Will Rogers, the 20th century sage from Oklahoma, famously said, “I belong to no organized party. I am a Democrat.”

That was at least 83 years ago. If I were a Democrat, I would be mad as hell at the people running my party. Or, to be correct, I would be angry as hell. And if Will Rogers came back today, he might be angry as hell, too, at the Democrats.

Maine’s Democrats can’t seem to win an election. In 2010, their candidate for governor (State Sen. Libby Mitchell) drew a whopping 19 percent of the votes, leaving 81 percent for Eliot Cutler and Paul LePage to carve up. LePage carved off slightly more of the 81.

Everyone in Maine who cared knew that Mitchell was running a binoculars third, that is, you needed binoculars to find her trailing the pack. She had every opportunity to throw her support behind Cutler to defeat LePage. But she refused. She apparently expected an October surprise that November.

So, next time you get angry with the Blaine House Bloviator, remember that Mitchell and the Democrats could have read the writing on the State House wall and kept LePage in Waterville. Or Florida. They didn’t.

The Democrats worked similar magic two years later when State Sen. Cynthia Dill outperformed Mitchell, winning but 13 percent of the vote for U.S. Senate against Angus King and Charlie Summers. She beat three guys you never heard of and she beat “blank ballots” by four-to-one. Her prize was a gig as political commentator on public radio.

Democrats don’t have to be in Maine to be numb. After the party conventions in 2016, most commentators agreed that it was “the Democrats’ election to lose.” So, they stepped up to the challenge, and lost it to a television buffoon.

The Democrats have a short bench, but whatever happened to “ABC,” that is, “Anybody But Clinton.”

Imagine the fun Will Rogers would have had with Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.

An aside. Had Hillary Clinton left Slick Willie in 1997, when that blue dress turned up in Monica Lewinsky’s closet, I’ll bet she would have won in 2016. Or even in 2008. She would have been seen as a woman on moral high ground, rather than as an enabler.

Last month, Congress failed to adopt a continuing resolution to keep the government running and for three days almost half the federal employees stayed home. What was the issue? Immigration. In a nutshell, Democrats love immigration, Republicans don’t.

To understand how that affects funding the government requires more patience and space than I have. Suffice it to write that the Democrats have allowed the alt-right, the white supremacists and the nativists — how fitting that the 19th Century nativitists organized a political party known as the Know Nothings — to steal the immigration issue from them.

Those who oppose anyone who isn’t white have smudged the line between legal and illegal immigration. And the Democrats let them get away with it.

So, the Democrats — in order to be on the side of some people who are here but really should be somewhere else — closed the government. Smart.

When they let go of the distinction between legal and illegal, the beast reared up and bit them. Even the GOP learned, in 1995 and ’96, that when the government closes for a bit, people blame the party that doesn’t hold the presidency. This time, Republicans just sat back and watched the Democrats shoot themselves in the foot. Or, maybe, in the head.

And all this while some Democrats and Republicans are working on legislation to pave a road to citizenship or permanent residence for people who were brought here by their parents. (I can sympathize with those people whose parents insisted on dragging them along. My parents took me from Wisconsin to Missouri when I was 3. They didn’t ask me, so I was in Missouri through no doing of my own.)

This plays into a bigger Democratic theme. Trump is a racist. We must denounce Trump because he is a racist. To begin with, Trump is where he is because he is a racist. He masks it as concern over immigration and crime. Everyone knows it is a racist pitch.

I love the term political writers use, “dog whistles,” to describe how pols like Trump use code words to appeal to our worst side. So, they don’t say “brown and black people aren’t welcome,” they say, “immigrants aren’t welcome.”

The point Democrats should be making is not that Trump is a racist but that he is an elitist. The tax cut legislation that he signed gives a school secretary in Pennsylvania $1.50 more a week — that’s $78 a year — but it gives Trump more than $5 million a year, based on eliminating the alternative minimum tax, which in 2005 cost him $5.3 million. (That’s the only year for which any of Trump’s tax returns have been exposed.)

Many of his cuts in regulations are overdue, but it is not you and I who will benefit. Unless you truly believe less-regulated corporations will pass their newfound cost saving on to you.

If you believe that, you may be a numb as a Democrat.

Thousands do benefit richly from Trump’s actions. They are the already rich. Can you say, “economic elites?” But that secretary in Lancaster can buy an extra McDonald’s Happy Meal every two weeks.

Paul Ryan, House of Representatives speaker and the GOP’s top “thinker,” tweeted this good news as evidence of how the GOP is taking care of “little guys.” When the stupidity of his tweet was pointed out to him, he deleted it.

Democrats are in no position to oppose Trump’s elitism until they wean themselves from the slops pail of the Wall Street money that fuels their campaigns. Most of us expect Republicans to be beholden to Wall Street. Few of us expect the Democrats to be slurping at the same trough. And Democrats don’t seem to get that.

Yeah, Will Rogers might be angry as hell if he were here today.

Bob Neal used to be registered Democrat. Now he is unenrolled. Next week, “If I were a Republican . . .”

Bob Neal

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