Not only does Ossoff do a good Obama here, but he has a very strong anti-corruption take that's going to be popular after watching the Trump family cash in for these last four years.
And really, haven't we seen how destructive this sorting everyone by race/gender/oppression is, at least to our electoral prospects? Or do we need a President Vance to finally drill the message in?
Unfortunately, Obama also did a good Obama, and he proceeded to be Obama, which got us Trump. Similarly, Biden was also trying to be the heir of Obama, and this got us Trump. The Obama of hope, change, and colorblindness did not materialize, so I'm not sure the Democrats can get credibility on the idea of not being loony vengeful progressives by aping Obama.
I don't think that Obama got us Trump. It really didn't help that the ACA took so long to get going, but I think by 2016 its popularity was starting to turn around. My memory may be bad here, but I think there was a reason Trump couldn't kill it in 2017.
My guess is that it was the liberals' focus on demographics during HRC's campaign that did us in. Hillary really pushed the historic nature of her candidacy, and my recollection was that the adjectives "white" and "male" were rarely used as positive adjectives even by moderate liberals during that time.
Combine that with the fact that the ratio of median salary or wage income to per capital GDP dropped from 54% to 27% in the last 30 years, so that you're calling white men privileged as they're looking back at three decades of dropping wages (compared to GDP) and you're looking at a recipe for some electoral losses.
TBH, I don't see enough of a movement towards remedying the situation either in economics or race/gender stuff to make me feel confident in our electoral prospects this year. But the Trump administration's complete and total incompetence in *every* dimension, from destroying farmers international markets to oil prices to destroying medical research to scaring international students away to spending like a drunken sailor to forcing women suffering miscarriages to bleed out in hospital parking lots, *may* make this an election that even Democrats can't lose. At least this year.
Unfortunately it seems the answer may well be yes. Silver lining: if that happens, Bluesky really will be out of excuses, and I'd expect the Democratic Party to clean house. You can only lose to freakazoids so many times.
The next time they lose a presidential election. I know it feels interminable, but social justice is a very strong memeplex. Nothing, however, can survive blowing it three times.
I'm down for the rhetoric--my question is whether, if Ossoff should take office, he'll actually govern this way and tell the radicals "I need the normie centrists more than I need you" when they start making demands, something Biden did not do and Trump has not done.
Yes, I'm interested to see what policy position Ossoff takes. As the primary develops, each candidate will pick a lane, and I'll warm to some of them and cool on others. I wonder if Ossoff, Shapiro, and Buttigeig will end up in a cage match for the "torch bearer of Obamaism" lane but I guess we'll see.
Tom: He needs to start by not hiring any Ivy League SJW to work for him. The first question in the interview should be "have you ever written or said a land acknowledgement out loud?" If the response is yes, then a trap door opens up under them and they disappear.....
You mean it's hypocritical and ludicrous to make your entire existence about Israelis being "colonizers" while you yourself live on "stolen land" which you have no intent of ever giving up or leaving? No way!
I think he'll be fine, mostly because to understand why Biden kowtowed so much to the left, you have to consider how remarkably weak Biden was as a party leader coming out of the 2020 primary. Sure, he took the moderate lane, but he got there by being everyone's "We've got to block Bernie" candidate. He wasn't beloved among his base. Then because he was the Bernie blocker, the leftists hated him. To unite the party, he kowtowed to the left.
Meanwhile, Ossoff is pretty popular with most Democrats, both the lefties and the moderates. If he wins the 2028 primary, he'll likely do it similarly to Obama, which is by being cooler than everyone else and being right on certain key issues that Democrats broadly agree with. A president everyone likes just has a lot of power to shut down the more troublesome parts of his coalition and tell them "right now we're focusing on x, you'll have to wait for later for your pet issue."
Biden came into office with the left flank of the party hostile to him, and so he worked overtime to accommodate them. Which, I know we like the narrative "everything Biden did was wrong," but his outreach to Sanders et al. was actually very important to managing the coalition to secure the very significant and positive legislation that was passed during his term. It's not easy to get Sanders and Manchin on the same page on how to spend trillions of dollars.
One "Biden kowtowed to the left" thing you see that I think is off base: the immigration surge wasn't about wokeness or accommodating the left, but I don't blame anybody for thinking that, because for whatever reason, nobody in the administration ever wanted to explain why they DID do it. It was to eliminate labor shortages and tamp down inflation aggressively, and inflation would have 100% without question been way higher without increased immigration. Maybe they thought it would sound too mercenary.
