Who Weeps for the Concern Troll?

Michael Bérubé tells the heart-wrenching story of those most devastated by Obama’s election: the professional concern trolls.

“Obama’s election is a historic event,” said former Clinton advisor Lanny Davis, co-chair of the newly-formed Fox News Democrat Caucus.  “But I’m concerned that Obama may have raised expectations too high.  What will happen when he has to face down the left-wing Congressional leadership or the Daily Kos brigades, who will undoubtedly try to goad him into adopting a narrowly partisan agenda?  I worry that Obama won’t have the courage to cut those people loose when he needs to.”

Journalist Amy Sullivan agreed, adding, “I’m hearing a lot of concerns about where the Democratic party goes from here.  Specifically, I’m concerned that fewer Democrats are going to be willing to take seriously the concerns of people who want to reach out across the aisle and establish a bipartisan consensus that abortion is wrong.  What will happen when the party is no longer concerned about these people’s concerns?  Based on what I’m hearing, I have to worry that it will back itself into increasingly radical and unpopular positions on this important issue.”

Other members of the Concerned Democrats focused more on the 2008 electoral map than on “hot-button” social issues.  Democratic strategist David “Mudcat” Saunders, in a plenary address to the group, noted that Obama had managed to make inroads into traditionally Republican southern states such as Virginia and North Carolina, while sweeping Ohio, Florida, Iowa , and even Indiana, which had not voted for a Democrat since 1864.  “There’s a real problem looming here,” said Saunders, “even if most Democrats don’t want to face it right now.  As the Republican party increasingly becomes the party of old white people living in Appalachia, the Ozarks, and the barren windswept areas of the Louisiana Purchase, Democrats are going to be less and less inclined to listen to advisors who insist that the Democratic Party must choose leaders who are white male Southern Baptists familiar with barbeque, NASCAR, and the music of Lynyrd Skynyrd.

Truly, it is a conundrum. Now that Democrats have won a healthy majority of House and Senate seats, not to mention the presidency (with a black guy named Barack Hussein Obama), how will the concern trolls be able to convince Democrats of the dangers of supporting racial equality, legal abortion, or any rights for LGBT people? How will they be able to warn of the danger of asking the rich to pay somewhat higher taxes, or the electoral catastrophe that surely faces any candidate willing to state his opposition to the Iraq war?

I don’t know what will happen to the Democrats if they stop listening to the concern trolls, but if we do, I’m sure it will be bad. For the concern trolls, if for nobody else.