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The Democratic Party couldn't have asked for much more from U.S. President Donald Trump in his first year than the low grades he has registered. He's down to 37 per cent in job approval ratings, this despite a good economy with a spritely stock market.

The support number is all the more wretched when you consider that going back seven decades when they started doing these soundings, no other first-term president scored worse than 51 per cent.

But instead of flying high, the Democrats are in a divided, dreary state, fending off charges in a new book from a party insider. They lack a galvanizing sense of direction, this being a reason for their jarring defeat a year ago. After decades in politics, Hillary Clinton was an empty vessel. Her vision was mist.

Now Donna Brazile, one of her old colleagues, has come forward with a dirty-laundry tome exposing the party's entrails. It's a wild score-settling exegesis called Hacks: The Inside Story of the Break-ins and Breakdowns That Put Donald Trump in the White House.

One accusation is that Hillary Clinton rigged the primary campaign against Bernie Sanders by strong-arming the Democratic National Committee that set the rules. Shortly after the charge was out, Ms. Brazile watered it down. But headlines had already done the damage. Ms. Brazile also revealed that, as acting DNC chair, she actually considered moving to replace Ms. Clinton as the candidate because she appeared ill, fainting once.

Ms. Brazile, who was booted from the Michael Dukakis campaign in 1988 and chaired Al Gore's woeful effort in 2000, takes down most everyone in the book except herself, a clear oversight. The party was in disarray when she took it over, she writes, because president Barack Obama, Ms. Clinton and outgoing party chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz were "three titanic egos" who had "stripped the party to a shell for their own purposes."

A multitude of senior Democrats have hit back at Ms. Brazile, saying she is delusional. She has responded they can all "go to hell."

That the party is split into several factions isn't all that unusual after a stinging defeat. But they have to stop reliving and relitigating the last campaign.

The Democrats got a bit of a lift in the gubernatorial race in Virginia Tuesday with a win by Democrat Ralph Northam.

The party's internal debate is over how to shed the elitist image and expand their appeal beyond minorities to low-educated white folk. Mr. Trump draws on the emotional intensity of the rabble. He's uninformed, his appeal is to the uninformed, and the country endures the consequences.

Conventional wisdom suggests that American politics has been realigned along elitist versus populist lines. Or, you might say, deep state versus shallow state. Of course, no one would be talking about a realignment and a populist uprising had not former FBI director James Comey brought back the Clinton e-mail server controversy late in the campaign, thereby turning momentum over to Mr. Trump in the closing days.

The Democrats, having won two elections under Mr. Obama and coming within a hair of making it three, have no reason to panic. As American voting patterns shift, the Trump coalition is unlikely to hold. In politics, it's always wise to bank on flux over permanence. As political historian Arthur Schlesinger once put it, "the future outwits all our certitudes."

Rahm Emanuel, the former chief of staff to Barack Obama, says the Democrats should not worry about left versus right so much as forward versus backward.

There's a lot of logic in that. Has there ever been a president more retrograde than Donald Trump? He is anti-immigrant, anti-green, anti-free trade, anti-gun laws, anti-public health care.

His great leap backward doesn't stop there. He favours tax breaks for the rich. He favours a build-up in nuclear arms. He's taken the highest office in the land to truth-shredding new lows.

If the Democrats can't beat someone with an agenda like that, they are as hapless as Donna Brazile says they are.

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