Trump has had one qualification for hiring which is "complete and total fealty to Donald Trump." It just happens that people with extremist politics also happen to be more likely to be craven sociopaths, so it's extremists who are willing to commit themselves fully to MAGA, and Trump ends up with an administration full of extremists. (And he doesn't care enough in any way about ideology or policy for it to even be a consideration, relative to loyalty.)
But anyway - if Ossoff came in it's likely we have a very united party, like when Obama came to office. And Obama was pretty good at saying "no" to the left, which made them really mad a lot. But his brand was capable of taking those hits. A President Ossoff would likely be in a similar position - he'd have a lot of flexibility to start his term. Everyone in the coalition would just be SO RELIEVED to have a President who is both competent and capable of explaining how he is competent.
Except that the Democrats managing the leftward wing of the coalition and giving them something is tied to why people trust Democrats less than Republicans on the most important issues, because they always try to throw the left crazies a bone in their bills. Republicans are willing to ignore their crazies (when their crazies are not running things like they are now at least), and this ties in to the Democrats having a branding issue where every left wing nutcase makes the Democrats look bad when they go viral but the same is not true of the right wing nutcases for the Republicans, because Republicans in congress (when the crazies are not in charge) don’t actually pass things that pander to the crazies, but the Democrats do as a part of coalition management. At some point, not passing dumb shit needs to take priority over keeping the fringe of then party in the coalition and the Democratic keep failing this.
We agree on a lot. I was just looking retroactively. I worry that because Biden’s party lost, nobody will ever want to do anything like him again, even though his administration performed incredibly strongly in a ton of ways. So I just really worry about an overcorrection. People just seem to not care that the reason the country is holding together right now economically is because it was so well-managed for four years.
So, this is just kind of a hobbyhorse. I will fully accept the label of “apologist,” which is an ironic word in this case, because it’s all the other Dems apologizing for Biden, I thought he was great. 😜
But I would like to think that sensible people in the party now recognize that coalition management has gone as far as it can, and we actually have to start persuading people.
So, I think we agree that rhetorically, Dems should start calling stuff that is unpopular stupid, rather than embracing it for a fraction of their coalition - even if it alienates some of those people.
And oh, my sweet heaven from God above, any time somebody left of center starts to say something openly antagonist towards men or white peoples as a class I want the ghost of FDR to come up behind them and drag them into an alternate dimension.
I mean, what “crazy things” did Democrats actually DO in Biden’s term? There is very little in his signature legislation that isn’t popular. The “craziness” is palpable but doesn’t touch actual governance very often. “Transgender illegal inmate sex changes” was what became the goddam Daisy ad of the 21st century, and it was simply because of Harris’s inability to answer to the question “do you think that [seemingly cartoonishly exaggerated question about your views?]” with anything besides “sure do! Here is the best Republican talking point ever!”
So I agree with you 100% (at least!) that it’s a huge problem for Democrats that they are associated with the loons. I just disagree pretty strongly that there was anything about Biden’s governance that caused problems for us when the problem was post-pandemic hangover inflation and propaganda. The first problem isn’t coming back but the second isn’t going away.
At a macro level “bad Democratic brand” is almost entirely because half of the media is anti-Democrat propaganda, and it’s exhausting that people search for other explanations while doing nothing to address that one, accepting it as an apparent force of nature. But Dems need to acknowledge that the right wing media will convincingly associate Democrats with the fringe to their audience. That means Dems need to start Sista Soulja-ing our ass off.
I don’t know why our strategists don’t listen to what voters who don’t like Trump and won’t vote for us actually SAY. All we have to do is NOT BE SCARY to people. But nobody in the party seems to understand what is scary about us to people. They interpret all the fear as hatred.
"I mean, what “crazy things” did Democrats actually DO in Biden’s term?"
The "whole of government DEI order" and similar things pushing money out the door quickly; defying SCOTUS on student loan debt and just doing it anyway; handing over CDC COVID reopening guidelines to the teacher's unions; the continuation of "sue-and-settle" consent decrees and unaccountable slush-funds for progressive NGOs and causes (the same thing Trump tried with the 'weaponization fund', just when he did it it was gold-plated and incompetent, instead of sneaky, boring, and competently-done under Biden), yadda yadda yadda...
"I mean, what “crazy things” did Democrats actually DO in Biden’s term?"
Immigration. The increase in the labor supply may have decreased inflation overall (a somewhat dubious proposition), but at bare minimum, politically, "we let in millions of people because they 'claimed asylum'" is a really tough sell.
I think you are underselling the counter-inflationary effects. Don’t forget that in 2021 you could t walk ten feet without somebody complaining that “nobody wants to work” (while unemployment was low and the labor force participation rate was normal.)
But yes, it’s a tough sell.
And let’s be real, anti-immigration sentiment was overwhelmingly driven by what people saw on TV, not what they saw in their lives.
The only reason people think immigration is “crazy” at all is because they are 100% convinced the country is now overrun with dangerous criminals, and not drive thru cashiers who sleep six to a room and keep their Big Mac prices single digits.
I am very confident that without immigration that was high enough for the right wing to exploit it, the economy would have been much worse, and we would have lost anyway. I know that’s not a common view, but I also think not many people have even thought about it that much. They say, “you shouldn’t have done that unpopular thing [and I have no questions whatsoever about the actual effect of that unpopular thing was and if it was good.]”
And I think you're underselling the inflationary ones. Sure, immigration increased the labor supply and drove down wages, while increasing the demand for housing, food, and the other basics of life, thereby increasing the prices of all those things. It is not a coincidence that Trump won in 2024 via gains among the working class (who were harmed) while Biden maintained among the college educated (who gained).
The democrats did nothing about immigration, including enforcing limits, their policy until 2024 was basically “nothing to see here” which extended to telling the border enforcement there was nothing to oversee, and look elsewhere. That is the left crazy position about open boarders, the mainstream Dems didn’t throw the crazies under the bus and actually put a border policy that includes recognizing the border exists and will be enforced.
Then look at the bills that were actually passed, and the everything bagel part of the bills to pander to every part of the coalition including the left crazies instead of making a functional bill (because bills are for managing inter-factional politics for the Democrats and not actually solving issues, at least that seems to be what their position is consistently over the past 10 years). At some point, maybe they should try something revolutionary like try to do something the public benefits from or likes instead of making sire the fringe of the coalition stays on board.
Seems to me Biden redefining what a woman is and changing Title IX from sex based to gender identity based via executive order on day one of his moderate presidency falls into the "crazy things" category.
I'm not playing that game. The better question would be why liberal men think they have the right to demand women explain themselves to them on a purely woman's issue.
"Biden came into office with the left flank of the party hostile to him, and so he worked overtime to accommodate them."
To what degree was this intentional, vs. left flank adherents just naturally filling up the ranks of jr. staffers, low-level PR and comms staff, agency interns, etc.? Because if the latter, it's a much bigger problem.
I'm certainly happy to see some Obama energy from a prominent Democrat. Bonus points for being from a swing state.
But I gotta ask, why do Democratic Presidential candidates always seem to come from the Senate these days? Obama, (Hillary) Clinton, Biden, Harris... they all came out of the Senate aiming for the White House. It's true that Biden and Harris served as vice president in between the Senate and running for the big job; but the last known estimate of the vice presidency's value is several liters of water mixed with urea at human body temperature, and its one actual function is breaking ties in, you guessed it, the Senate.
Used to be we elected governors to the Presidency. Call me crazy, but maybe the job of running the world's most powerful executive branch should go to somebody who's run a goddamn executive branch. Just, you know, once in a while.
(And no, Republicans, running a family business that's three-fourths of the way to being a Family "business" does not count.)
Governors simply have a hard time building a national profile in the 21st-century media landscape. Look at Scott Walker and Jeb Bush. George W. Bush in 2000 and Romney in 2012 were the only former governors to get a major party's nomination since 2000. Romney spent much of the 2012 primary running away from his record as a governor even though his constituents seemed to like him fine as a governor. Trump winning the GOP nomination just underscores how much media attention matters.
In the 21st century to date, the Republican nominees have been Bush, McCain, Romney, and Trump. That's two governors, one senator, and one deranged billionaire. Governors are regular contenders in their primaries.
Democrats in that time have nominated Gore, Kerry, Obama, Clinton, Biden, and (sort of) Harris. That's three sitting senators and three veeps-who-were-previously-senators. The last time a Dem governor got more than 0.1% of the primary vote was Howard Dean in 2004.
They're one in four, we're six for six. Even our bomb-throwing populist insurgent was a senator. Whatever is going on, it's specific to Dems.
You're overindexed on the Senator part and under-indexed on the national media profile part. Senators simply have more of a national media profile than governors. If anything, a celebrity winning the GOP primary shows what is happening is even more saturated in the GOP base than it is for the Democrats. Meanwhile, even among the GOP governors who have won their primary, Bush was the son of a former president and was able to have more of a national profile because of that, while Texas is also a state where the lieutenant governor does a lot of the work the governor does in every other state. Romney didn't even run for re-election as governor of Massachusetts and was mostly using his governorship as a springboard to run for president since he was unable to beat Ted Kennedy for a Senate seat in the 1990s.
Kasich put up a respectable third to Trump in 2016 (behind Ted Cruz). In 2024, Nikki Haley placed second and Ron DeSantis third. Governors are alive and well in the Republican pipeline. The last public executive to place in a Democratic primary was a small-city mayor. And he came in fifth.
If it's about national profile, why is it that Democrats can only seem to build a national profile as senators?
You're really overstating how well Kasich, Haley, and deSantis did to make your case. Their runs were largely jokes. If anything, Buttigieg as a former mayor did more to raise his profile in 2020 than Haley did in 2024, with the latter also already being a former cabinet member.
1) too few Dem governors from purple-ish states to have a deep bench of candidates that can win nationwide.
2) The Dems have become the institutionalist party, and especially institutions at the federal level. The Senate is theoretically the most serious and esteemed part of the federal government. At least, it’s supposed to be.
Possibly because when the moderates decide they need to fend off Bernie, the senators tend to band together and pick one of their own because they spend more time together, and they also have a strong sense of it being a certain person's "turn" so they pick the person who's "turn" it is. The governors are just not networked together this way, nor are they heavily networked into the senate's seniority system.
I'd like to move to ranked choice specifically to get rid of this problem. It would also be nice for the Democrats to adopt a candidate age limit.
"Used to be we elected governors to the Presidency. Call me crazy, but maybe the job of running the world's most powerful executive branch should go to somebody who's run a goddamn executive branch."
Because populous blue state governors haven't been doing a fantastic job recently. The last one to leave office with any real popularity iirc was Jerry Brown in CA, and he was halfway a fossil when he left office. Not Presidential material.
Sure, but that still leaves Democratic governors in purple and red states. They mostly have a solid track record, because they'd have been kicked out of office if they didn't. There's a similar dynamic with Republican governors; the good ones mostly show up in purple or blue states.
That's the nice thing about governors. You don't have to wonder how well they'll handle being chief executive, dealing with a legislature, etc. You can look at the record.
I disagree; I think the most successful recent GOP governors have been of states that either started solidly red, or which went hard red during and after their governorates; Mitch Daniels of Indiana, Mike DeWine of Ohio, Bill Lee of Tennessee, and Ron DeSantis of Florida.
I used to have a "Rat Patrol" lunch box in elementary school in the late 1960's. "Rat Patrol" was a TV show about G.I.'s in World War 2 running around the Sahara desert in jeeps killing bad guys. Those jeeps had a .50 caliber machine gun mounted in the back. Such a cool manly show!
When you say Make America Great Again, you are faced with a few responses, such as "Do you think it's not great now?" or "It was never great."
If I was to run for office, my slogan would be Make The Good Parts Of America Great And Make The Bad Parts Of America Not As Bad, because I want to send an optimistic but realistic message, but how the hell would you pronounce MTGPOAGAMTBPOANAB?
It's a strange feeling when expressing a once bog-standard, non-controversial political platitude seems edgy again. I get a similar feeling around some of my more lefty friends when I suggest that the nation of Israel has as much right to continue existing as any other nation.
Not verbatim, but I remember Mark Liebovich recounted being invited over to the Obama WH during the 1st term and finding the president and an aide “kicked back”, drinking beer and “watching the game”. After Liebovich politely calls bullshit on this phony baloney tableau, Obama sheepishly replies “trying a little hard are we?” Similarly, Ossof’s bit makes my eyes glaze over like I just ate an entire bag of potato chips. Trump’s relentless meta-trolling and our ceaseless saturation in social media have, for better or worse put paid to this sort of soaring, inspirational horse dooky
Glenn: Mark Leibovich (last name spelled correctly here) has written three excellent books but gosh darnitche (what did spell check just do? Darnitche?) has used Joe Barrett as the narrator on all three and the man sounds like he is nervously recording the text from a sound booth with defective egg shell style soundproofing. Arrgh!
Nothing ruins good writing quite like bad sound. Like the New York Times new audio computer voice.
Aargh! She sounds constantly out of breath and scarily depressed. The perfect voice to not make NY Times staff feel "unsafe." Unlike Jeffs' Substack audio computer voice, who sounds like an Asian woman who has ingested a few black Molly's.
In someways it's better than Obama- Obama dismissed the idea of American Exceptionalism as just another term for patriotism. Ossoff uses it as something more than that.
It is interesting to listen to the crowd's reaction as he begins that part of his speech. The clapping is very hesitant at first when he says our greatness is not from our blood or genes. They seemed a little nervous that he was going to talk about a colorblind society. But once it became clear he was going to do a full broadside at Trump's anti-immigrant policies, they were onboard.
