Given the general FUBARed state of our democracy, Digby asked on Tuesday if Democrats even have a survival instinct. The party has less than two years to stop the slide toward autocracy. Democrats had best take off the blinders and get about it tout de suite. Their opponents believe rules are for suckers.
Presuming after rumaging around they locate the stones to pass a $15/hr minimum wage, covid rescue checks, and other legislative play-pretties the public actually wants from government, then what? Everyone has a come-to-donkies moment? Not likely.
It is not enough to improve people’s lives. They need to know you improved them and who stood in the way.
“Who’s Gonna Tell’em?” asks Josh Marshall. Good policy does not necessarily make good politics. The truth will not set voters free. Especially if Republicans succeed at keeping them from being voters and if Democrats fail to let them know it was Democrats who made their lives better.
Marshall writes:
This belief that good policy will take care of itself is deeply rooted in the technocratic, meritocratic mentality that animates so many professional Democrats. There’s a lot to that worldview that is good and we should celebrate. This is one of its blindnesses. There is no good policy that isn’t conjoined to good politics. You just have to do the politics because there’s no good policy without building, nurturing and sustaining constituencies for good policy. That’s the only way good policy can be sustained over time, from election to election. Because the most ingenious and humane policy is a failure if it isn’t sustained, if voters don’t know that it happened, why it happened and what they need to do to make it keep happening.
To wit with all of this, Democrats are in the midst of passing a massive COVID relief bill which will spend almost two trillion dollars to revive the economy, speed the vaccination program that will crush the COVID epidemic and address entrenched inequalities that predate and have been deepened by the crisis. It will also send out fat checks to tens of millions of households – ones two Georgia senators ran on with the explicit commitment of the incoming President himself. The bill is overwhelmingly popular with the public at large and it seems likely that few and quite likely no Republicans at all will vote for it. When you do something that popular, that you promised you’d do and your political opponents are all refusing to support it … you absolutely, positively have to tell everybody. It’s negligence not to.
Naturally, those meritocratic biases will get in the way. Democrats’ congressional campaign arms (and the DNC) will prefer to hoard their funds for re-electing members in 2022. To attact opposing candidates. To rig the game for incumbents against primary challengers. And in open federal seats, to rig the game in favor of middle-of-the-roadsters picked in Washington, D.C. over rising progressive stars in the several states.
What they need to spend cash on — and immediately — are ads “in every district in the country that is remotely in play and frankly even ones that aren’t in play and telling everyone this: The country is in crisis. President Biden just delivered and every Republican including [add name here] refused to support the plan.”
Get ahead of the narrative, says Marshall rightly, or Republicans will.
It is always the case. But it is especially the case now – given the that everything the Democrats do over the next two years has to be part of an integrated plan – both doing and publicizing – to convince as many Americans as possible to go into the 2022 midterm election believing that it is important to them personally that Democrats retain and expand their congressional majorities. Did you like your $2,000 check? Well, Democrats brought you that, even after Senate Republicans tried to filibuster those checks. Every Republican including [add name here] voted against it. Again and again and again.
Are these ads being prepped? Is money billing allocated for this? Which groups are taking the lead? I have no idea and frankly I haven’t heard anything about anything like this happening. But it needs to. So if you care about saving the country, it’s time find ways to make this happen.
It doesn’t take much time in Washington before politicos join the Church of the Savvy where chummy “players” who know best funnel campaign funds to former colleagues who after a couple of years on the Hill set themselves up as experts in campaignin’.
Here in the Cesspool of Sin in the New Agey 1990s, people who took $50 workshops in cosmic neuro-nuclear transmigration at the Airport Ramada on Saturday were down at Kinkos ordering business cards on Monday.
Please. Get over yourselves. We are talking survival here. It’s not about you. Ditch the filibuster and get busy making good things happen for Americans. And then don’t be shy about letting voters know you did. Sooner rather than later. Hire pros worth paying. You’ll find more in Hollywood than in D.C.