Tag Archives: Democrats

Joe Biden is not the answer

Democrats need to think outside of the box.

Joe Biden is not the answer.

He’s a nice man but he is too old, too encumbered by establishment political history, and slow to admit his own mistakes.  I wish he would take himself out of the running, because we have played this scene before.

We can do better.

If there is any overarching lesson to take away from the perilous state of our union, it is that old assumptions and conventional wisdom can no longer be relied upon.  The same must be said about polls, focus groups, handicapping and other tools of the political trade.

There’s no such thing as a sure thing in topsy turvy Trumpland, where he is still fully capable of criminal election meddling in full sight.

Don’t pick a candidate based on what Pennsylvania might do. If the people of Pennsylvania can’t figure out that ANY candidate is better than Donald Trump, even after two years of his venomous lies and letdowns, the disease has progressed too far and the patient will die.

Democrats are just too polite and rational.  They think that the problem in 2016 was that Hillary wasn’t “relatable.”  The idea is that Biden will dish-out some of his blue collar B.S. and Trump’s base of noble working men will come a-running.

Bullshit. 

Trump’s faithful base is a white supremacist soup of religious haters, woman haters, brown haters  and repressed homophobes.  Democrats should not be offering anything that would  win their votes.  

I grew up in the 1950’s, in a lower middle-class household, in a blue-collar neighborhood.  Both of my parents had to work, because they thought they had to send us to Catholic school and otherwise couldn’t afford to do so.  They scraped and they struggled throughout their lives and never took a nickel in public assistance until the blessed relief of Social Security and Medicare kicked in;  but they NEVER looked down their noses at those who did, and they taught us tolerance and progressive values despite being given every opportunity to be bitter and resentful.

If my parents could be kind of heart and generous of mind, there is no excuse for the poisonous attitude that seems to have possessed the Trump base.

I’m tired of hearing that Democrats have to somehow “win over” those misanthropes, just as I am tired of seeing the outstanding women in the race treated as if they shouldn’t aspire beyond Vice-President, and the one proud Democratic Socialist, relegated to a sidebar, despite the fact that he stubbornly refuses to slip away from the top polling positions and his central ideas spring from the few really good public policies that we all depend upon.

If we don’t strive to be better than this, we deserve what we get.  

Put Elizabeth Warren or Kamala Harris on the debate platform opposite Donald Trump and be done with it.  Was there ever a more important moment to take a courageous stand?

After the dust clears, if we still have a “United States of America” maybe we’ll finally have the guts to mandate public funding for elections, eliminate special interest funding, put some guardrails on the presidency, and really do something about the environment.

If we can’t do that, what is the bloody point?

Democrats: Framing is Everything.

I am concerned that the language being used by some Democrats to advocate for reform of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) division of Homeland Security is only going to undermine party unity and messaging in the 2018 election cycle.

We’ve done this before and it did not serve us well.  We allowed the other side to brand themselves “Right to Life” while branding us as “Pro-Abortion.”  The far more accurate descriptor, “Pro-choice,” fell by the wayside in the war of words and we continue to allow them to represent us as baby killers, while we defend our moral high ground with perfectly sound arguments about individual liberty and responsibility that get drowned out by the simple poisonous messaging that the Right does so much better than we, who place a high premium on truth and tolerance.

Now, in the understandable outrage felt by decent folks in the face of Donald Trump’s grotesque reign of incompetence and baby-snatching, we are once again in danger of losing the messaging war by reaching for a bigger and more empathetically distant target than we should be immediately addressing.

Yes, ICE is a badly flawed remnant of post 9/11 planning panic that was allowed to fester and grow its mission even under Obama.  It has created self-justifying enforcement redundancies,  and even un-American over-reach practices that should be dismantled in short order.

But we have to regain some control in Congress to have any hope of affecting beneficial change; and loudly calling for the “elimination of ICE” is unlikely to help us get there.

It’s a negative message that allows unprincipled Republicans to cynically charge that Democrats want to foster lawlessness.  

Whenever we rest on a negative message without providing the positive policy alternative, the Republicans are only too happy to leap into the breach and define a sinister significance  to the Democrats’ position.

T250px-Statue_of_Liberty_7his will never do.

Democrats must insist that their leaders get a better grip on messaging and use more constructive language.  Don’t say “Abolish ICE” and let them finish the sentence.  Talk about “reforming” the institution and remodeling the Homeland Security mission as a whole into something that more closely reflects our traditional American values concerning immigrants, who have been the lifeblood of our young and upwardly mobile nation.

By all means, keep elimination of ICE in mind as the ultimate goal, but don’t use that as your stand alone message.

We have much better immigration messages available, and we need look no further than the Statue of Liberty for the right language.