The Tragic Genius of the Democrats
by tristero
Democrats are geniuses at reverse alchemy. They can transmute the purest political gold into lead sludge:
To date, Democrats have urged their candidates to conduct their own races and avoid a national campaign against Mr. Trump or the Republican Congress, except on carefully targeted issues like health care costs. Mr. Trump’s scandals, they argued, will play like background music that they do not need to accentuate.
I really can’t think of a dumber strategy for this political moment. While the article provides some hope that Democrats are beginning to wake up, there is also this:
Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the House Democratic leader, distributed a public letter to her colleagues arguing that the Trump-era capital had “become a cesspool of self-enrichment, secret money and ethical blindness” and that House Republicans were offering only a “blind eye to the corruption and criminality at the heart of President Trump’s inner circle.”
But in the same letter, Ms. Pelosi also said that Democrats “must also stay focused on delivering our strong economic message.”
Exactly backwards, Nancy.
People are afraid that democracy will fail and that nukes will be falling. That’s the focus. And what exactly is a “strong economic message?” That sounds like vacuous last-century political doublespeak.
Democratic strategists overseeing the midterm elections said they would use corruption against those Republicans tarred by any wrongdoing, but they were not yet convinced that focusing on what some in the electorate view as unending Washington drama would be more effective than highlighting policy differences.
Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, on Tuesday in Washington. “Campaign finance violations — I don’t know what will come from that, but the thing that will hurt the president the most is if, in fact, his campaign did coordinate with a foreign government like Russia,” he said.
“For a lot of voters, the Donald Trump circus is not enough to get them to vote Democratic in the midterms,” said Alixandria Lapp, who runs the main House Democratic “super PAC.”
Bullshit. People don’t view Donald Trump as a “circus” but as a threat to their very existence. And that —the totally legitimate fear that Trump and the GOP are so incompetent, malicious, and corrupt that they will get us all killed — is about the most effective argument Democrats could imagine to get folks off their collective arses and vote the GOP into oblivion.