Democrats...let's move on

[Svartalf]

red states will stay red, senate won't go Democrat, I have no idea about the House

[L'Emmerdeur]

Interesting thesis, but I think the Democratic party in the US doesn't have it in them to move in this direction.

'Hey Democrats, Fighting Fair Is for Suckers'

If Democrats are wise, they will embrace President Donald Trump’s demonstration that there no longer are any unwritten rules in American politics. (I’ve come to think that the key text for understanding our era is the 1997 movie Air Bud: “There’s no rule that says a dog can’t play basketball.”) Democrats should be preparing to exercise power, beginning as early as 2020, with that lesson in mind.

As we all know, Trump and the Republican Party that enables him eat norms for breakfast. A norm is a tacit and mutual agreement that certain exercises of power, while lawful, also are unthinkable. As a result, a willingness to think the unthinkable is itself a source of power. With that willingness, you can deny a president a hearing on a Supreme Court nominee. You can threaten to jail your political opponents and call an election rigged if you don’t win. You can demand investigations of your enemies, you can fire the FBI director investigating you, and you can quite possibly pardon yourself for federal crimes.

Trump and Republicans are not interested in self-restraint. We ought to be past surprise, for example, that the “let the people decide” standard invented by Mitch McConnell to block Merrick Garland’s Supreme Court nomination no longer applies now that Trump can choose a successor for Anthony Kennedy. Those who care about the future of liberal democracy in this country ought to be beyond outrage and ready for something altogether colder and more disciplined.

Democrats should plan to treat political norms, when and if they’re in charge of a unified government, the way Trump and the Republicans do. They should be readying a program of systematic norm-breaking for partisan advantage—but only if they are willing and able to follow it through to its conclusion.

...

[N]orms are only norms when they are mutual; fairness is only fair when it’s shared. Democrats aren’t justified in breaking norms because they’ve been “wronged.” They are justified because the current system has ceased to function.

So if there is a problem with the Democrats initiating a counter-program of partisan norm-breaking, it doesn’t lie in an abstract idea of fair play. It lies in the logic of escalation. Republicans, too, can create senators out of thin air, can pack courts, can strip citizenship from immigrants Democrats have enfranchised.

...

If Democrats are resolved to fight dirty, they should be studying cases of successful and failed realignments, fleshing out the ideological framework to explain themselves, and building the internal consensus it will take to follow through. They should be assessing their leaders with the goal of realignment in mind, rejecting those whose mental models still have a place for concepts like “meaningful bipartisanship.”

Realignments are nothing short of revolutionary events. Democrats should begin a norm-breaking program only if they are willing to complete it. And they can complete it only if they are willing to tune out the very civil, very serious, and very wrong voices that will demand half-measures at every step.

...

Real political success can change, and has changed, our notions of the thinkable and the unthinkable. Democrats should aim for nothing less.

They should aim for nothing less, even as they understand that they will be dealing in mere probabilities, in risk and in fog. America’s most successful revolutionary—so successful that he is rightly regarded as a re-founder—had something to say about what it takes to work through such a fog: “firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right.” Understand that your view of what’s right is contingent, fallible, permanently imperfect. And then be firm.

Unfortunately, I think that the Venn diagram depicting current Democratic politicians and firm comprises two adjacent but separate circles.

[Tero]

There needs to be a strong media presence next time. Politics of presidents has moved from olympic wrestling to Professional Wrestling. The undecided voters vote based on who acts tougher, never mind facts.

[Sean Hayden]

“Republicans have always feared that immigration would change the character of American society. Democrats should reward them with their very worst nightmare.”

--from L'Emmerdeur's link

that was very heartening to read

[Seabass]

Yeah it was.

[Tero]

”So we got one socialist, let’s put the Sanders thing on hold and go centrist!”
(Sanders thing: "The ideas that he was talking about — Medicare-for-all, a $15 minimum wage, free tuition at public colleges and universities, radical criminal justice reform, immigration reform — many of these issues were considered fringe issues, and now they are mainstream issues that we take for granted that, of course, there are legions of Democratic candidates running on these platforms," said Sanders' 2016 campaign manager, Jeff Weaver.)
https://www.npr.org/2018/07/05/62582259 ... -it-counts

[Tero]

https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/policy ... ona-nevada

Polling has been consistently strong for Democrat Kyrsten Sinema in Arizona. With a kind of fierce and late Republican primary there, she looks like a strong bet to flip the seat.

