It’s been two weeks since American Eagle brought sexy back to American advertising, and the left is still grappling with how to deal with Sydney Sweeney. Last Friday, Biden White House functionary Rob Flaherty joined the fray with an op-ed in Politico entitled “The Sydney Sweeney Saga Shows Why Republicans Keep Winning.” In his opening paragraphs, he laments the stupidity of the radical left’s insane reaction to the ad campaign while admitting that “Democrats keep losing the culture war, and with it, the narrative war that inevitably shapes who wins elections.”
I suppose Flaherty should be commended for admitting the culture war is ongoing instead of calling it “phony” like more prominent members of his party. Sadly, there is little else praiseworthy in his diatribe. In his willful blindness, Flaherty chooses to blame his party’s woes on “the media ecosystem we’re all trapped in” rather than the massive elephant in the room: his party’s lack of credibility with the American people.
Look In the Mirror First
Flaherty shares some guilt in destroying that credibility. Although he’s only a minor character in Original Sin, Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s better-late-than-never exposé of the cover-up surrounding Biden’s mental degeneration, Flaherty’s role as director of digital strategy for the administration put him squarely on the front lines of the conspiracy.
In the 2020 campaign, Flaherty was responsible for countering Republican “misinformation” about Biden’s “verbal stumbles” by successfully “blasting a targeted audience with images of Biden looking stronger and more assertive” in order to “[quell] doubts about his age,” the book details. As deputy campaign manager during the “bad times” after Biden’s catastrophic debate in 2024, he “felt the need to push back against the news media and … the Democrats’ ‘bed wetting-brigade’ and [argue] that Biden was the strongest Democrat to take on Trump.” In short, it was Flaherty’s job to convince an increasingly skeptical public that their emperor wasn’t strutting naked before them.
He continued as minister of illusions when he jumped ship to become part of Kamala Harris’s doomed presidential campaign. Though he claims in the op-ed to “have soul searched about why [Harris] lost,” he is either too cowardly or too brainwashed to admit what the majority of Americans (including his colleagues in Biden’s inner circle) know: Harris was a disastrous DEI hire for vice president who was undemocratically foisted upon the Democrat Party faithful and is simply not up to the job of leading the free world.
Ignoring Reality Is a Poor Strategy
Instead, Flaherty falls back on a Democratic boilerplate explanation: their defeat came from a failure to properly leverage new digital communication models. In a classic leftist move, he blames the lack of effective messengers rather than the message itself, despite his party’s continuing dominance of the legacy media landscape.
Flaherty’s description of the right’s “media-to-politics pipeline” regarding the Sweeney ads is accurate, but he doesn’t understand what made that pipeline effective in the first place: the left’s knee-jerk hatred of anything that pleases ordinary Americans. Yes, the criticism of American Eagle began “among a few hyper-online lefty TikTokers,” but this group is now the cornerstone of the Democrat base, and Republicans know it.
Having completely lost its grip on the working class and seeing its race-based coalition slipping away, the Democrats continue to rely more and more on the energy of its radical fringes, which is why social media influencers masquerading as legislators are now considered leaders in the party. The very existence of social starlets, like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Jasmine Crockett, reveals Democrats’ reliance on social media and the superficial approach to leadership it created.
Flaherty fails to grapple with these facts, apparently preferring to believe progressivism is only one viral clip away from redemption. That clip, he argues, could have been a recent Instagram post from a Nebraska Republican and “dog mom” who seems to be giving a Nazi salute, but “Democrats didn’t have the tools to make [this slander] stick.” Has he forgotten the weeks of discussion among corporate media figures prompted by a similar gesture from Elon Musk in January? Did that hate-fueled fever dream produce any political benefits for his fellow Democrats?
The truth is more prosaic: The Instagram post had no resonance because Democrats have accused Republicans (especially Trump supporters) of being Nazis so loudly and for so long that no one takes these accusations seriously except for the “hyper-online lefty TikTokers” that create them. The right’s reaction to the comments about Sydney Sweeney being a Nazi, on the other hand, went viral precisely because it further confirmed, to a much larger and saner audience, that the Trump-hating left is incapable of self-reflection and improvement.
The Definition of Insanity
Flaherty cannot rationally expect Americans to believe the people who spent years lying to them about Trump being a Russian asset and Covid-19 coming from a Chinese wet market. But he continues to convince himself that he and his allies deserve their trust.
At the end of his op-ed, he laughably advises his leftist friends to “treat politics [not] as the slicing and dicing of issues, [but as] the formation of perceptions,” as if the Democrats haven’t been trafficking in fantasy instead of reality for years. The party now finds itself in an approval death spiral because this strategy invariably emphasizes style over substance.
Flaherty wants his party to imitate the Republican “machine that shows — not tells — people a story about cultural values,” but such imitations ring hollow because they stem from a place of dishonesty, a denial of what is happening before the audience’s eyes.
Trump didn’t need to show voters a story. They saw the story every time they filled up at the gas pump, went to the grocery store, watched leftist violence on the evening news, and heard about men dominating in women’s sports. What Trump offers aren’t narratives, but solutions. He’s winning because he gives the story of Democrat malfeasance a happy ending.
In his inaugural podcast, Gov. Gavin Newsom asked Charlie Kirk what advice he had for Democrats in the wake of Trump’s victory. Kirk bluntly responded, “Get better ideas, governor.” Unless party insiders like Rob Flaherty take this advice seriously and stop lying to themselves and everyone else about why they are losing, they will continue to lose in both the culture wars and the political debates that stem from them.