The kitchen table is on fire
Lewis Rothschild : People want leadership, Mr. President, and in the absence of genuine leadership, they’ll listen to anyone who steps up to the microphone.
Donald Trump steps up to the microphone a lot. But to Americans too busy to listen, too overworked to devote their precious free time to political news, they hear only the loudest voices and feel how the world feels. To them.
They’ll be asked this fall to hire leaders. From the president on down to the local school board. What they want in their leaders are people who will fight for them. It’s not just what you say. Words are cheap. It’s what you do. And voters need to see you doing it.
Anat Shenker-Osorio had a long essay in Rolling Stone yesterday, not so much about messaging (her specialty) but about voter attitudes she sees in her focus groups:
If my colleagues and I took a shot everytime someone in these groups decried the Democrats as doing nothing on the fascism front, we’d have cirrhosis.
As one disaffected Democratic white woman from Arizona said in April, “I don’t think any of them care really. Even if Democrats won the House, the Senate, the presidency, they’ve had it before — didn’t do anything then.” The video player is currently playing an ad.
Last month, a disaffected white Democratic man in Pittsburgh pointed out that “Biden ran in part on protecting Roe v. Wade,” and noted that Democrats stalled for weeks on legislation codifying federal protections for abortion, despite the early leak of a draft Dobbs decision overturning the landmark high court decision. “Not that I have a womb,” he went on to say, “but materially for me as an individual and as a voter, it doesn’t really matter whether the Republicans are actively taking the rights away or the Democrats are allowing them to be taken away because they’re being corroded regardless.”
Joe Biden may go down in history as the most effective Democratic president since FDR. But people don’t remember what he and federal Democrats accomplished as much as what they didn’t. Failures they remember. “You’re only as good as your last picture,” as they say in Hollywood.
Like Lewis Rothschild said in The American President, people want leaders. Right now many are ready to elect a wannabe autocrat who plays one on TV. Frustrated others want nothing to do with him, but don’t see Democrats as prepared to fight for them with more than empty words.
“Democrats had a governing trifecta for two years and failed to codify Roe or pass voting rights legislation that would have combated state-based efforts to seize people’s most fundamental freedoms over our bodies and our ballots,” Shenker-Osorio says of her higher-information subjects.
Biden is rebuilding your bridge, but he’s only as good as his last win. Voters have longer memories for what they didn’t get, and what they had taken from them while Democrats seemingly stood by.
Is it any wonder there’s a lack of belief in the efficacy of voting, especially among disaffected Dems, who feel that they were told to turn out in 2020 to stop terrible things from happening, only to see those terrible things happen anyway? It’s challenging to sell voters on the same premise this year.
Things could get far worse under a second Trump presidency, but that message is not getting to most voters, Shenker-Osorio finds.
The kitchen table is on fire
There’s a 900-page plan from the Heritage Foundation for Trump 2.0 called Project 2025. It calls for gutting the civil service and replacing it with MAGA toadies, “restricting contraception, dismantling the Department of Education, eliminating labor and environmental protections,” and more. But most people haven’t heard of it. When study subjects get briefed on Project 2025, they soundly reject it.
Where we run into problems is that when voters learn for the first time of these horrors, many wonder why Democrats don’t seem to be speaking out about them or fighting back. In an online group across battleground states on June 11, one swing Latina participant summed up these sentiments, saying that “the Democrats have to step it up. Where is the counter agenda?” More darkly, Asian-American disaffected swing men the same night didn’t like MAGA’s plan but noted that at least they have one.
Democrats lack the messaging infrastructure that right-wing media owners provide gratis to Republicans. And the both-sides mainstream press offers more coverage of the Trumpist clown show because it’s more colorful and attracts eyeballs and clicks.
But that means Democrats running on kitchen-table issues, an idée fixe among old-guard Democrats like Rep. Nancy Pelosi [timestamp: 1:17:00], get little or no traction in the minds of a distracted electorate. A laundry list of accomplishments doesn’t lodge in people’s brains the way a good story with heroes and villains does. Democrats aren’t telling one. It’s not voters’ fault that they don’t know what they don’t know. It’s a challenge Democrats are struggling to meet. And the kitchen table? The kitchen table is on fire.
The widely reported fact of Biden bleeding support from key 2020 constituencies including young people and people of color merits a cold hard look at causation. Pundits pounced to attribute these drops to some sudden onset of Trump-attraction and insist Biden has to moderate. But in reality, most of those moving away from Biden are either utterly unaware of or refuse to credit MAGA’s well-laid plans to control our lives and our livelihoods. The erosion in support isn’t driven by the lure of Trump and cannot be cured by Biden adopting lite versions of his policies. It stems from lack of awareness of what Trump and the rest of the MAGA mob say and intend; thus the only way forward is to ensure voters hear the alarm bells and believe the emergency is real.
It’s both accurate and entirely fair to lay much of public ignorance and incredulity at the media’s door. But we cannot expect voters to believe that the house is indeed on fire, that the threat of fascism is neigh, if the firefighters, that is our current leaders, aren’t attempting to put out the blaze.
How many Rocky movies did Stallone make? And they’re all the same movie. So why do people keep going? Because so many Americans themselves feel like underdogs. We want to root for the little guy with heart. Facing insurmountable odds. Risking it all. We want to feel the thrill up our spines and in the tops of our heads when Bill Conti’s trumpet fanfare introduces the training sequence. We want to hear that. Wait for it. Cheer for it. Pay for it. Over and over and over.
Say what you’re for, Shenker-Osorio insists. Paint the beautiful tomorrow. But words are not enough. They need to see you fighting for what you believe and for them. They’ll be inspired by it. That says leadership more than speeches. That’s what they’ll vote for.
You’re only as good as your last picture. Paint one.
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