You misunderstand - I thought you were making fun of what right-wingers think qualify as satire. Because that’s “slightly exaggerated” in the same way a video about how Hillary Clinton eats babies in rituals to satan in an attempt to get political power is “slightly exaggerated”.
Adaher wrote: "Democrats are preferred by the public, but that’s not the same as public opinion being behind whatever Democrats want to do. "
I think that’s kind of backwards. Most elements of what we might call “the Democratic” agenda poll higher without the party label attached to them. Every component of Obamacare was significantly more popular without the “Obamacare” name attached to it.
Admittedly this says as much about the folks being polled as it does policy, but there you go.
First, I’m in agreement with the OP that the Democrats will be back in power in 2020. As far as where they shouldn’t start, it shouldn’t be with social issues. Yes, they are important, but in the grand scheme of things they shouldn’t spend large amounts of political capital on issues that affect smaller and smaller slices of the population. The Democrats are not going to keep a House and Senate majority in 2022 by focusing on transgender rights.
One of the things that Democrats need to focus on is elections themselves. I keep hearing about things like voter suppression, gerrymandering, and cuts in the amount of time for early voting and the number of polling places on election day. All these things result in populations that typically vote Democratic having a more difficult time voting. Working to fix these things and making it easier for everyone to vote should be a top priority.
Another thing is Democrats need to acknowledge that the US will not become prosperous by trying to return to a 1950s style economy, no matter how much people might wish it were so. There needs to be some kind of a positive plan, however, not just being the party of everything not Trump. They need to come up with new ideas that would benefit working class people and run on those.
The Democrats should also be recruiting new people to run in 2018 and 2020. They shouldn’t be focusing on bringing back the people who lost to the current Republicans (I’m looking at you Hillary Clinton, Russ Feingold, etc.). Instead they should look to local community leaders such as prominent local businesses owners, successful veterans, physicians, community organizers etc. People like that should step up and run for office. I think if the Democrats focus on those things, they would have a good showing in the 2022 midterms and avoid disasters whose lessons they should have learned from after the 1994 and 2010 elections.
I disagree. I think the idea that the Democratic Party caters to elite liberals is a story that conservatives tell to discredit the party. The reality is that the Republicans are the party that’s dominated by its fringe and the the Democrats are the moderate party.
Look at the Freedom Caucus. Look at the Tea Party. These are real groups. But where are the equivalent groups in the Democratic Party?
And another one slips over the edge of the Abyss…
The problem with those kinds of polls is that they essentially ask people if they want a bunch of free stuff. It should be of no surprise when the answer is YES!!! When you ask people how much they are willing to pay to get that stuff, you get a different answer.
What ‘should’ they do? Their biggest priorities should be
Abolishing gerrymandering
Rebuilding the labor movement
Making voting as easy as possible everywhere they can
However I support those for selfish reasons, each of those 3 policies makes it easier for democrats to win elections in the future. There is a reason the GOP is doing the exact opposite of all 3 (gerrymandering, crushing the labor movement, making it hard to vote).
Other than that their priorities should be lowering medical costs, increasing innovation, finding a way to deal with the upcoming mass unemployment caused by robotics, reducing income inequality, etc. Those are policies the US desperately needs.
However the dems also need some policies that aren’t that important, but that keep people happy. Not sure what they’d be though.
It’s not an ancient word or anything (at least in this context), but it’s not new-new. It’s about 30 years old. Kimberle Williams Crenshaw first used it in 1986, to talk about the problems that come when you focus on one category of discrimination. For instance, black women might suffer from discrimination that black men don’t and that white women don’t, so just looking at black women as “black” and “women” isn’t necessarily enough.
I don’t know that it’s identity politics taken to an extreme, although the term does get thrown around a lot. In a way, it’s almost a reverse of what you’re saying. There can be a tendency, when looking at groups, to lump together people. So, you say, “Is this good or bad for blacks” or “Is this good or bad for women” or “Is this good or bad for gays”, when people are more complicated than that. Not all x are the same. I know for, to take an example I’m most familiar with, the gay rights movement has largely been dominated by middle class gay men, and a lot of the issues that the gay rights movement focused and focuses on…gays in the military, gay marriage, more funding for AIDS, have been issues that primarily affect middle class gay men. That doesn’t mean they’re not important issues, because they are, but for instance, the AIDS crisis primarily hit gay men, not lesbians. While sexual intercourse between two women can spread AIDS, it was primarily a disease of men. Am I saying that fighting for AIDS funding shouldn’t have been a priority? Of course not. People were, and still are dying. But too often, it gets seen as a “gay” issue, when it’s more of a “gay male” issue.
