MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE
by Michael Wolraich
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How to talk to a Republican (or progressive?)
By PeraclesPlease on Tue, 07/09/2019 - 8:38am |URL:
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/07/09/never-trumpers-2020-democrats-227255
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Comments
Yay Warren Harding!!! The 41st best president ever! Even better than Trump, Johnson, and Buchanan.
PS Anyone else tired of Politico's Democratic concern trolls?
by Michael Wolraich on Tue, 07/09/2019 - 11:38am
I think the point was "Harding got elected, despite being a chump and the US needing some relief".
And the "concern trolls" that bother me are the ones that decided last December that Nancy Pelosi needed to be replaced in the middle of a government shutdown... by an elderly white dude. They still think that a) we're not working from a really weak position in everything from legislatures, the Senate, the White House, the court system... b) that the public works on policies, rather than packing policies into their tribal allegiance. Trump didn't offer a specific $30 billion recovery package to W. Virginia like Hillary did - he just said he was going to bring back jobs and prosperity. He didn't, but they believed him - cuz he was "Mr. Businessman", let's make a deal.
"Other people's money" is going to be a tough plank to drop if they find out the public isn't *that* convinced that gouging the 1% is the right course. Trump's hanging onto his 42% approval rating a week after he took his daughter to embarrass the G20 meeting & dance with Kim Jong-Un, and days into a disastrous 4th of July and a pedophile scandal, with the British Ambassador calling him whacko, and ignoring a court decision where he got his ass handed to him on the census question and telling even non-administration officials not to talk to Congress. Yes, we should be concerned.
by PeraclesPlease on Tue, 07/09/2019 - 3:59pm
Yeah, so did Donald Trump. They even had the same slogan, "America First," and the same nativist bullshit. So Democrats should obviously do what those Republican assholes did.
Or...radical notion...Democrats could emulate Democrats who got elected and weren't chumps. I mean, if we're digging into history, how about Woodrow Wilson, FDR, JFK? You know, presidents who got elected AND changed the world for the better, the top 10 presidents instead of the bottom 5.
by Michael Wolraich on Tue, 07/09/2019 - 11:36pm
And someone's telling us not #BeBest? I don't think anyone is looking for 2nd class. But will this year's best be a Dukakis, an Obama or a Clinton, a Carter or an Adlai Stevenson or John Kerry? And which of those successes/failures were due to not fit as much for the time/opposition, or just not good enough campaign, or...
Then again, some candidates get away with just saying shit and it doesn't matter, Harding or Obama, Bush or Trump - people want their style somehow. Look at the GOP pack in 2016 - who's our Robert Redford/The Natural or Ross Perot/Jesse Jackson even
by PeraclesPlease on Wed, 07/10/2019 - 1:25am
PS - I'm rooting for Pelosi to step in and mop things up, but that means a) she's interested, and b) she successfully rounds the bend on the impeachment setup soon (any delayed start will easily be forgiven with success, esp in the Senate - as well as working with the next wave of candidates).
No one else is really grabbing me as The One just yet. Yang probably headed for the door. Maybe Avenatti if he pays off a few bills ;-)
by PeraclesPlease on Wed, 07/10/2019 - 1:40am
PPS - Reagan/Thatcher's neoliberalism is discredited. Clinton's Neoneoliberalism is still kicking, even though it got coopted like Betsy Ross' flag on Bush/Blair's road to Iraq and Bush's later "what me worry" hands-free mishandling of the economy, as well as Obama's standoffish version of realpolitik.
Yes, caputalism is part of the solution. No, it won't lift all boats without care. Yes, we've got to cone up with some creative solutions for this generation's problems (refighting busing and the crime bill and even Iraq/Afghanistan won't much help). Yes, we need money, I.e. taxes to do it. No, it won't be easy, especially since we're the party in the ditch - they're the amoral winners that only with difficulty can be brought down off their perch (Epstein a prime example, but so many others).
The idea that we should "talk like Democrats) or some other easy sounding solution, is simply there's so much confusion out there, talking isn't guaranteed to even cut through, much less if the ideas are sound.
Likely we need to promote trust more than anything else - and even (especially?) within the party we're mistrustful. For all the digs against Hillary, a hold-your-nose-even coalition that got 3 million votes more than her opponent seems like a far reach for most of our contestants. It'll be a GOTV operation first, and that's always iffy (ask Beto). We need some fire in the belly, but one that can wade through the confusion and propaganda and tribal pre-established partisanship. There was criticism in 2016 of just trying to win by X%, being too careful, but as Nov 2020 gets closer and our political clusterfuck continues to enrage and outrage, that may be the best we got.
by PeraclesPlease on Wed, 07/10/2019 - 4:17am
Look, any historical analogy to a presidential campaign is dubious because there are so many variables and anachronisms, but the Harding comparison is just absurd. He was an arch-conservative Republican who defeated a forgettable Democratic opponent by exploiting a wave of nativist, red scare hysteria prompted by the trauma of WWI and the Spanish Flu. He then led one of the most corrupt and inept administrations in American history, which earned him that #41 spot.
So the fact that Mona Charen is urging Democrats to win like Warren Harding tells me that she is neither genuine nor credible. Her "advice" to Democrats is a thinly-veiled artifice for promoting the kind of kind of candidate she would prefer. That's what makes her a concern troll.
by Michael Wolraich on Wed, 07/10/2019 - 10:06am
I dunno - if we can hype the antivaxx thing into a big scare,
and then get people to feel traumatized by the border wars,
we might have a winning combination.
