FWIW, the WaPo’s Greg Sargent appears to think there’s something to Burton’s view, and he says that “multiple leading Dem[ocratic] strategists” have made similar observations.
It would be nice to think that politicians should be able to speak to all of us. To find what our shared concerns are, and not try and turn us into a bunch of groups fighting for a bigger share of the pie.
Part of learning to talk to white people is NOT talking to minorities as if white people are the enemy. I have to think that Democrats’ last minute blitz of fearmongering among minority communities, and the news coverage that followed it, could have resulted in a white backlash.
You’ve got people wondering why the polls were so wrong. Maybe they weren’t wrong. Maybe things just changed drastically in the last couple of days.
Do I even need to read the rest of this post? You want our economic program to be based on portable cash-crop “exportable technology”? Great. A few corporations can own the intellectual property, while the mass of manufacturing jobs will be in Asia anyway. e_e
I think that the rant in the OP is a case of Democrats trying to come up with an explanation of conservatives that only some self-described conservatives would recognize. It probably does mostly accurately describe a substantial fraction of the serious racists.
And this is a right-winger trying to explain Democrats in a way that most Democrats will find bizarre.
Here’s a hint about Archie Bunker. He’s not meant to caricature white working class men as backward racists. He’s meant to caricature backward racists, particularly the subset of backward racists who happen to also be part (but not all) of the working class.
“Divide and conquer” is an old strategy for people and groups seeking power. It’s easier for the powerful if America is composed of disunited groups that hate one another.
Wow, that’s…distorted.
[ol]
[li]Hispanics aren’t one community. Latin America isn’t just a big place, it’s many places.[/li][li]“to work hard and make money”? Your emphasis is on the wrong phrase. They came to work hard and make money. There have always been plenty of places in Latin America you can be work hard and be poor or even a peon. Underpaid labor is not the American Dream, and practically nobody risks life and limb to work hard and not make money.[/li][li]“that’s anathema to everything your party stands for”? Have you ever spent any time around actual, active, get-out-the-vote Democrats, let alone Democratic Party politicians? You would gag on the amount of extolling the virtues of hard work and the working class. Remember that the old machinery of the Democratic Party is grounded in organized labor, and people who are not any part of the ownership class. They will draw wages and salaries until they retire and draw pensions, and never own capital of their own. They are the party of work until you can’t.[/li][li]What is “acceptable immigration reform” to the party that refused to pass any kind of visa for guest workers when a POTUS of their own party was trying to get it done? What kind of immigration reform is acceptable to most Hispanics, and indeed most church leaders who work with migrants? And where is there any resolution where the GOP and the movement conservatives end up on the same side as most Hispanics on that issue?[/li][/ol]
And by this definition of “demonize,” at least three previous posters in this thread, including the OP, astorian, and Martin Hyde. Also you yourself, here, by comparing Der Trihs to Cromwell.
:dubious:
Oh, good lord. I didn’t notice those white Democratic candidates telling blacks that all white people, including themselves, were the enemy. No wonder they lost! Too bad Democrats have completely forgotten the whole idea of the brotherhood of all mankind.[/sarcasm]
[del]Are you on LSD* right now?*
Can I ask that outside the Pit?
But are you?[/del]
Seriously, that’s rich. As if the GOP were the party of racial love and understanding.
Perhaps you should see the ads they were running before you say that. The ads were clearly meant to appeal to racial animus.
Were the Democratic candidates white, and running for statewide office in majority-white states (which is almost all of the USA)? Then they probably weren’t doing that.
Let’s see the ads of which you speak.
The key part:
Since the NY Times was good enough to report on it, however, the news spread pretty quickly.
Knock off the [del]cute[/del] efforts to pretend these are not personal remarks.
No warning issued.
twickster, Elections moderator
Tell you what- read up on Fred Dutton, the Democrats’ top strategist, and get back to me.
I repeat, and (in Dave Barry’s words, I AM NOT MAKING THIS UP), the Democrats consciously CHOSE to blow up the old New Deal coalition and build a new coalition that the white working class of America was not welcome in.
Kind of on-topic (if it hadn’t been posted already).
Republicans almost always carry Whites across all demographics (young, old, rich, poor, single, married, make, female, etc.). I like how progressives only seem to care about that fact when their candidate loses. I don’t recall the left beside themselves over the fact that Romney won White women (probably because their candidate won).
I’ve given this background before: I come from an Irish working-class family. To my grandparents, Herbert Hoover was Satan and FDR was God. My parents were strong union people.
To my family, the Democrats were the working man’s party and the Republicans were the party of the elites who looked down on them. But by 1980, most of those people voted for Reagan. How did the Democrats lose their most loyal voters? Hint: it wasn’t by accident.
Can anyone seriously claim that the leadership of the Democratic Party’s first priority is the working class? That hasn’t been the case in decades. In the late Sixties and early Seventies, both parties began assuming that prosperity was pretty much here to stay and that the social issues were what mattered most.
The Democrats’ leadership hasn’t cared about steelworkers in Western Pennsylvania or farmers in Arkansas in ages. If they think about the white working class at all, it’s in dismissive (stupid bigots and rednecks) or puzzled (“What’s Wrong With Kansas?”) terms.
Well, to be fair, they are known to cling to guns and religion…
Bill Burton and Greg Sargent both miss the point that Democrats already know how to talk to white voters. Many white voters already vote for Democrat candidates. The Democrats have a problem reaching conservative voters. Both sides hear what the Democrats are preaching, but one side objects to what the Democrats views are. Especially when the Democrats continually demonize the GOP, Tea Party, NRA, Christians, business owners, and rural voters and repeatedly call them the enemy or racist simply because they might be white.
Saying, “You’re all assholes and you should vote the way we tell you to”, isn’t going to win over any converts.
The Democrats who continually trash the conservative voter simply can’t understand that they’ll never convince conservative voters to vote for a liberal, progressive, democrat platform if name-calling is their go-to campaign effort.
The biggest problem Democrats have when dealing with conservative voters is that they keep listening to other Democrats tell them what conservatives believe, stand for, and will vote for. Live and learn (or lose more than the U.S. Senate).
Some back history -
Do you believe that steronz became confused because I was asking you to clarify astorian’s position instead of waiting for astorian to respond or might it be the fact that you chose to channel astorian’s thoughts thru your posts? That last part had me a bit a confused but I can deal with it.