Personality punctuates policy perfectly. With tens of thousands of dick headed tweets to choose from, it shouldn’t be too hard to juxtapose some MAGA, job creator bullshit against the story of a laid-off factory worker living in her car. Kind of makes me wonder WTF all these fancy consultants are getting paid for.
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If they didn’t dismantle Dr. Dean’s 50 state strategy some years back who knows where we’d be now.
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Trying to win over a few mythical undecideds.
Which is it? Is it ok to mention that the chief executive has continuously lost his mind about mothers feeding their daughters birth control or do we just concentrate on when he said that tariff wars were easy and profitable.
I’m mentioning this, because she caught flack for the deplorables comment, but the times that she bought up his business practices rarely got mentioned.
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Reminder: just concentrating on his personality is a ‘no-no’.
I guess my argument is that the volume is so high on the “This man is borderline insane” stuff, that I wish they’d turn up the volume on the “He keeps talking about repealing Obamacare with will personally screw you for X, Y, Z reasons”.
I’m not worried that there are people who have missed all the evidence for argument A. I am worried that there are voters who aren’t educated on argument B. And whatever small sliver of votes who find argument A insufficient but might be won over by B, I want to target them.
The people like you and me who think Trump is a dangerous lunatic aren’t worth spending money on, and for a political organization, the idea of trying to boost the signal on “Trump has a dangerous personality” is meaningless to the point of counter-productivity.
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YES
at last they are following my advice
So, let’s go hyper local, so that there won’t be any sort of overarching ideological narrative with concrete policy proposals.
That’s worked SO well in the past. (not)
I think that is a fantastic point. To be honest, it wasn’t just the DNC. I think there were a whole lot of us that just couldn’t get past that part either myself included.
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I thought hillary lost because Bernie? no?
When analyzing catastrophic events, like major air crashes, investigators often speak of a chain of failures, and if any one of a number of things had gone differently, the accident might have been avoided.
Hillary Clinton lost the election by very small margins in a very small number of places. Take away any one of several factors that were working against her, and 2016 – and the past two years, and the rest of our lives – would have had a very different outcome. Just off the top of my head, the electoral college very possibly could have been won with:
- A little less complacency about places like Wisconsin in the final phase of the election
- A little more professional discretion on the part of James Comey
- A little less dezinformatsiya from the Russians
- Less (careless?) enabling of the above by the social media giants
- Even an ounce of country-over-party from McConnell when the interference was detected
- And, yes, fewer fuckwitted “I can’t stand Hillary” third party voters and/or abstentions
So yeah, Hillary lost because Bernie. And IRA. And Comey. And Jill. And Mitch. And Wikileaks. And Hillary.
Just because it’s not all his fault doesn’t mean he doesn’t deserve blame.
So in short, if only people would have let Hillary win. Got it
I have a degree in composition and rhetoric, and it’s interesting to study the construction of arguments and their underpinnings. At the end of the day, to debate someone, you must agree to a mutual standard of what “winning” the argument looks like. Many of the problems with the debate in this country is that there is no consensus. It’s not that we can’t get together on the answer to the question of “Who would be the best President” it’s that we can’t agree on what the word “best” means in the context.
Democrats can’t get over the fact that people don’t care, or actually like Trump’s personality. The idea of a woman wearing a shirt to a Trump rally that says, “Trump can grab me by my…” with an arrow pointed at her crotch is horrifying and cognitively dissonant.
For me, the alarming part of the 2016 postmortem was how many Hillary voters wanted to argue that they had actually won the popular vote, so the election was stolen, as if Clinton campaign had been unaware of the goalpost markers for electoral victory.
Democrats have a difficult time believing the demostrable fact that half the country (or near enough to half to win a national election) prefered Trump as a leader over Clinton. Some of them in spite of his personality, many of them because of his personality.
It’s why, when my Democrat friends come to me with another news story saying, “Can you believe Trump did X?” I just shrug and say, “Yes… I have no trouble believing it.”
I’m deeply offended by the systematic dismantling of the rule of law and the societal standards of conduct that this administration represents, but I’m no longer surprised by it. I’m more than a little worried at how shocked Democratic voters still are by the latest Trump headline.
It took a lot of self-reflection to understand the issue and to divorce myself from my own subjective framework that act as blinders. Yes… as it turns out, ~42% (remarkably consistent) of the population are okay with an Executive Branch that calls the press the Enemy of the People; who treat any judge that doesn’t agree with them as part of “The Other”, and talks about the rule of law as a roadblock to the American Dream ™.
I’m officially OVER trying to argue with people on the merits of that argument because every argument I make is reinforcing the things they like about Trump.
Instead, cynical as it may feel, I point out that he’s giving tax cuts to the rich that cost them money and social services, that the fact that their healthcare costs are rising due to his actions and local GOP refusal to adopt Medicare expansions, that his trade war costs blue collar jobs while making Wall Street types richer… Self-interest is a lot more motivating than ideals.
The idealistic argument of a President who isn’t a laughing stock on the public stage, who isn’t overtly motivated by self-interest, and is willfully untruthful at every opportunity, is a losing argument with people who look at Trump and Obama side-by-side and think Trump is the better President.
The sooner Democrats can get over their horrified refusal to believe that such people exist, and exist in such numbers that they control the Senate and the White House, the sooner they can change tactics to something that might amount to victory.
At this point, I’d rather win elections than arguments.
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