I don’t know if you saw Molly Ball’s recent piece On Safari in Trump’s America, but the basic idea was that researchers from The Third Way had gone to talk to folks in Middle America and then wound up writing a report that reflected what they wanted to say before they went. I thought of that when I saw the conclusions of the latest Women’s Voices Women Vote Action Fund survey. In their polling memo, Stan Greenberg and Nancy Zdunkewicz give a prescription for the Democrats that reads like a history of Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign.
I’m not saying the conclusions are wrong necessarily, and I have a lot of respect for Stan Greenberg, but he was the pollster on Clinton’s 1992 campaign and an architect of his economic messaging. It just seems highly coincidental that the message he is sending now sounds so much like the one he helped create back then.
According to the pollsters, the solution is staring Democrats in their faces. The voters who trust neither party need to be convinced that one party, the Trump-led Republicans, had already betrayed them. One of the best-testing messages mirrored what Democrats had said for years: “Trickle-down has failed and the richest need to pay their fair share of taxes.” They had just not said so effectively about Trump and Republicans in Congress.
“It is time to recognize that these voters will not be motivated unless they hear a message from the Democrat who says he or she is ‘fed up’ and ‘the economy and politics are rigged against the hard-working middle class,’” the pollsters advise. “The message deplores that ‘corporate lobbyists and billionaires spend unlimited money to get their way,’ which is more ‘trickle down’ while ‘people who play by the rules are crushed by the cost of health care, child care, housing and student debt.’ While it ends by proposing a range of changes ‘so American grows the middle class again,’ it is otherwise mostly negative and dramatic.”
Politics can be cyclical, and some things never change, so it could be that fighting against trickle-down economics, promoting the little guy who plays by the rules, and focusing relentlessly on “the middle class” are the perfect messages (once again) for this upcoming election season. Arguing in favor of this is the business friendly tax plan the House Republicans rolled out this morning that makes trickle-down economics topical again. To my ears, though, it’s stale and unexciting and given the results for the American people over the intervening years since 1992, amounts almost to an empty promise.
I strongly believe that the Democrats can only excite people and have credibility by offering fresh ideas that haven’t been heard before, or at least in living memory. I don’t disagree that these ideas should be cast in a “mostly negative and dramatic” way, but they shouldn’t sound like unreconstructed Clintonism.
I’d recommend reading Gilad Edelman’s new feature in our magazine, The Democrats Confront Monopoly. It might encourage you that the Democrats, or a growing segment of them anyway, realize that they need to take on corporate concentration and begin taking antitrust policy seriously again. But one thing you’ll realize is that the fresh messaging probably won’t poll that well in the find of survey that Greenberg and Zdunkewicz just conducted because voters aren’t “used to hearing and thinking about the perils of monopoly.” To be effective, a lot of groundwork and repetition will be required. Fortunately, the ideas are perfectly suited for the “rising American electorate.” Young voters are diverse and less prone to voting, but they also have unique problems that Monica Potts spelled out in The Post Ownership Society in our June/July/August 2015 issue. They will be receptive to a message that understands what it’s like to live in an insecure gig economy where everything is rented from a monopolistic corporation and almost nothing is owned.
The new messaging isn’t exactly contradictory to the old Clinton message, but it’s different enough to be fresh and credible. But if you want to poll-test everything before you decide to try it, it might not meet that test.
We don’t need to find out what works with an unprimed focus group so much as we need to change what those focus groups expect to hear.
Politics can be cyclical, and some things never change, so it could be that fighting against trickle-down economics, promoting the little guy who plays by the rules, and focusing relentlessly on “the middle class” are the perfect messages (once again) for this upcoming election season.
What exactly does middle class mean to politicians? Are you middle class if you’re part of the “Fight for 15” movement? Or getting paid similar? Fighting corporate concentration is good. What’s also good is busting up the rich’s control of our political system. That means taxing those of Trump and Manafort’s ilk very heavily. Like Eisenhower-era rates, if not higher.
I can imagine no better way to keep losing elections than to listen to people who did their best work in 1992.
It wasn’t even all that good back in ’92.
