The Democrats who cried wolf

Perhaps some progressives are a mite remorseful about their rhetoric in the past: Next to Trump, Mitt Romney doesn’t look so bad and John McCain (at least the John McCain of 2008) looks downright, um, acceptable. Some of the same publications that were critical of Romney’s presidential run lavishly lauded him for speaking out against Trump. On Tuesday, Obama drew a distinction between policy criticisms he leveled against his two opponents and the idea that they were unqualified. “I think I was right, and Mitt Romney and John McCain were wrong on certain policy issues, but I never thought that they couldn’t do the job,” he said.

The “cried wolf” paradigm is not sufficient to explain what’s going on, nor is it a single-party phenomenon. For one thing, some of these attacks might be true. You could make an argument that Mitt Romney really was the most conservative candidate since Goldwater—after all, the Republican Party has been moving rightward, although FiveThirtyEight found Romney to be slightly more centrist than George W. Bush—and it could still be true that Trump is more conservative. Romney surely benefited from his father’s career. Abortion-rights advocates see any number of Republican candidates as extreme and threatening. And so on. For another, refusing to believe the news does not make it wrong or false.