Most important is to figure out which dance'll be this gen's "Charleston".
"The Whoring (or Abhoring, depending) 20's" - how's that sound?
by PeraclesPlease on Wed, 07/10/2019 - 10:20am
re: Politico's concern trolls. It's a site named Politico about politicos and run by politicos, soooo, maybe it's just me but I am not surprised to find this sort of content there.
by artappraiser on Tue, 07/09/2019 - 4:16pm
They're wonks, but you sell them short. Her's an excerpt from Weidl over at Paste:
Bernie Sanders supporters know Abramson as the guy who wrote that Bernie was winning in June of last year. Abramson's logic centered on Nate Silver's assertion that Democratic primary polling was off by 10.6%, and “We can therefore conclude that the 54% to 46% lead that Hillary Clinton has over Bernie Sanders in pledged delegates is in fact a statistical dead heat, with a possibility that Sanders is actually ahead of Clinton in pledged delegates.” You can't “presume” that it's a statistical dead heat, because the margin of error works both ways, so it was also possible that she was up by as much as 18.6%.
If you think 2016 was bonkers, Louise Mensch and a variety of other "citizen journos" came to light *after*, and if you compare the rather detailed Trump backgeounder I just posted with the dial-it-in both sides do it/low on actual new facrs from much of the MSM to the pile-on-what-your-twitter-feed-said, there'll be much more spin than logic & analysis. And while it's been about Trump, the sharks are turning on each other for primary season.
by PeraclesPlease on Tue, 07/09/2019 - 4:58pm
I don't think of "politicos" as wonks, I think of "politicos" as political operatives, people interested in the cynical playing of politics to win at politics, the horse race thing. Hence, endless advice on how to win over such and such demographic, endless articles on political horseplay and the analysis of it. etc. Would also mean paying attention to whose got power, who's getting power, who's losing power, and why that's happening. And when you do a lot of the latter, you end up with sources in power that might want to leak. Not that the kind of journalism you are talking about is their main raison d'etre, but it comes as a side effect of their main brand.
That's what I look to Politico for, and I actually do think they are pretty damn good at it. And I also think op-eds like Mona Charen's are pitched on that basis, on a free-lance basis from the writers themselves and vice versa, from the editors. Because Politico has become a main place to figure out what politics are being played.
by artappraiser on Tue, 07/09/2019 - 5:20pm
Democrats have to face the reality that the only way to counter the extreme far right republican party of Trump is to become a merely far right party like the far right republican party of Newt Gingrich. This is the logical progression from countering the far right party of Gingrich by becoming the merely right wing party of Reagan.
by ocean-kat on Tue, 07/09/2019 - 2:11pm
One problem I have is many Dems equate Reagan/Thatcher with Clinton/Blair under a demeaning "neoliberal" tag. But largely the latter was a compassionate market-assisted approach that had great results (especially as Soviet Union, China, India, SE Asia, East Europe, Latin America improved access to trade and production of goods, and extreme poverty went from 36% to 8%:
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/decline-extreme-poverty-perspective/
You'd think there'd be a celebration, but we only see as far as West Virginia and Ames Iowa, and we equate wges only with growth, rather than buying power and access to goods and services and taxation - we are largely economically illiterate - remember the Modern Monetary Theory scam? -, so some successes are lost on us as are some solutions. And our compassion for the rest of the world dried up as well.
So we'll have candidates ignoring big successes in poverty and bringing down war, and instead offer counterintuitive plans to fix things but more to appeal to angered voters. It is crazy that Wharton had a 40% acceptance in Trump's day (higher for transfers), and now it's at 8%. It's crazy that housing has become mostly unaffordable to buy for most, while access to healthcare is somehow bad and wages and retirement seem static... but half of that is plain and simple ugly politics and wasted money on bad defense choices, and then there's understanding the changing monopoly landscape - back to 1890, except faster paths to monopolies with better tools for barons to control.
by PeraclesPlease on Tue, 07/09/2019 - 5:57pm
Ftr Ames is a liberal college town. Just sayin (as a native Iowan).
by Michael Wolraich on Tue, 07/09/2019 - 11:23pm
Oops, substitute some little rightwing angry iconoclast community in God knows where - I'm in YourUp living the good life (with socialist healthcare, yay!), what do I care?
by PeraclesPlease on Wed, 07/10/2019 - 1:29am
Perhaps useful to consider more how conservatives talk about us, without getting mad -
what is Tucker's strategy re: Ilhan (somewhat like Michelle not loving her country, but quite a bit stronger, the ungratedul America-hating immigrant)
https://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_5d25530de4b07e698c4280e1
What presupposes such statements? Is Ilhan supposed to be thankful to the US for time in a Kenyan refugee camp? For all the criticism Conservatives levy against government, why should anyone else be shy, except a 2nd class charity citizenship status.
And that 2nd class citizenship seems one of the GOP's major goals - the true god-fearing patriots are over here, claiming all the military as Republicans, all productive people as Republican, all American-looking/acting as Republican. Salute the flag, watch your football, complain in the rigjt way - then you're American.
Ilhan could counter this with more humor, but maybe she's just not funny?
by PeraclesPlease on Wed, 07/10/2019 - 4:38am