Who would ever dream of handing political leadership to someone whose crowning career achievement was a high-paying no-show job? As its next presidential candidate, is Michelle Obama the best the Democrats can come up with? That's the view of pollster Douglas Schoen, who thinks they don't stand a chance otherwise.  In a piece for The Hill, he writes:

As I’ve said before, the Democrats need an alternative plan to rebuild and unite the party if they have any hope in winning back seats in Congress in the 2018 midterms, nonetheless the White House in 2020. 

This alternative plan requires a new, united opposition, led by a political leader with widespread popularity.

The only person I can see accomplishing this would be none other than the party’s most popular political figure: Michelle Obama.

He goes on to cite her high popularity numbers among Democrats and with the general public, leaving her Democratic Party potential competition in the dust.

It's well reported that President Obama stripped his party of upcoming potential leaders as he made it all about himself during his two terms. Voters liked him, personally, but not his party positions. As a result, Democrats lost 1,042 state and federal legislative offices, governorships and the presidency itself during his administration. Republicans posted gains across the board, culminating in the 2016 election of Donald Trump. Their fundraising dried up, too.

Putting Michelle Obama out there (and who knows if it will happen -- all we know is that Democrats are desperate) would be more of the same personality-based office-seeking.

Because if Barack Obama had a lightweight political record before his election, Michelle Obama has a virtually non-existent one. It was utterly substance-free. Her main point of visibility to the public was in her wearing of expensive designer gowns. Her main policy move during her White House years was in her utterly unpopular school lunch program, which one student recipient summed up as "nasty, rotty" food. It was served up with a side of corruption to boot. Prior to that, she held her no-show job in Chicago for a $316,000 salary payout. She pretty much has nothing else to speak for her other than her penchant for wearing diamonds and expensive clothes and serving in boutique ribbon-cutting roles for leftist causes, under the rubric of 'service.'

It all shows the vast desert wasteland of potential leaders the Democrats have left themselves with.

That they grasp for Michelle shows that they know their ideas are bankrupt and no longer sell with voters. That they seek to repeat the Obama act again with Michelle, suggests they are looking for an Evita, or perhaps Isabella, the two nightclub dancers who were put into place in Argentina because the locals longed for their absent strongman, Juan Peron. It was a desperate grasp for the politics of personality. Isabella's tenure as president after Peron's demise in the early 1970s was a disaster for Argentina, ushering the reactionary Dirty War which followed the leftist terrorism and disorder that emerged during her weak leadership.

Now the Democrats seem to be anxious to follow the same pattern. We've seen it elsewhere with this bunch, with the tag-team politics of Bill and Hillary Clinton, and more broadly on the left, with the Hollande-Royal partnership in socialist France, and with the Kirchner couple recently in Argentina.

Michelle Obama says she's not interested, but one wonders how long that will last, now that President Obama has begun to fundraise for Democrats once again. Whether she does or doesn't get involved, the verdict is in: The Democrats can't come up with anyone better.