Clunky! But she's certainly right that "Many Americans are fed up. The jumbled Covid response has eroded an already shaky trust in government. Inflation is biting. War is looming. Things feel out of control. People are anxious and reassessing their lives. Democrats have to connect with that." Normally, I would think-- I would be sure-- that Biden and his feckless party are about to get an ass-whoopin'. But... Trump? McCarthy? McConnell? Marjorie Traitor Greene? Coups and insurrections? That's not nuthin'
Dowd further noted that "The Democrats are stepping all over themselves. And Republicans are doing all they can to prevent the Democrats from accomplishing anything, and then are trashing them for not doing anything. Voters like to punish the people in power. So if the Democrats don’t figure it out, Jim Jordan is going to be running the House and pushing investigations of Biden and Hillary. They can’t quit her. Exhausted, confused, isolated and depressed Americans are not buying the Democratic line that things are better than they look." Oh yeah, let me add Gym Jordan to that list of why Americans might be wary about giving the GOP the keys to the car... at least for the 20% of voters who ever heard of him.
David Axelrod, she wrote "understands, from his days in the White House, that the Biden team is frustrated because they feel the public doesn’t appreciate their achievements, and they don’t understand why. Biden’s advisers are urging him just to sell harder and people will get it. Axelrod disagrees: 'You cannot persuade people if their lived experience is telling them something different. We’ve been through hell in America and around the world.' In a Times opinion piece, Axelrod said Biden should avoid 'off-key' triumphalism in his State of the Union address, and remember the country is traumatized." She wrote that Gary Hart told him what he terms the smartest thing he ever heard in politics: "Washington is always the last to get the news." No shit, Sherlock!
Talk about "lived experience," if the DCCC and DSCC try to shove more of their Manchin-Sinema-like garbage corporate whores down the throats of the voters-- and that is exactly what they are trying to do-- the Republicans will wipe the floor with him. Later this morning, we will introduce you to a woman running in a new blue district in the suburbs north of L.A., Ruth Luevanos. Unlile the two garbage candidates she's running against-- one Republican and one Democrap-- Luevanos, a school teacher, is living the same experience as her neighbors. Credible, candidates like Ruth Luevanos can save the Democrats from themselves. Trashy Republican-lite careerists like Christy Smith-- who already lost twice while Hillary and Biden won her district-- cannot. But that's who EMILY's List and the DCCC are demanding. Don't ask me whose side their on; it's not our side.
Today's my birthday. Want to help me celebrate? Consider contributing $5 or $10 to Ruth's campaign here. The rest of Dowd's piece is so bad and so wrong that Id recommend it for lining the bottom of your garbage can, as long as you're certain no one will be digging around down there who might read any of it.
The Democrats always count on one thing: being the lesser evil. sometimes it works. With Trump, it should work even more. But it may not. We can help save the Democrats-- and the country-- by beating the DCCC and DSCC corporate candidates-- and electing these people to the House and these people to the Senate. Am sure the DCCC and DSCC candidates will lose? Yes. Do you think anyone wants more like Kyrsten Sinema or Joe Manchin? Cat's out of the bag finally... not any blue will do!
Last word goes to Jason Call, a progressive champion running a values-driven campaign in northwest Washington state against a corrupt conservative DCCC hack, Rick Larson. "Dowd got the thing right about Republicans being single minded of purpose-- making Democrats look bad," he told me last night. "It's been the name of the game for the GOP since Newt Gingrich's Contract ON America in the mid-90's and is what drove the Clinton impeachment. They didn't actually care if Clinton was molesting staffers, they were just looking for something to politicize. It has been their m.o. for over 25 years. But the real story on Republicans came out of Grover Norquist's mouth when he said he wanted to shrink government to the size of a mouse and drown it in the bathtub. That is the ALEC version of GOP purpose, along with Moral Majority founder Paul Weyrich's assertion that 'our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.' The point in identifying this is simply to say that the Republicans break government literally ON PURPOSE. And the Democrats let them. The one thing that Joe Biden needed to do for the American people was to show them that government could work well. For everyone. And he has yet to do it because just like Obama he wants to lean on bipartisanship, and just like Obama in 2010, he's gotten his ass handed to him. I can't for the life of me think why anyone thought it would be different now than it was just over a decade ago when Democrats lost a thousand seats across the country. And dipshits like James Carville in their ivory towers thinking they are playing a chess game will never understand it. The people who understand it are the people who are living, as David Byrne said, life during wartime. This ain't no party, this ain't no disco, this ain't no fooling around. The window to save the planet is shrinking, and in their daily lives Americans are feeling no relief while billionaires continue to get richer. This is not going to end well for anyone unless significant changes in purpose are made immediately."