Nevada is also favorable for Democrats, and Rep. Jacky Rosen, who is now officially the Democratic candidate, should be a strong challenger to Republican Sen. Dean Heller. He is the only Republican facing a reelection race in a state that presidential candidate Hillary Clinton won in 2016. Axios puts Rosen in the lead, 48 percent to 45 percent.

[laklak]

It's all just a dog and pony show to keep everybody riled up, so we won't see them all drinking Cristal and eating Beluga while they loot the planet. Or maybe it's lark's tongue in aspic and honeyed dormice. Everything old is new again.

[Tero]

Warren still stuck with policy speeches. We need simple message like "cooked Hillary" was
Boston mayor, a working class Democrat, goes after Trump ”foreigners” fantasy:

But what is “it”? What’s the way for Democrats to grab the Marty Walshes whom they’ve lost? Walsh said the answer is advocating for healthcare, Social Security and the rest of the New Deal, and leaning hard into diversity and immigration.

Every time Trump has talked up about immigration, Walsh has jumped forward in the opposition, to the point of offering to house immigrants in his office and the rest of City Hall if the administration ever follows through on its threats to crack down on sanctuary cities.

Convincing struggling workers who’ve turned into anti-immigrant hardliners should be easy, Walsh said.

“Explain what’s going on in Boston. Twenty-eight percent of the people that live in our city are foreign-born. Forty-eight percent of the people in our city are first generation. We have immigrants in this city that are citizens. We have immigrants in this city that have green cards on pathway to citizenship. We have immigrants in this city that are undocumented,” he said. The result: “We have $11 billion worth of construction going on in our city. We’ve had 85,000 new people move in the last four years. We are one of the safest cities in America.”

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story ... iew-219029

[Forty Two]

Tero, I think what "working class" Americans want is a reasonable immigration system enforced. They aren't "anti-immigrant," but they separate immigrants to immigrate legally, and those who either enter illegally or overstay and remain illegally. The legal immigrants are generally welcomed by a giving and caring populace, who generally have friends who are immigrants or the children of immigrants.

What pisses people off are those who shirk or do an end around the system. I'm first generation American with parents, aunts and uncles who immigrated, and I have a wife who immigrated. You know what every one of them thinks? That illegal immigration is wrong, and should be stopped. However, they also support immigration in general, and the process of allowing immigration to those who play by the rules, as they did.

There is a very strong distaste for illegal immigrants among the legal immigrant population.

I think this is one of the things that some Democrats have gotten lost about. They express policies which make no distinction or very little distinction about legal and illegal immigration. Some Republicans make the opposite mistake, of being too anti-immigrant in general. But, if you talk about the issue with the average, working class factory or office worker, I think you'll find that they don't so much mind immigrants as they do mind scofflaws who just come in and expect to be legalized.

[Animavore]

We need simple message like "cooked Hillary" was

Wut? I think you mean "Crooked Hillary".

"Traitor Trump" will do.

[Tero]

Oh. I got it wrong? She was crooked? I voted for her! I want my money back!

[Tero]

New rule: break the fucking rules

Politico: In the final days of Obama’s tenure, calls rose for Obama to give Garland, the Supreme Court nominee whom Republicans refused to consider, a recess appointment. As the New Republic’s David Dayen strained to argue, on January 3, 2017, there would have been “metaphysical” space between the end of the 114th Congress and the beginning of the 115th, in which Obama could claim the Senate was in recess and appoint Garland without Senate confirmation.

After none of those fantasies came to pass, and after watching Trump chew up and spit out norms as part of his daily routine, the movement of progressive norm-breakers has grown. Roosevelt University political science professor David Faris this year published It’s Time to Fight Dirty, which called for packing the Supreme Court, ending the legislative filibuster, and breaking up California in hopes of creating more blue states and more Democratic senators. Now, Avenatti is poised to elevate court-packing to the level of progressive litmus test.

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story ... ary-219910