Screw the polls.
Can’t we just do what is right and agree to disagree on those few points we differ?
I don’t really care if Wall St makes $$$ as long as Main Street is healthy.
The problem is that Wall Street knows how to make money only in the short term for itself but in a way that creates a collapse eventually.
And Main Street believes what Wall Street tells them and has narrow ideas about what will make them prosperous again. (In the 1970s, Main Street businesses thought that free parking was their panacea to compete with shopping malls.)
Business owners, even those with business degrees, don’t understand what closes the circle to make an economy prosperous. That is they don’t understand that ripping off people eventually saps their own prosperity as well
The key message is that everything that conservatives promised under Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign and the subsequent Republican Presidencies has failed — every single promise of results. Ending the Cold War did not happen through strength but through diplomacy, especially Rejyavik under Reagan. Reducing government spending and cutting taxes for the rich did not bring prosperity. “Just say no” did not reduce drug abuse. Tough on crime did not end crime in the streets, it just changed the uniform of the gang. Privatization did not make government more efficient, just more corrupt. High-stakes testing did not improve public schools, just resegregated them and make charter schools boondoggles. Refusing to pass government funded single-payer health care did not make US health care costs drop and outcomes become better under managed care models of medicine. And on and on.
Democrats can talk about a 37-year experiment with government and economics and how the Republican and Third Way failed completely. More war, more racism, more poverty, poorer health, poorer education, poorer economy, poorer competitiveness even, and large deficits despite the efforts of Clinton and Obama at cutting spending (exactly the wrong thing to do when they were forced to do it.)
“Me too” kills an opposition party completely.
You know, it surely seems to me that this has been effectively the Dem message for the past three prez elections. “Conservatism” has indisputably failed. Yet Conservatism isn’t dead.
The proof of its (policy) failure is damn close to “2+2=4” at this point. But the American rube just doesn’t agree. How many times should the hapless teacher have to put the equation up on the board? Can we really say that “what we have here is a failure to communicate”, or is it more an inability to learn?
And ultimately the teacher becomes the enemy, of course….
The problem is refuting their (unfortunately very effective) charge that we’re for redistributing the wealth of “hard-working Americans” (white people) to “those who have their hands out (non-white people) and washing down that basic injustice with “elitism” (wherein the elites are college professors rather than plutocrats), “political correctness” (meaning, fighting against racism/sexism/injustice) and “coddling of terrorists” (because “Obama is a Muslim”).
All of this propaganda must be somehow overcome in a way that isn’t defensive or reactionary, and, at the same time, doesn’t play into their narrative — for example, by the end of 2016 I was cringing at every “What about women and the glass ceiling” defense of Hillary because I knew all of those arguments just played into their narrative about our “identity politics” being so corrosive and anti-God and anti-merit etc.
I don’t have a solution. It seems like an impossible rhetorical conundrum. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama each pulled it off twice, which is why the Conservative rhetoric has galvanized and calcified the way it has — into a specific set of beliefs (my paragraph above) specifically designed to undermine and refute the Clinton and Obama achievements.
I agree. I do not believe you can accomplish anything on the progressive side of the ledger without addressing and directly defeating this core myth the Republicans have been shovelling since Reagan. The shocking thing about 2016 was that making the usual dog whistling an explicit appeal worked. There is no hope for about 40% of voters. They consume the propaganda.
Bernie Sanders (and Joe Biden) seem to think Dems can win by sliding past the issue, but that can’t work. How can socialism sell into the teeth of this myth? At the end of the day, we all know that (mostly white) people with good employer based healthcare will be the ones to shoot down medicare for all (including undeserving blacks and browns).
The only good news is that the Obama coalition is a majority. The correct strategy has to be to double down on “We’re all in this together” and spend the money organizing. If we can get the voters registered and to the polls…
I think the problem is that Tarheel Dem is making an extremely strong and well-founded argument, but arguments don’t win elections. Stories win elections. That’s why, all the faff about Walmart and Amazon notwithstanding, I think there’s milage in the monopoly thing. It’s a story.
