In the waning days of the midterm election campaign, Republicans have finally stumbled on a closing message: defending the honor of the Cheesecake Factory. Last week, Barack Obama made a viral crack about Donald Trump’s renovations: “He’s got the White House looking like Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory.” Conservatives feigned outrage on behalf of the humble American volk for whom the Cheesecake Factory is the height of sophistication. Fox Business interviewed the centimillionaire Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, after lunch at the restaurant; he sniffed, “I would tell the Martha’s Vineyard set to give it a try.” (His Massachusetts beach house, which he sold for a couple of million dollars in 2012, was in Provincetown.) The Wall Street Journal suggested that Democrats had shot themselves in the foot in their quest to win back “the working man in Middle America.” The White House posted a list of Trump’s “accomplishments” in the style of a Cheesecake Factory menu.
Republicans have been trying to brand Democrats as the party of out-of-touch elitists since at least the 1960s, but this time, it felt particularly forced and desperate. After all, it’s become screamingly obvious which party represents billionaires and unchecked plutocratic power. On the stump this week, an increasingly disinhibited Trump scoffed at the idea of “suffering at the pump” while boasting that high oil prices have been a windfall for the energy industry.
Elon Musk, the richest person on earth, is almost single-handedly funding the Texas Senate candidate Ken Paxton’s campaign. Susan Collins ran a closing ad in which a retired broadcaster seemed to mock her Democratic opponent, Troy Jackson, for being a logger, saying, “We’re not talking about buying a cord of wood here; we’re sending someone to the U.S. Senate.” Meanwhile, Democrats all over the country are running against the ultrarich. “The biggest divide in this country is not left versus right,” the Texas Senate candidate James Talarico says on the campaign trail. “It’s top versus bottom.” In the Michigan Senate race, Abdul El-Sayed is a political protégé of Bernie Sanders who accuses his opponent, Mike Rogers, of being bought by corporations. Former Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio, defeated with the help of crypto dollars two years ago, may regain his seat thanks in part to widespread fury at data centers and the tech billionaires behind them.
If Democrats win big on Tuesday after running such populist campaigns, it will be more than a victory over Trump. It will be an opportunity for them to once again develop an image as the champion of working people against predatory elites. That, in turn, could realign American politics.
But it will happen only if Democrats can resist the entreaties of the tech donors and lobbyists who, having realized that going all in on MAGA was a bad bet, will now spend big to rebuild bridges to the center left.
Source: New York Times Top Stories · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing