IT'S GOING TO BE A FUNNY TABLE D'HÔTE MENU.

Well, Eugene Robinson told us a presidential platform was not an a la carte menu.  I suspect he'll find more to like than not when the Democrats come up with one, but maybe we can have a reprise of the platform committee meetings of 1968 and 1972.

Democratic Party voters are split. Its most progressive wing, which is supportive of contentious policies on immigration, health care and other issues, is, in the context of the party’s electorate, disproportionately white. So is the party’s middle group of “somewhat liberal” voters. Its more moderate wing, which is pressing bread-and-butter concerns like jobs, taxes and a less totalizing vision of health care reform, is majority nonwhite, with almost half of its support coming from African-American and Hispanic voters.

The public face of the identity politics wing might be that third world kiddie corps, but most of the voters in that wing are the sensible-shoes, World Council of Churches Nobody Attends aging white folks.  The Coalition of the Ascendant has policy preferences that you might expect of a rising middle class.  But the noisy fringe is calling the shots.  "There is an abundance of evidence that the more liberal Democratic presidential candidates may be pushing into dangerous terrain, taking stands that could prove difficult to defend in the general election."

Longtime Democrat court intellectual Paul Starr notes the same thing.

With the presidential nomination race wide open, they are effectively leaderless. Trump is taking advantage of that void to make the Squad the faces of the Democratic Party, calculating that they are the perfect symbols to drive his voters to the polls.

Some of the leading 2020 Democratic presidential candidates didn’t help their cause in the June debates by taking a series of unpopular positions, such as banning private health insurance, providing insurance to the undocumented, and decriminalizing border entry. They’re giving Trump and the Republicans plenty to work with.

There’s a real danger of Democrats getting ahead of themselves. Eventually, they should benefit electorally from the rising numbers of people of color and a younger generation with progressive views. But that emerging majority isn’t a majority of voters yet, and the sense that it is on the way is creating a panic among conservative whites.

Perhaps that "panic among conservative whites" is some projection on the part of Mr Starr.  There might be opportunities, for instance, for populist Republicans to make common cause between upscale voters of European extraction, who provided a lot of Our President's votes in the battleground states, and those among the coalition of the ascendant who might see more value in civil society, bourgeois conventions, and freedom of action than in the straitjacket of identity politics.

Look for a follow-on post along those lines, before school starts.