That’s actually really good, but simple slogans have to have fleshed out ideas behind them to really be successful.
First, what is America, as in what is America the idea? Is it just a rich country where we’re going to divide the wealth, thus making us no different from Sweden? Or is America a unique country with unique ideas of freedom and liberty, and that we will recognize those freedoms even when it’s inconvenient? The Democrats’ history suggests that they see no constitutional limits on their ambitions, and that the freedoms they staunchly defend when a Republican is in the White House become unimportant once they take power.
There’s a certain subset of Trump voters that really likes getting worked up about imaginary problems. I think this group is winnable for the dems if we give them an imaginary problem they can sink their teeth into while still catering to issues the base cares about. This is why I propose the slogan…
It implies learning from past mistakes. They’d have to pair that with a demonstration that they’d learned from the past, though, by not running the same people on the same platforms.
If you are claiming that Hillary’s greatest error was refusing to do sound bites, I disagree. She made a lot of mistakes, but her campaign DID include sound bites. The main difference between Trump and Clinton, if you take away the thirty years of anti-Clinton Republican propaganda, was that Trump talked about addressing problems and imagined problems of the voters, and Clinton talked about how awful Trump was.
But I will agree with you that she has always been an absolutely TERRIBLE public speaker. Poor focus, poor vocal control, poor staging, you name it.
But people don’t vote in favor of someone BECAUSE they use sound bites, any more than they vote for someone BECAUSE they spend more on ads. They vote for someone because the particular sound bite or ad, makes them think “THIS person is going to address what bugs me.”
I am not making the claim that Clinton’s greatest error was refusing to do soundbites. That claim is not anywhere in my post, implicitly or explicitly mentioned. I pointed out that soundbites were made out of her speeches, parts taken out of context and played over and over that swamped out any messaging from the clinton campaign itself.
I will mostly agree on that, she doesn’t do as well in public speaking as some more glib politicians do. I don’t know that I would actually rate it as “poor”, but then I am involved in local politics, and see people make public speeches on a regular basis who are far far worse than her on her worst day, and people have no problem with that, because they are looking for someone who can competently run the city, not someone who can make nice speeches. So, if I were looking for an orator, not a leader, then that would make a difference to me.
But they did vote against her based on soundbites. You even make the claim that Clinton only talked about how awful trump was, never talking about the problems of the voters. And why is that? Because those are the soundbites of her speeches that you were exposed to. She talked about many, many, other things than trump, she talked about how she was going to help out of work miners get retrained for high paying jobs, how she was going to work to fix higher education, healthcare, environmental issues, and many more, it’s just that those didn’t make it into the headlines and onto the news shows, so you apparently never heard any of them, even though they were contained in the very same speeches from which the soundbites that you did hear were lifted.
That you can make the claim that Clinton never addressed the problems of the voters tells me just how powerful soundbites are, in that you absolutely ignore the meat of her speeches to exclusively focus on them.
Why make any such effort towards crafting a slogan? Let the slogan arise from the people and they will pick the one they like, and then we will know what it is. Don’t try and tell them what it is, let them tell us. Perhaps more to the point, let us tell us.
If the people lead, the leaders follow. Or they go find honest jobs.
As someone who generally votes Democrat (and essentially never Republican), I vaguely remember seeing the ‘she persisted’ meme a while ago but figured it had something to do with Clinton and didn’t look into it anymore. I don’t think ‘she persisted’ as something to do with Elizabeth Warren has a very broad penetration of the public consciousness, and I think people outside of a narrow circle would associate it with Clinton.
Picking slogans that are only recognizable to a narrow subset of voters who are already going to vote Democrat no matter what is generally not a good way to win elections. Also, responding to someone who isn’t familiar with a particular fad with accusations of sexism is also not a good way to win elections, it tends to result in more of a feeling of “well if I’m already sexist, I may as well vote for the pussy-grabber” than “oh no, I’ve been accused of sexism, now I must vote for the vagina-bearer to redeem myself”.
Interestingly, a lot of the slogans that mashmallow listed when disagreeing with my assessment of Clinton’s slogan as narcissistic actually originated this way, and not from the candidate. “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too” was adopted from a popular song, it didn’t originate from the party’s inner circle, for example.
So let us wait, respectfully and patiently, whilst the Great Mass stews, burping the while, until at last they pronounce the answer in a mighty eructation of platitudinous half-remembered rock songs and cloying sentiments of 100% pure uncut glurge welded into admirable irreproachable dumb.
But how long do we wait, and how will we know ?
The problem with Democrats and slogans is that slogans are simplistic, reducing complex issues to a few simple words, and in general liberals don’t roll that way. I understand the appeal and even the importance of campaign slogans, but it’s an uphill battle, one that Republicans are much better at.
“Hope and change” worked because the candidate was poised to be the first black president (Kennedy was deemed a historic big deal just because he was Catholic!) and also brought a unique intellectualism that was a distinct contrast to the previous eight years. “A better deal” – or any kind of “deal” – is problematic IMHO because Trump has defined himself as the unchallenged master of deals. My only suggestion: let the candidate come first, and then devise a slogan that credibly fits the appeal of the candidate.
I think that’s true-- letting the candidate shape the slogan/message-- but even before we get into 2020, the Dems probably should have some overall message heading into the midterms. As much as I’d like it to be something along the lines of “Look at what these fucks are doing to our nation,” I think it needs to be more proactive than reactive.
For bumper stickers, pennants, and banners: license a cartoon with Sylvester holding a Tweety with big orange hair, about to put the bird into his mouth. The punchline/tagline: “Tweet This!”