What you are saying is that not enough people have been hurt enough to wake up. Not enough people are desperate enough to want change in policy from the conservative talk-talk.
We need another Herbert Hoover before change happens that that means four full years of Trump.
Just like the Bush misadventure took eight full years.
And then unlike 1932, Democrats did not understand the historical situation. Because there were enough establishment Democrats still betting on segregation.
The people we need to reach are unlikely to hear the monopoly story if Dems keep wallowing in the identity politics story, the PCness story, and the sanctuary cities story, along with the story of too many in our party being bought and paid for by Wall St/large corporate/MIC interests.
What we need is some major housecleaning in the party before we talk about new messages, new messaging and candidates.
So far, judging from one (CA) state party confab, where a Big Pharma lobbyist was selected by insiders for the top state party post even though the progressive candidate won more regular votes, and the recent anti-Bernie actions of the DNC and Tony Perez, it would seem the Dem Establishment is fiercely resisting change and prefers business as usual. This does not bode well for 2018.
The old message is fine. We need to focus on the messengers. We need someone who can say “trickle-down has failed and the richest need to pay their fair share of taxes” credibly, passionately, with a certain ‘fuck you’ flair.
Fuck the steak, we need the sizzle. (We’re Democrats, cooking a well-balanced diet with all the nutritional information on the packaging is hardly going to fall through the cracks.)
“trickle-down has failed and the richest people and businesses need to pay their fair share of taxes and stop hiding it in foreign countries.”
“..people who play by the rules are crushed by the cost of health care, child care, housing and student debt.”
So why not run on the actual Medicare for All, Universal Childcare, and Student Loan Relief proposals being worked on by Democrats IN congress right now?
Guess I am showing my electoral naiveté, but why not just tell them: Democrats are working on stuff right now that will significantly, directly, and immediately help you. We just need the votes! Give us the people to get the votes!
Conservative media has long rebutted the 1992 economic arguments. Polls show in “Trump’s America!” the economy went from a dystopian hellscape to UTTERLY GLORIOUS!! around 2 am November 9, 2016. Since then it has only been further hyped with every new height reached by the pre-November 9th Doesn’t-Mean-Anything Dow Jones or formerly cooked, now stone-cold-fact employment numbers.
I mean, come on, temporally saving 200 Carrier jobs got Trump off the hook for doing ANYTHING regarding a jobs program for the rest of his first term.
History does indeed run in cycles and right now we are at the end of the New Gilded Age. And just like the last time, we need reformers. But reformers have to be able to connect to the voters, all of them. Not just a calculated 50.5%.
Its hard to accept, but candidate chrisma (original Greek meaning- anointed) is very important. The message and the ABILITY to deliver it effectively. The ability to motivate and inspire.
So like the last Gilded Age, we need a candidate who can attack the Gould’s, Vanderbilts, Mellons of our age.
Kochs, Mercers, Eddlesteins. The same Wall Street villains under different names. Trust busting, corporate breakup/shake up. etc… We need our crusading Theodore Roosevelt.
But like there is institutional corruption in Washington govt. There is in political parties. And it is absolutely clear that there are powers in the DNC that want access to campaign funds without really caring who wins. Either way, they get paid. I mean, why run a candidate who is a money making machine but is hated by almost 1/2 the country? It makes no sense if you are committed to policy and “liberal” or “progressive” values. Only makes sense if you want some of the pie.
I would put Brazile in that category as well as any number of faceless consultants, bundlers, media buyers, etc… They are like brokerage houses who get paid buying or selling.
With those forces at work, it would be very difficult for a new TR to rise to the top. The Party has to be reformed and institutional/corporate money has to be shaken out of it. Until then, the candidates put forward on a national level will be as bland as possible as to not rock the boat. Or it will be an insider who will mirror the forces inside the Party, and not threaten their “rice bowl”.
Can we have a TR now a days? Some think Sanders was in that vein. Certainly inspired devotion and action.
Teddy reached national office by his reformer past history and war record promoted by press. He was always good copy. That got him in as VP, then an assassin’s bullet got him the big job. But his campaigning on progressive policies got him re-elected. Current conditions mirror those at his time and the same message could work again, changing the direction of the country just as TR and FDR later did.
