I don’t see that much in the “Better Deal” from the Democratic leadership today that is in any way orthogonal to what HRC was running on at this time last year. Still overly focused on the middle-class, still a little too much don’t-scare-the-big-business, and most offensively, the notion that “Democrats have too often hesitated from taking on those misguided policies directly and unflinchingly – so much so that many Americans don’t know what we stand for.”
Horseshit.
The Democratic message has been pretty much the same for a decade or two: the notion that if you work hard and play by the rules, you should be able to have a successful middle-class American life. Nothing here is substantially different. All that this amounts to is an attempt to articulate it in a way that will get some attention, because when HRC was the candidate, all anyone cared about was EMAILS EMAILS EMAILS – the complete failure of the press to examine her policy positions, or anyone’s policy positions for that matter, was not because she didn’t have them, it was because it was easier to hold the camera on the Trump train wreck and offer no challenge to whatever his trained catamites in cable media said.
In a way, you can make a case that HRC was a fatally flawed candidate from the beginning, not because of any fault or flaws of her own, but because she would never be allowed to be anything but HILLARY, the nightmare caricature that the GOP and its amen corner at the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times (that’s right I said it) and Fox and AM radio had piñata’d for a quarter-century. HRC was a fine candidate, albeit one with Al Gore disease: the terminal earnestness of the smartest kid in the class who doesn’t understand why the monkey-boy who pours milk over his head and steals out of other kids’ lockers is considered an equal candidate for class president. And who then loses to the monkey even though the monkey didn’t get as many votes as they did.
So ultimately, the challenge now for the Democrats isn’t the message – although it’s at the point now where it’s easy to get frustrated and dispose of anything that suggests the DLC in the least, and push really hard for a left-populist vision, and I’m not saying that’s wrong – it’s having the messengers who can sell it. Maybe Chuck Schumer is that guy. Maybe it’s Kamala Harris or Cory Booker. New fresh faces that aren’t carrying the baggage of decades of Republican slime. But the biggest fear is that once again, they’ll decide it’s going to take another white Southern male who doesn’t scare off the hillbillies who aren’t going to vote for him anyway. And that Crazification Factor crowd? There’s no reason to fish in that pond. They’re dying and the ones who aren’t won’t ever vote for a Democrat. Go where the votes are. Throw it where the action is. Get your voters enthused and excited and get them out to vote, and make it happen the right way.
But stop wasting time shooting the wounded. If anyone needs forgiveness, it’s not HRC, it’s a party that couldn’t produce a less-tarred and more-exciting candidate with four years’ advance notice.