It will be *so *much easier to be a Republican then , won’t it? You’ll once again only have to oppose, not propose. No wonder the prospect has bipartisan attractiveness.
The problem for progressives will, as always, be one of choosing the highest priority ways to *make *progress. Obviously, given how far behind where we could be and how much threat it faces from the oppositionist party, that’ll be health care, and how to get to true guaranteed coverage at a controlled cost, and if that’s via simply expanding Medicare or some other mechanism. But that will be in a political environment where even the deplorables think it’s a government responsibility now.
A lot of stuff in those polls aren’t related to taxable issues. “Do you care where trans people pee?” does not require any additional tax burden.
The cost (whether in taxes or otherwise) depends on how the policy is implement. 
But that’s really neither here nor there. Le’t hope that “where transgender people pee” is not at the top of the Democrats agenda if they take over in 2020 (the topic of this thread).
Well, perhaps…
Just a modest suggestion :).
Depends on what needs to be done.
Look at what Dems did in 2008 - 2010 as a guide. You can do one big thing. There was a lot of financial bailing out going on by bipartisan consensus so they didn’t need to expend a lot of energy on that. They could have gone for massive stimulus or Obamacare and they decided to do Obamacare.
Once Dems lost the House, it was too late to do stimulus. All of Obama’s budgets after 2010 had large infrastructure spending, but none of them ever passed the House. We’ve been running on CRs and Executive Orders since then. Everything gets decided in the courts.
I suspect single payer is going to be irresistible to Dems. Get that through, it’s bullet proof, you’ll never roll it back.
Of course, if they do get back in in 2020, it’s likely Congress will be preoccupied shortly thereafter with the War of Northern Aggression II.
There you go indeed.
People are completely full of shit when asked what they want and why they do what they do.
So, no real change then.
Good God, ppl obsess on bathrooms and gender roles and (gasp!) political correctness. As a liberal Dem, I think about those things hardly at all. It’s an issue of importance, and I have opinions, but I don’t spend all day rolling them around in my head and getting worked up about them, like the right seems to think I do. As far as “political correctness” goes, I just file it under the heading of, “Don’t be a jerk” and it’s business as usual.
Someone, I think it was on this board, had a very nice, short write-up on how liberals and conservatives view political correctness. Wish I’d saved it. It stated that we had different ideas of what PC is, and each thought, of their own definition, “How could anyone possibly be for/against that?”
I kind of think conservatives are looking at PC through the actions and words of a very few on the extreme left. It’s possible more of us would be in agreement if we were precise in what the hell it was we were talking about.
Finally, I think the right-wing media pushes this, “All gender identity/PC/SJW, all the time” theme to cloud and obfuscate the many things on which we might agree on. Amplify and exaggerate these things to draw attention away from talk of infrastructure bills, health care reform, etc.
If they do regain power (dubious), Dems might spend most of their time putting out the fires left by Trump and friends. Maybe they’ll try to cut SS/medicare again, gotta get that grand bargain to show your responsibility and sober minded pragmatism.
These would require a major shakeup of the party. I doubt single payer will be “irresistible” since whenever it’s brought up most of the power players come out against it or hem and haw and wring their hands. They’re for Romneycare.
That’s no longer accurate. We did go 6 years without a budget. We had one for FY16 though. It took until December, most of the way through the first quarter of the FY, but being on CR till Nov or Dec isn’t particularly extreme even when looked at through the even the lens of less divisive times. The coverage for FY16 tended to focus on the start of the process (Shutdownapalooza over PP funding and Boehner’s resignation) and the public missed Congress getting a deal done a little before the holidays.
We even have one for FY17 now. Some delay under CR in Presidential election years isn’t a new thing. This one took a long time before Congress basically ignored the Administration to get a deal done.