R
We certainly need a good, charismatic messenger. As for the message, I believe all people, whatever class, want some agency over their lives. They want some feeling that they control their own destinies.
The Republican attacks on “Washington” and its plea for local control speaks to making people feel empowered (though it’s a charade in the long run).
Obama tapped into HOPE as a sort of symbol of agency. It was something you could control yourself.
The message of monopoly is difficult since folks don’t know exactly what it means. They think it means BIG, but they like big. Walmart saves them money. Amazon does too. There isn’t much problem with that. There is always the promise that bigger will mean cheaper. Even today there is talk of not allowing AT&T to buy Time/Warner. The justice department is looking into whether that’s too much of monopoly. But I think consumers don’t give a hoot. And they don’t care about Sinclair Broadcasting or TV and Radio station owners also owning the local newspaper.
They might care about collective bargaining. I think folks have learned to care about health care and insurance. And I think they care about the image of the country and many are ashamed right now that Trump is the head of state.
I don’t think anyone but the most dedicated political junkies remembers Clinton’s 1992 rhetoric. I barely remember it, and I’m more engaged than average. Partly that’s because it was 25 years ago, but also it’s because it stands in such contrast to how Clinton is seen to have governed, with his financial deregulation and free trade agreements. Bernie Sanders had similar rhetoric, but stronger, but the difference is that Sanders’ proposals were not moderate, and his track record suggested he meant it. No one seemed to regard Sanders as old hat, though. He was definitely seen as something new in the Demcratic Party as it has been known certainly since Clinton, and arguably post-McGovern. So the issue is not in saying these things. This issue is being believed saying them.
I don’t think antitrust will work. The new order delivers its benefits – particularly to the rural whom the Democrats have to win. Economies of scale are a real thing, You can get pretty much anything you’re likely to need for your house at Home Depot. The mom and pop hardware stores could never provide that and their prices were higher. in the big city, where a big mom and pop hardware store could be supported, and where the economies of scale are provided by the location, this does not matter so much. Likewise, Walmart. Most are open 24 hours and supply a huge percentage of consumer needs. Meanwhile, the primary beneficiaries of the proposal would be the local business types, who skew strongly Republican. They’re stubborn about this, so they won’t be an easy sell. They’re also not that numerous. Employment might pick up, but less than prices will, as that is one and only one of the extra costs that will be tacked on. And the Internet is killing retail anyway.
Now you want to go after Amazon for monopoly, I think that’s worth doing. Google too, though that’s hard. The economy is so dependent on Google. But those positions are not general enough to build a campaign around.
Yes, the notable problem is the great Progressive wave of “Bust the Trusts!” in 1895 was fueled by the experience that the ordinary schmoe was getting actively screwed by the trusts—monopoly profits in every industry: rail transport, oil, sugar, timber, milling, etc etc.
Today, as others have observed, many of the companies which were allowed over the past 30 years to attain effective market power (like Walmart) are not seen as screwing the happy Walmart shoppers. The cartpushers loadin’ up their monster pick-ups and SUVs don’t see Walmart as the abusive company store.
I suppose Congress could pass a law prohibiting volume discounts by wholesalers and manufacturers, so the low prices at Big Box, Inc. weren’t simply a result of their market power. Of course, so much shit is now purchased overseas for sale here that tariffs would also have to be involved to level the Walmart playing field. It’s an Augean stable at this point….as is anything involving the Broken Branch.
That’s the cumulative effectiveness of their anti-labor message.
When I say the business types are stubborn about being Reublicans, I don’t mean they won’t support the Democrats on policies that benefit them. I mean they will still be reluctant to translate this into votes. Even if they do, they are not that numerous.
Off year elections aren’t traditionally a great environment for major policy pronouncements and “debates” (one must use some English word, however misleading.) Hell, we just had a prez election with a lengthy, highly substantive Dem primary resulting in the most progressive platform in decades and “lost” to an utterly unqualified, mentally deranged Repub blatherskite whose message was ethnic cleansing and Burma-Shave signs, circa 2016. That was the policy message the incompetent white electorate wanted to hear. Now we must rummage around the margins of the failed electorate seeking to get some low-info dummies to change their minds on a few Congressmen.
I suppose Dems will have to dredge up some attempt at a uniform message for 2018, but the corporate teevee media won’t give it any more time of day than Hillary’s (probably too multifaceted) message, which was essentially ignored in the braindead media circus that constitutes an American election.
So it’s hard to see how Election 2018 will or can be anything other than a referendum on the poor man’s Mussolini, his egregious incompetence and his RICO-violation executive branch. It at least gives Dems a chance and some sort of focus, I suppose. But there’s clearly no national Dem leader, so the brave souls seeking to unseat the average corrupt back-benching gerrymandered Do-Nothing Repub Congressman are effectively on their own and most likely will have to “craft” their own story to the extent it’s not just The AntiTrump.
2016 showed spite beats reason. If one must fight fire with fire, Dems better start finding some kindling that an (emotional) match can ignite. Fortunately Trump’s monumental incompetence and impulsiveness is only dragging the nation closer and closer to the roaring vortex.
Obama saved us from another depression in 2008. His stimulus, although too small, was enough to pull us our of the recession. He was the right man at the right time. He was a good man, far different from the clown we have now. But he spent six years fighting the conservative wall of NO.
Clinton won by three million votes despite a lackluster campaign. How do kill the electoral college?
I may be naïve but it seems to me we must find our way back to a strong economic message that helps all people. It was in the platform last time, but I must have missed it.
We cannot abandon social justice for sure, but there must be something for the WWC. For that reason I support the fight for 15, single payer, free college (NY is going there on their own) and help on student debt. There is room there to fight to shut down monopoly. And this time, let us be sure we capture congress.
What I am not about to support is some more Third Way bullshit and throw back to the Clinton years. We need to move on. And we need a candidate who can inspire and with a vision.
. . . to target any benefits, at all, whatsoever, to them (us!) specifically . . . which in effect means specially . . . exclusively!
I am so sick of that bullshit!
Proposing anything that is in any way at all beneficial to the WHITE working class that is not equally beneficial to the, simply, working class is racist on its face (and, obviously, racially divisive) and hence morally reprehensible.
Just stop it!
Any proposal to coddle the specifically WHITE (subset of the) working class should be repudiated. Dems/libs/leftists in particular should flee any suggestion of such a tactic at all non-deliberate speed.
Note that you contradict yourself:
vs.
No, no, no, a thousand times no! This is messaging that plays right along with Trump’s open appeal to vile racists. Also too, did I remember to say it’s morally reprehensible? Yeah, pretty sure I did.
Note also that in fact — and to your credit! — your endorsed list of programs/proposals has nothing whatsoever in it that’s of special, exclusive, different benefit to the specifically white subset of the working class (nor should it!):
So why frame it in racist terms?
I don’t get that.
Thankfully, I’ll never get that.
But I’ll always oppose it.
Of course the idea is to benefit all people. Sorry if you didn’t get that. There is no contradiction. You must have racism on your mind. The idea is to appeal to everyone even the WWC. I encourage you to look into Pew Research to understand the changing demographics of the parties. I have referenced it before. We need a strong economic message that everyone can get behind.
Really?
. . . alter/remove its meaning (very clearly and accurately spelled out and supported in the comment you replied to) . . .
. . . then have the chutzpah to ask “Really?” about your distortion of what I wrote?
Really?
I stand by every word (including all-caps “FUCK”). It’s obviously, facially (self-)contradictory to simultaneously propose “a strong economic message that helps all people” and “there must be something for the WWC”. As already demonstrated, that implies that this must be “something” specifically, exclusively, specially, disproportionately beneficial to whites, i.e., else the first “W” in “WWC” is redundant, extraneous, pointless, meaningless — it’s already covered by “a strong economic message that helps all people“. “There must be something for the WWC” is racist framing — inherently so. This conclusion is rationally inescapable. Remarkable that you seem to be having so much (or really, any) trouble grasping that.
