1. I swear to God, if Dems are still talking about this "we need better messaging" bullshit by next week, I'm going to lose my mind. Here's the problem:
A. Dems have traditionally had three core constituencies: working class whites (especially men), professional women (who care about issues like glass ceilings and reproductive rights more than the working class), and black people. Somewhere along the way, we also picked up gay people.
B. It turns out that the first category hates the people in the other categories. We literally just witnessed that play out over the past year, the past three years, the past ten years. It also turns out that black people don't like professional women all that much, and certainly not gay people. And professional women are not that numerous and some % of them are pro-life voters who are probably unreachable.
C. You cannot win elections consistently when parts of your base hates another part of your base.
There is no amount of messaging that can paper over this basic problem. Thus do we need a plan. And if the plan doesn't take account of this reality and address it head-on, then it is a shit plan that will guarantee future losses.
2. I've been thinking back to the DNC. To me, the most powerful part was the close of Raphael Warnock's speech. Link below for those who don't remember. It still gives me chills.
"In order for my children to be OK, I need all my neighbor's children to be OK" is what liberal politics is all about. That was the tenor of the MLK message. That was Barack Obama's message. And it's a message that everyone can rally around.
3. This is to say that we need more Christianity in Dem politics. The Pubs have given us an opening by embracing a Christianity of hate. And we can take that mantle by expressly embracing our shared religious traditions. That doesn't mean we need to be bigots. Warnock, after all, talked about the children of Gaza and of Israel to be OK in that speech.
What's the most enduring image or memory of Obama's presidency? For me, his singing at the Charleston funeral is high on the list, and I don't think I'm alone in that. Obama was a competent technocrat and a person fully conversant in the Christian tradition.
4. This isn't exactly my wheelhouse, and it's not my intuition either. [Note to people who think I'm arrogant: I'm literally suggesting that Dem politics move away from my areas of expertise, which is to say that I'm suggesting sidelining myself to some degree, so maybe ask yourself what arrogance really means.] I expect pushback. And if you ask me how, I won't be able to tell you because I don't really attend a church.
But if you look at the most resounding victories of liberalism over the years, they were the Civil Rights movement and Obama '08. Those two victories were based on the same principles.
The part that really got everyone going starts at 12:33 or so (or 12:42 if you want to skip the runup).
