Fifty-one years ago, the national Democratic Party and its presidential nominee were characterized as the party of ”acid, amnesty and abortion” in one of the more devastating, effective and enduring slogans in American political history.

As Donald Trump maintains and builds on his commanding lead in polling of the Republican presidential nominating contest, the notion of the former president’s “inevitability” gains momentum.

It’s time for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to retreat to his executive suite in Tallahassee, take a deep breath and end his war with the Disney Corp.

Outwardly at least, the Democratic Party’s national leadership has exhibited no sense of urgency over the absence of any definitive announcement of a President Biden re-election campaign.

“Defund the police” – the rallying cry of the Democratic Party’s progressive left wing in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death at the hands of Minneapolis police nearly three years ago — was arguably the most self-defeating political slogan in modern history.

Aside from occupying the White House itself, former president Donald Trump is exactly where he wants to be — at the center of the national political dialogue, a dominating media presence and a controlling influence in the selection of a Republican presidential nominee in 2024.

A constant in the political universe is the quest to occupy the moral high ground, that space that sets apart those with noble intentions and pure motives from those driven by craven desires in pursuit of personal gains.

On Nov. 15, former president Donald Trump announced his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024. Less than three weeks later, he ended it.

One of the most enduring justifications for a combat operation was uttered by an Army major in the war in Vietnam in 1968: “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.”

No matter the outcome of the midterm Congressional election, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s run as leader of her party will come to an end.

It took some time, but the Democratic Party establishment finally recognized what had become apparent to most of the political universe many months ago — If the congressional midterm elections became a referendum on the Biden administration, defeat and the loss of both houses of Congress was inevitable.

Whether Donald Trump scooped up 15 cartons of documents and classified material and scurried off to his Mar-a-Lago compound 20 months ago is politically inconsequential.

In the nearly 21 months since the last presidential election, millions of Americans have given the benefit of the doubt to former president Donald Trump as he unleashed a torrent of accusations that his defeat resulted from massive voter fraud, and in an honest process he’d have won a second term.

Despite a few points in her testimony in dispute, the narrative laid out by former White House assistant Cassidy Hutchinson concerning the events of Jan. 6, 2021, presents a chilling portrait of a furious president desperately clinging to power surrounded by advisers offering outlandish legal theories to block the certification of Joe Biden as president.

As the Congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U. S. Capitol heads into its final public hearings phase, early indications are that — despite compelling testimony — the needle on the public opinion meter has barely budged, and the impact on the congressional midterm elections, as well as the 2024 presidential contest, will be minimal.

When the draft Supreme Court opinion overturning the constitutional right to an abortion was leaked to the media last month, it tore through Washington, D.C. with the force of a category five hurricane.

With public approval lodged for months between 40 and 42 percent and facing a midterm election anticipated to be a seismic disaster, President Biden has endured an almost Pavlovian response from consultants, strategists, academics and party leaders.

A desperately needed bounce in public acclaim following President Biden’s signing of the $1 trillion infrastructure proposal has yet to materialize, leaving the president wallowing in the low 40 percent range in job-performance approval from a discontented and dispirited nation helpless in the face of out-of-control inflation.

Alice Roosevelt Longworth, the free-spirited tart tongued daughter of Teddy, once described her president father as someone who “wanted to be the corpse at every funeral, the bride at every wedding and the infant at every christening.”

The White House press corps is in a snit again because President Biden, who many reporters openly cheered on in last year’s election, has stiffed them repeatedly, refusing to answer their questions and — most recently — tossing them unceremoniously out of the Oval Office.

It began with 25 candidates. It’s been reduced by half, yet concern persists among Democrats that the party should look beyond the still standing contenders and seek an individual capable of party unification and persuade him or her to enter the race.