That leaves the only way of appealing to, specifically, the W in the WWC an appeal to the racism (and/or other bigotry) of a substantial subset of that white subset of the WC. For example, endorsing and appealing to irrational white resentment via scapegoating non-WASP groups.
Which is what Trump pulled off against all odds.
Which is a big part of why we now have a racist president consistently pandering to the racist core of his “base”.
So, I must have racism on my mind??? Well, duh!
You don’t??? What’s wrong with you, then?
You are certainly full of yourself. You obviously did not bother to look into the changing demographics as I suggested. The party has lost a good deal of its white vote, you know the racist one, falling from 64% in 2008 to 57% in 2016. And there are a number of articles on the party in crisis (google it and pick one), like this one from The Nation:
What Killed the Democratic Party?
There are others you may want to look into. It is little wonder the democratic party is missing in so many areas of our country. Here is another link
So please spare me your sanctimonious bullshit. And so you are really clear about this. I have relatives in rural Ohio and New York, and they are WWC. They are not republicans. And for a good deal of my life I was also WWC. So you want to throw us out of your party? Really?
Compare and contrast with: it ignored the special distress of white working people (and so failed to adequately pander particularly to the white subset of “working people”).
That you can’t seem to grasp this clear and critical distinction looks sadder with each succeeding reply.
If your reading comprehension were better, you’d have noticed I already identified myself as “WWC” (as are most of my friends and family, so all your blather about you and your friends and family attesting to your authoritative experiential knowledge is silly and pointless).
The difference is that I am not pleading for special treatment based on my membership in the white subset of the working class.
So, no. Not full of myself, but implacably opposed to pandering to the white subset of the working class based on its whiteness.
That’s racist.
And if that’s not the intent, then there’s no good reason to name “white” at all . . . and lots of good reasons not to (like: that’s racist framing!).
That Dems “ignored the general distress of working people (white, black, and brown) is legitimate, accurate criticism (it’s odd that you see it as supporting your proposal when it instead repudiates it). Addressing and correcting that is what’s needed, not proposing “something for the WWC”.
What you propose is what Trump rode to “victory”.
I think you may have missed the message. Did you think I was wanting medicare for all merely for the WWC? How in heavens name would one do that?
The democrats have a problem. Obama won the popular vote by 8.54 million in 2008 and by 3.48M in 2012.That was a 59% drop amid the loss of congress and state legislatures. Hillary won by 2.87m or a drop off of 18%. As noted there has been a continuing shift in the democratic base and this past election Trump captured a good deal of that shift including the WWC. You can google it. Those particular stats come from the Huffington Post.
The question in my mind is how to stop the bleeding and regain power. Surely you have noticed the democrats control about nothing at all in the federal government less each year on the local level.
You may also have noticed the states the dems lost along with others like Kentucky and W. V. Those states and many red states have large white and WWC constituencies.
I noticed you ignored the other quote I gave you. But that is ok, since I left it deliberately. Any program, 15 an hour, medicare for all and free college are for all people, not simply for white. But it seems to me it has an added meaning if one wants to regain power in congress, et. al.
If we keep letting Trump ride to victory on an issue that should be the democratic base, he will surely win again and retain control of congress. We do not need to win all of the WWC, just enough to ensure we win. They cannot be ignored. And since they are a subset of white people, they take on added importance. We do not need more deplorable quotes. Plus it helps people everywhere.
Now to be sure, the dems have other issues. But this one along with the monopoly one could go a long way,
You do not need to pander to the WWC. Heavens they do not want you to I am pretty sure. But I am personally offended at your accusations directed towards me that seemed utterly with no thought. And even less understanding of the issues involved.
You’re the one who keeps sticking the first W into WWC. You’re the one who insisted there must be “something for the WWC”.
That’s racist framing.
Stop it.
As I’ve explained repeatedly, ad nauseum now (can you really be this dense?), unless you’re engaged in special pleading for special treatment of the white subset of working people, then there is no good reason for “white”, i.e., your first W, to be in there at all. And many good reasons to omit it (it’s racist framing!). That’s the message you astonishingly keep managing to miss.
Maybe this could help you “get it”. Just imagine this reversal of your framing: proposing “something for the BWC”, i.e., something specifically targeted to differentially benefit the black subset of working people (else — explaining again ad nauseum — there’s no reason whatsoever for “B/black” to be included in there at all).
Now, I have no idea how you’d react to such a proposal. Maybe you’d think it a fine thing!
But there’s no question such a proposal would be met with howls of outrage, cries of “reverse racism”, blah, blah, blah, from the Mighty Wurlitzer of the rightwing media propaganda infrastructure, mainstreamed by the Worse-Than-Useless Corporate Media, then further amplified to deafening levels by the racist core of Trump’s base within the white subset of “working people”.
When you adopt the converse of that racist framing, you follow Trump’s model and serve their purposes.
You seem upset that I’ve largely ignored all the extraneous-to-this-point stuff you keep dumping in here, muddying the waters.
But the reason should be obvious: it’s all irrelevant to the objection I actually raised, on which I have kept a laser focus.
Oh my gawd. You are thick. The WWC is a group that has been written about since the election due in part to Trump winning it. The working class is composed of white, black and brown. The issue though is around the WWC and how can they be brought into the Democratic Party and away from Trump and the republicans. Many of them are in rural areas and could help with local elections. They are also white and the Democratic Party has been losing white support.
That is not racist. It is an economic message that could help. And I hope to bring the party back to power. If you can’t understand that go away. If I want to talk about lower middle class white people ( a sizable number) I use what others have before me, the WWC. I suppose they too are all racist by extension. You have ignored all the information I offered you. Get over yourself and go read a little of it.
I think you are racist over the WWC.
Trump thanks you. Bannon thanks you. Milo thanks you.
I don’t get this navelgazing among Democrats. I understand the bitterness that will forever exist between the Berniacs and the Clintonites but that won’t matter so much by 2020. The Dem’s message does not matter. That is the problem.
There was nothing wrong with their message in 1992 and there was nothing wrong with their message in 2016. The problem in 2016 is that their message is not heard and their policy proposals are never debated. The Dem’s message does not matter. Nobody is going to pay any attention to it.
We know what the Republican message will be in 2018 and in 2020 – the glorious whiteness of being white – we know how that message will be distributed, and we know that the message is explosive enough to dominate.
The Democrats will have to win that debate. Lose that debate – or ignore it – and you lose the election.
How are Dems going to win that debate? Nothing else matters.
. . . of a formal debate in which one debate team gets up and presents their arguments — you know this, you can see their lips move — but no sound comes out.
This seems a remarkably good metaphor for our current discourse and the Dem/lib/left’s problem breaking through, regardless of how good their message is (or isn’t!) or how obviously better for the voters rejecting them.
Here in the age of the political success of Reality-Denial, it’s a problem!
Perhaps. Perhaps it should sound like 1994, when Gingrich produced the “Contract for America.”
Put down those pitchforks. I don’t mean the same policies, of course. Maybe a couple them – making Congress no longer exempt from certain laws is a no brainer. But a fairly simple set of potential legislation that all the Dems sign off on and promote. If the atmosphere in 2018 is right, (and it should be) nationalizing the election like the Contract did will work in the Dems favor.
And by the way, take your time and do it right. The original contract came out only 6 weeks before the 94 mid-terms.
Last paragraph + 1 million
Id also add that we need to end nudgeocracy and seriously fight kluge government.
No efective message without a believable messenger.
No believable messenger as long as the old guard runs the DNC.
Cosmetic changes in the hierarchy won’t do the trick.
Newish face on old body?
Doubt it.
The voters who will count in the next elections…the undecideds, the independents…won’t vote for yet another public/private-faced DemRat, no matter what promises and plans are presented. If it wasn’t obvious before Trump that there is a huge population out there looking for something truly different…almost anything truly different from the crap that has been handed out as “policy” at least since Nixon…then it must certainly be obvious now. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama ran…and won…on “difference,” but both of them were in reality simply public/privating the voters. So did Trump, he just chose another group of controllers with whom to be “private.” The first candidate who can convince the increasingly jaded voters of this country that he or she will actually follow though on whatever promises are made during the campaign will win in a landslide. But convincing those voters is going to be even harder now that they have been demonstrably crossed up by every president since Jimmy Carter, who was at least honest if not quite up to the task of being president.
