Goodwin: Dem impeachment report is Adam Schiff’s latest dud

Say this for Rep. Adam Schiff: His imagination is vivid and he has a flair for the dramatic. If only he had more respect for facts and a tighter tether to reality.

The California attack dog is, in real life, a frustrated writer of rejected screenplays, and he’s produced another dud in the Democrats’ impeachment report. Released Tuesday, it offers nothing new of significance, but that didn’t stop Schiff from hyping the contents as something akin to the second coming of Richard Nixon.

While the vast majority of Americans found something else to do than watch the mind-numbing hours of public testimony, Schiff depicts the hearings he orchestrated as pivotal events in modern history. While Trump is in Europe dealing with crucial national security issues and is a growing favorite to win re-election, Schiff insists he’s doing “potentially irrevocable” damage to the system of checks and balances and is a threat to the Constitution.

But it’s in the concluding paragraphs of his introduction where Schiff fully unleashes his Hollywood imagination. Implicitly conceding that impeachment has become a one-party quest to bring down a president, he tries to turn the tables by saying it’s Republican refusal to help that fulfills the warnings of George Washington and other Founders about the dangers of “excessive factionalism.”

“The President and his allies are making a comprehensive attack on the very idea of fact and truth,” he writes. “How can a democracy survive without acceptance of a common set of experiences?”

That’s a fabulous question — and I can’t wait to hear how Schiff and his party answer it. After all, they are the ones shattering historic norms by pursuing a partisan impeachment, in an election year no less. Trump Derangement Syndrome is not an acceptable excuse.

Fortunately, most Americans have more respect for facts than Schiff does and realize that impeachment should be reserved for egregious misconduct. To the fair-minded, the burden falls on the impeachers to build such a strong case that the appeal will be compelling and automatically cut across party lines.

Schiff failed to do that, and it’s not Republicans’ fault. He tortured the investigation process just as he now tortures language, but no amount of distortion and spin can turn Trump’s dealings with Ukraine into an impeachable offense.

Indeed, the proof that the hearings failed is that most polls showed support for removing the president actually falling after the Schiff show. That’s a flop by the only measure that counts.

If Dems had any sense, they’d fold their impeachment tent and concentrate on trying to defeat Trump the old-fashioned way — at the ballot box. Instead, they are launching yet another round of hearings, apparently on the theory that if they can’t convince voters on the facts, maybe they can at least browbeat them into sharing their hatred for the president.

So starting Wednesday, Rep. Jerry Nadler gets his second chance to be the leader of the would-be hanging party.

Recall that Nadler, head of the Judiciary Committee, started off the process with two unspeakably boring events and was effectively fired by Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Now he gets another chance to be important and has scheduled four lawyers and scholars, three of whom already support impeachment. Viewers are advised to keep a pillow handy.

On the other hand, attracting converts might not be Pelosi’s goal anymore. Where once she talked of using the investigative process to build public consensus for impeachment and getting major GOP buy-in, she now is defaulting to feeding boob bait to a party that will swallow anything as long as it is anti-Trump. She apparently has decided that doing less will turn off much of the activist base and could cost her the speaker’s gavel.

Democrats, of course, have wanted to make Trump go away from the moment he was elected. All they lacked was sufficient cause — and three years into his presidency, they still have the same problem.

Meanwhile, they’ve frittered away their two years in power as Pelosi refused to negotiate with Trump on most major issues. Putting all their eggs into the resistance basket, they are now reduced to impeachment or bust.

Their presidential candidates are similarly bankrupt of accomplishments and good ideas. Driven to extremes by Trump’s success in stoking economic growth and jobs, including for black and Latino Americans, most of the large field of candidates has played to the fringe in terms of health care, immigration, taxes and the environment.

The result is a mishmash of mediocrity, with Joe Biden hanging on precariously to a lead in national polls but faltering badly in the early states.

The surge of Sen. Elizabeth Warren has stopped, and several recent polls show her support is actually declining.

Remarkably, the monthly debates have stopped being a factor, with no clear winners emerging. Good performances aren’t producing tangible benefits, a worrisome sign that even the party faithful are unimpressed.

The rise and fall of Sen. Kamala Harris is instructive. She seemed like someone to watch after she ripped into Biden at the first debate and soon joined him, Warren and Sen. Bernie Sanders in the top tier.

But Harris didn’t have a second act and after Rep. Tulsi Gabbard subsequently shredded her record as a California prosecutor, Harris never recovered. Her withdrawal was inevitable, and she pulled the plug Tuesday.

She was the most prominent of three to quit this week, and the entry of Michael Bloomberg is surely a factor. At a time when also-rans are running out of money, the billionaire New Yorker is spending very big bucks in numerous states in massive ad buys.

He’s skipping the early states to focus on Super Tuesday, but it’s not clear how Bloomy can possibly win a majority of delegates and seize the nomination. Then again, it’s not clear how anyone else in the party can win the nomination, either.

All of which helps explain why Dems are so keen on impeachment. It may be the best hope they have.

Sad ‘Times’ for ex-reader

Reader André Medeiros, calling himself a former New York Times reader, tells why. He writes: “The bad writing goes beyond not following nuances of the style manual. There are endless adjectival nonsense, ledes buried (or non-existent) and thousand-word pieces bursting with opinion and starved of facts.

“The kids that work there now don’t know any better. What about the older, experienced editors? They’re supposed to be the last firewall.”

Bibbidi bobbidi boo-boo

A correction in the Wall Street Journal: “The name of Disneyland’s Bibbidi Bobbidi Boutique was misspelled as Bippity Boppity Boutique in a Life & Arts article on Wednesday about the ‘Frozen’ movies.” Whew, glad they cleared that up.

Not Weld-done

A public relations pitch for Bill Weld, a Republican presidential candidate, calls him the “Face of the Trump Resistance.”