Atlantic‘s Edward Isaac-Dovere.

He reports from Iowa:

The impeachment fight is all-consuming. It’s the biggest story in politics. No one is talking about anything else—except pretty much everywhere outside of Washington.

…

As the candidates arrived at the arena with their supporters, Beto O’Rourke headed to a park across the street in the cold, wet dusk to officially end a campaign that for him had become a long, frustrated scream about the country’s political crisis. As I waited for him, my phone rang with a call back from Gina Raimondo, Rhode Island’s governor and the chair of the Democratic Governors Association. She was headed to a big dinner herself in Providence, for the NAACP, where she was expecting to continue her week-long streak of not hearing a single person in her state bring up impeachment. That’s what makes her so worried about how the conversations on cable television and Twitter are impeachment-obsessed—instead of focused on the issues that Democrats usually win on. It’s not like voters are hiding what they most care about: health care, climate change, and the perpetual feeling that they’re working harder and harder but never making enough to get by. “Doctors say, ‘Listen to the patient long enough and they’ll tell you what’s wrong with them,’” Raimondo told me. “We need to listen.”

Somehow, Raimondo said, Democrats are expected to say that Trump has committed impeachable offenses and that they’re on board with how House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is moving through the process, and also to not say anything about impeachment at all. The hyper-engaged and serious-minded may find this hard to accept, but even with every day’s news out of the White House seeming like a point-by-point rebuttal to The Federalist Papers, most Americans still see the chaos of the moment as another case of politicians in Washington fighting with one another—like when the Tasmanian Devil used to spin off in whirlwinds of fury while the rest of the Looney Tunes characters looked on.

Read Isaac-Dovere’s full article here.

No Republicans voted in the House to authorize the “impeachment inquiry” last week, and two Democrats joined Republicans in voting against it.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He earned an A.B. in Social Studies and Environmental Science and Public Policy from Harvard College, and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.