Bernie?
I think he is too old already. So will the voters. Plus the DNC…despite whatever game Donna Brazile may be running at the moment…is so deeply in bed with the corporate powers who are the real guilty parties that they are more resemble part of the mattress than an active participant in the bedroom action. They didn’t want him last year and they won’t want him…or any other real game-changer…in 2020.
What to do, what to do!!!
Damned if I know, but there it is today.
I think that we will need to hit a real national emergency before the DNC parasites can be dislodged. Maybe Trump is that emergency.
We’ll see.
Won’t we.
AG
I’m a lurker mostly, and I don’t usually agree with you, but on this I do. There can be no Democratic win unless we find a credible leader and we start changing the old guard. The Democrats do not have a messaging problem as much as they have a credibility problem.
Agreed, but who? Like you say, Bernie is/was/will be too old. Our senator, Gillibrand? Booker? Harris? One of the Castro twins? Perez? Warren? Who?
I wish I knew.
I don’t.
Time will tell…
AG
Bernie appealed to people that he was saying mostly the same thing in 2016 that he said in 1980 (when those things were not nearly as popular).
I think simply marking check boxes off (supports Medicare for all, etc) isn’t the way to find his replacement, because policy was only a part of his appeal.
That suggests first looking at potential candidates personal stories first. It’s why someone like Jason Kander is drawing interest despite the fact he lost his race for the Senate in Missouri.
Booker, Harris? Obama Lite, except unlikely to get elected, especially Booker, who reeks of slickness and insincerity. But let them run for the nom — they’ll split the Obama Lite vote and leave an opening for someone more worthy.
Gillibrand — encouraging signs when she voted Nay on the recent NDAA, that huge budget increase for the Pentagon. I’ll need to see much more, but it’s a good start.
Tulsi Gabbard — shows political courage and wisdom rarely seen in today’s party. Who cares if she’s just a Rep and rather young — Donald proved just about anyone can run and win; the old ways of needing to be in the right elevated position no longer apply.
Who else? Only Liz Warren, but she went down significantly in my estimation with her positive vote for the Pentagon budget vote. What was up with that?
Very thin bench. We need younger, fresher leadership. And not that Schiff dude, the Russiagate fanatic who has only suspicions, not evidence. Pelosi, Stony Henyer, Clyburn, Schumer, DiFi — they all need to step aside.
I posted above before seeing this
which puts my point rather more succinctly. Failure to do first things first leads to lipstick on a pig. I would add, in addition to new faces actually from the Democratic wing of the party, we need to stop over-emphasizing certain things, as addressed above. Otherwise we will continue to be perceived in the old unhelpful ways, a major turnoff to many voters.
Re Bernard, yes, probably too old for 2020. A shame that HRC didn’t name him her VP, the better to unite the party. Instead I think she was thinking of the person she would feel most comfortable governing with. Undoubtedly Tim Kaine was better suited in that sense. But the priority should have been to consider who would have helped more in getting elected.
“… then wound up writing a report that reflected what they wanted to say before they went.”
If so, they are far from the only journalists who do this.
Note to the marduk/nalbar twins:
Look at the ratings.
You have lost.
Go back to whatever dKos-like hell from which you arose.
The sign-off of the four-decade run of the wonderful radio comedy team, Bob and Ray, two smart guys with comedic roots that went right back into Great Depression times.
But you two would never be able to clomp, clomp clomp yourselves into that survivalist mindset….too entitlement-blinded to be able see or hear the truths of the matter.
Go flack yourselves.
AG
Nalbar/malbar/malduk/nalduk….
Impotence is your only excuse.
Continue to go flack yourselves.
You will no more be able to get anything done than did your standard bearers, HRCbar/Obamaduk.
Go barduk yourselves.
Your time has come…barely…and failed.
Completely.
Sincerely…
Arthur Sheridan Gilroy