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“When they go low, we go high”. So said Michelle Obama at the last Democratic National Convention in 2016, when American liberals were at the height of their power. Their opponents did go

low and, as a result, now control the Presidency, the Supreme Court, the Senate and the majority of state governorships. Now it is the Democrats who are at their lowest point. And yet, when

not knocking chunks out of each other on national television, their presidential candidates seem far more interested in winning the moral high ground than the political high ground. Just

look at their slogans — Tulsi Gabbard’s “Lead with Lov”’, Andrew Yang’s “Make America Think Harder”, Joe Biden’s “Battle for America’s Soul” and so on. Of course, the “hopey changey thing”,

as Sarah Palin called it, is par for the course in election season. But the Democrats’ gamble to make 2020 a morality contest, even though half of the country voted for Donald Trump in 2016,

is a big risk. The man behind Bill Clinton’s election to the presidency in 1992, James Carville, has said that he’s “scared to death” by the direction of the party. And the evidence does

suggest that “woke” won’t win. Recent polling shows that Trump would beat every Democratic candidate in an election, with the exception of Bernie Sanders, and even Sanders’ margin of victory

(2 per cent) is still far too close for comfort. The candidate who made some headway in recent weeks was Mike Bloomberg, and he did so on the back of roughly $410 million dollars’ worth of

TV attack ads. He went low. Elizabeth Warren fired up the Democratic base when she said that “Democrats take a huge risk if we just substitute one arrogant billionaire for another”. Since

Bloomberg’s mini-surge, Joe Biden has emerged from the pack as the front-running candidate, having won the primary in South Carolina and with it the backing of several moderate candidates,

who dropped out of the race to support him. But whoever secures the Democratic nomination in Milwaukee in July would do well to remember that, if demonising Trump served them in closed

Democratic primaries, it will not win a general election. This much was clear from the 2018 midterms, when successful Democrats focused on bread and butter issues, not Trump. And, love him

or loathe him, the 45th President is not so different from previous presidents. As usual, half of the country thinks he’s a hero, the other half a villain; and like past presidents, the

truth is that he’s something in between. Some have even compared Trump to the “anti-hero” figures that dominate American culture, from Jay Gatsby to Batman. There is something in this.

Anti-heroes are complex — they are on the good side, but they themselves have a mix of good and bad (or are just bad). But the mistake that most observers have made is to presume that Trump

is the first president to have a heavy dose of bad. He isn’t. After all, the Founding Fathers went to great lengths to create what John Adams called an “empire of laws, not of men”. They

predicted Trump — and every slave-owner, warmonger, wiretapper, court-packer, philanderer and wrong-doer who came before him. Many of these presidents were Democrats. Andrew Jackson

committed genocide. JFK and LBJ presided over the catastrophe of the Vietnam war. Harry Truman dropped the bomb. Two of the three presidents who have been impeached were Democrats (Andrew

Johnson and Bill Clinton). These were great men in their own right, but they weren’t exactly good men. They didn’t go high. And why would they? This is the presidency, not the priesthood.

Look at the Democrats who have lost presidential elections: Adlai Stevenson, Hubert Humphrey, George McGovern, Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis, Al Gore, John Kerry, Hillary Clinton. All

intelligent, noble people — and they all lost. Even the “good guys” who have made it to the Oval Office — Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford, George HW Bush — were one-term presidents. Who knows,

maybe it’s because America is a Christian nation, but the American people really don’t take to politicians being what they call “holier than thou”. They want a sinner like them. Richard

Nixon was re-elected by a landslide in 1972 despite the Watergate scandal breaking out earlier that year. Bill Clinton’s approval ratings reached their highest point following his

impeachment. Ditto Trump. This is why Sanders would struggle against Trump — his politics is too noble. The same goes for all of the candidates: the way to lose in November is to portray

themselves as the Messiah to Trump’s anti-christ. No one is unimpeachable — as the Founding Fathers knew — and good eggs tend to make bad presidential candidates anyway. Citizen Sanders and

Biden seem to be breaking away, but we’re yet to have Super Tuesday or the Convention, where an entirely new candidate could emerge and steal the nomination. There is still time for the

Democrats to find their own anti-hero.