We’re not following the regular budgeting process, let alone the norm which didn’t either but was less irregular. We’ve managed to get a bipartisan deal done for two fiscal years though. Baby steps.
Actually, one thing I’ve pondered: We talk a lot about “limited political capital”, and “no time to address all the issues”, and so on, but is it really true? Spend the two years until midterms, and the two years after that until the Presidential election, writing up bills on all of these subjects. Get discussions going with both the current Democratic legislators (and any Republicans willing to participate, too, if we can find any), and with the up-and-coming new politicians who are likely to become legislators, about what they’d like to see, and what they’d need before they’d vote for any given bill. Run as the party that multitasks and addresses all of the issues, and then as soon as you have power, put all of those pre-written and pre-negotiated bills up for a vote. Focus on infrastructure upgrades, AND on other jobs, AND on healthcare, AND on education, AND on climate change, AND on the water crisis, AND on civil rights, AND on whatever else I’m leaving off.
For either party, playing strategic political games of any kind with legislation, has proven to be a mistake, especially in the long run.
Neither party has shown in the last thirty years or more, that they are at all in touch with what true average Americans have to deal with. Hence the flailing at peripheral issues.
As well, I keep seeing politicians catch on to correctly pointing out PROBLEMS, but then falling down horribly when it comes to HOW they go about addressing those problems. A decade back, the Democrats had a major opportunity, based around the near universal concern about health care costs. The Republicans had declared that they wanted to do exactly nothing at all about it, and allow it to “solve itself.”
But the Democrats blew it, because they did two things: first, Obama in particular, and the entire Democratic leadership as well, focused on trying to “play nice” with a Republican Party which openly and repeatedly declared that it was dedicated to saying no, and to blocking and even sabotaging anything the Dems tried to do. That contributed to the ACA being crafted as it was, with all sorts of limits and handicaps that the Republicans wanted put in, especially to please the Insurance companies, so that they could undermine it. The second big thing they did wrong, is a common Democrat error: because everyone in the leadership is wealthy, like the Republicans, their solution was designed around telling everyone to spend MORE MONEY, rather than less.
It’s like when they decided that the way to fix air pollution was to tell everyone to buy new fuel efficient cars. Yeah, it’s probably true that if everyone got a Prius, all manner of modern problems in the US would go away. Trouble is, only fairly rich people can afford to do that, so it’s not a real solution.
If the Democrats want to return to power, they have to do a series of things:
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they have to refocus on local elections, the way the GOP did, and win back control of State Houses, so that they can undo all the Republican gerrymandering in 2020. If they fail on this step, any victories they have will be narrow and temporary.
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they have to come up with ways to REDUCE how much Americans have to spend to get what they need, rather than either reshuffling current spending, or adding more tax penalty based notions (the ACA).
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they have to find a different way to deal with concerns about minority rights, that doesn’t appear to involve oppression of, or insulting of majorities.
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more than anything else, they need to establish a skilled, rapid action task force, with the sole job of firmly and competently refuting Republican Lie campaigns. What they’ve done for the last three decades, has been to let the GOP run with huge lies for weeks and months, before making a single rather esoteric high-brow refutation. The Obama suggestion of “when they go low, you go high” thing sounds cool, but it only works if you “go high” in a forceful and skillful way. And it also only works if they refute the lies in a functional way, instead of simply calling for proof.
The GOP gained their compete control of the government by AVOIDING saying what it was that they wanted to do once they had the power. They built everything on revving up angry and worried people to vote while thinking that the GOP simply hates the same people that the voters hate. All the Democrats did in response, was to say “tsk tsk, that’s not nice, we’re not like that!” all without addressing why all those people WERE so angry and frightened. Because the Dems offered no alternate solution to what people were upset about, they voted in the people who said “oh yeah, we hate those guys too!”
Why would they abolish gerrymandering? If they win in 2020 they’ll gerrymander themselves. Not only that, but the Democrats kept the House for 40 years in large part through gerrymandering.
BTW, are we also getting rid of racial gerrymandering and thus making the House 99% white?
As for making voting as easy as possible, oh, we will eat your lunch on that one. Voting is already very easy and it’s even easier to paint your efforts as a plot to make it easier for illegals to vote.