The Postal Service Democrats

“…After years of Russian collusion, Ukraine and impeachment, the Democrats have arrived at saying that Donald Trump—in his apparently limitless infamy—is now intent on destroying the U.S. Postal Service so that he can “sabotage” mail-in voting and steal the election….”

Daniel Henninger, "The Postal Service Democrats,"Wall Street Journal, August 19, 2020, https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-postal-service-democrats-11597877645

An eon ago, Nancy Pelosi entered national politics as the host committee chairwoman of the 1984 Democratic National Convention in San Francisco. Other than sending former Vice President Walter Mondale to defeat by Ronald Reagan (Mr. Mondale carried one state, his own, plus the District of Columbia), the convention survives in memory only for being branded by Jeane Kirkpatrick at the Republican convention as “the San Francisco Democrats.” Never has so much political derision filled eight syllables as “the San Francisco Democrats.”

So it is astonishing to see Speaker Pelosi in the twilight of her career as party leader presiding over a political convention in the same week that she transformed her party into the Postal Service Democrats.

Being on vacation last week, I took a few days to focus on the fact that the Democrats were indeed betting the party’s public standing on a nonstop defense of, believe it or not, the post office.

Mrs. Pelosi gave a press conference in front of a San Francisco post office, at a lectern draped with the Democrats’ new logo: “#DontMessWithUSPS.” She is requiring Democratic House members to abandon their re-election campaigns and return to Washington this weekend to vote $25 billion in spending for the post office.

Probably every adult in the U.S. has a favorite post-office story. Mine is the letter delivered here in New York City from a woman in California addressed to her friend in... Sacramento. At least the numbers on the street address were the same. I mailed it back to her.

After years of Russian collusion, Ukraine and impeachment, the Democrats have arrived at saying that Donald Trump—in his apparently limitless infamy—is now intent on destroying the U.S. Postal Service so that he can “sabotage” mail-in voting and steal the election.

Joe Biden, who earlier said he would order the military to remove Mr. Trump from the White House if necessary, claimed from a Delaware fever swamp that the president was responsible for “tractor trailers picking up mailboxes.”

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, an unimpeachably reliable guide to where the party winds are blowing, said: “An attack on our Postal Service, and an attempt to dismantle our Postal Service, out of a selfish desire to sabotage our democracy, and maintain a grip on power, is an attack on all of us.”

Now that the Democrats have adopted the Postal Service as a party paragon, voters are obliged to consider the implications.

At their convention, the Democrats have elevated an array of policy goals—eliminating fossil fuels in 15 years and making health care “affordable” for everyone and public college “free.”

No such grandiose goal is required of the Postal Service, whose single task is delivering envelopes or boxes from here to there. Still, with the post office now coequal with the donkey as the Democratic Party logo, it’s worth considering where they are taking us.

It means that for all the airborne rhetoric of their convention speakers, the Democratic Party in power will settle for doing less. A lot less.

It means the benchmark of achievement for the party’s programs isn’t excellence but something more akin to mail delivery. It means they have no interest in setting incentives to improve. And no matter how many years, or decades, pass of subpar performance, there will be no serious effort at reform. Reform is “sabotage.”

The USPS has seven unions, which makes the idea of effective management an oxymoron. Work-rule modernization, such as ending overtime abuse, can’t happen. Structural inefficiency becomes the norm, as do massive operational deficits.

California is experiencing rolling power blackouts this week because the state’s alternative-energy subsidies suppress efficient changeovers to natural-gas plants, which have closed. When the breakdown of the power supply came, Gov. Gavin Newsom blamed the grid operators.

No surprise that when Postmaster General Louis DeJoy tried to put in place reforms recognized as necessary years ago, Mrs. Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer forced him to revoke them. Don’t expect the party’s wind farms to be run any more efficiently.

Speaker Pelosi is making her members vote $25 billion for the Postal Service just as her urban counterparts are voting to defund police departments in Seattle; Portland, Ore.; Austin, Texas; New York; Los Angeles; Baltimore and Philadelphia. Joe Biden is upset about at-risk mailboxes, but don’t expect him to say anything in his acceptance speech about children being shot in cities across America.

In San Francisco and New York, the Democratic post-office solution to homelessness caused by addictions or mental illness is to ship these people from one neighborhood to another, with no real effort to fix the problem.

U.S. students in K-12 underperform their foreign counterparts in standardized tests year after year. So just as people use FedEx now to ensure timely delivery, parents put their kids in private, parochial or charter schools to bypass the post-office-like public schools. Naturally the Biden-Sanders Unity Task Force proposes to suppress that competition.

The San Francisco Democrats represented only a slice of America. The Postal Service Democrats will subsume the entire country into an ethos of mediocrity.