Ossoff's a good politician and the fact that he's a US Senator is a reminder how stupid it was the GOP to rally around Trump's stolen election rhetoric in 2020/2021 which had the effect of depressing voter turnout in the reddest parts of Georgia for runoff election.
Do we hear the nuclear hellscape vision of America from the majority of Dem candidates? I know we hear it from their fans, and it's the token of Trump's realm, but "America sucks" seems like much more of an "activist you hear about from other people and have never actually seen in person" talking point than a campaign message.
The other Dem candidates usually give you some upbeat, Ossoff-like rhetoric-- but it generally turns out that the America that's great is only the idealized version which exists in their own heads. Getting them to say anything good about the actually existing country is like pulling teeth. Whether and how much Ossoff fits this mold is impossible to tell without hearing the rest of the speech.
Well, I personally used to respect "the electoral process" . . . until early voting, mail in voting, no ID voting, no signature-matching voting, mysteriously programmed voting machines, and the alchemy of weeks-long out-of-sight vote counting: "Respecting the electoral process is not Trump’s bag, baby." I will have my respect for the electoral process restored with one-day voting, paper ballots, and voter ID.
Going to the polls to vote is insanely unnecessary, full stop. Couldn't disagree more with your comment. WA state mail in voting works well, is convenient, respectful of the voters' time, and I'm unaware of any significant fraud concerns. Most eligible voters don't vote, but some folks have created a narrative in their own mind that millions of non-voters somehow do, creating a ballot on adobe I guess and operating with a motivating driven 65% of regular voters can't even imagine. Be well -
It is very difficult to verify the identity of a mail-in voter, and outright impossible to verify that they aren't being coerced in how to vote by someone standing over their shoulder. In-person is the only way; anything else is lethally unserious.
I just want to emphasize what you wrote, and then followed up with "lethally unserious". You're concerned that people in sufficient numbers to move an election are being coerced by someone physically standing over their shoulder while filling in their ballot if they can do so from their home. That is an amazing worry. Be well -
Not at all - I've seen it happen. In non-fraudulent areas, voters cast their votes in actual privacy. They are not allowed to photograph their ballots and the circumstances in which someone can accompany them are very limited, mostly cases of severe disability.
As for being enough to move an election - it is not uncommon for a local election to hinge on a small number of votes. Moreover, the right to vote is an individual right, which does not inhere in some nebulous aggregate but in each specific voter. The correct amount of voter fraud is zero. And if you disagree, surely you would voluntarily give up your vote? After all, your vote is unlikely to move an election on its own.
There is also the practice of seeing who doesn't vote often, stealing their ballots, and using them as you please.
> this country’s founding documents are explicitly universalist
Are they? The Constitution's Preamble says a bunch of stuff about being for the benefit of "Ourselves and our Posterity", which is pretty explicitly not universal.
The "Jimmy Neutron" theme song is some pretty legit indie rock-style commercial music. Way better than any Free Credit Report stuff, and probably even Five Dollar Footlongs.
I think Ossoff is the perfect candidate because he seems moderate to moderate and progressive to progressives (which is the opposite of what Harris was: too progressive to moderates and too moderate for progressives). He’s also young which is what every voter wants right now.
Yes, aboriginal inhabitants of north, central, and south america were specially created here? Or did they colonize too? And whoever was in a given area in 1500, did they colonize, enslave, conquer, or otherwise displace those that were here before them? One moment in time is not specially privileged over prior moments, no one is native to any land here (or all of us born on it are native to it, you pick). Be well -
Hey, I don't make the rules, I've just witnessed them be applied. If this message gets acceptance among Democrats, let's not pretend it's not a massive deviation from the last few years.
Not only does Ossoff do a good Obama here, but he has a very strong anti-corruption take that's going to be popular after watching the Trump family cash in for these last four years.
And really, haven't we seen how destructive this sorting everyone by race/gender/oppression is, at least to our electoral prospects? Or do we need a President Vance to finally drill the message in?
Unfortunately, Obama also did a good Obama, and he proceeded to be Obama, which got us Trump. Similarly, Biden was also trying to be the heir of Obama, and this got us Trump. The Obama of hope, change, and colorblindness did not materialize, so I'm not sure the Democrats can get credibility on the idea of not being loony vengeful progressives by aping Obama.
I don't think that Obama got us Trump. It really didn't help that the ACA took so long to get going, but I think by 2016 its popularity was starting to turn around. My memory may be bad here, but I think there was a reason Trump couldn't kill it in 2017.
My guess is that it was the liberals' focus on demographics during HRC's campaign that did us in. Hillary really pushed the historic nature of her candidacy, and my recollection was that the adjectives "white" and "male" were rarely used as positive adjectives even by moderate liberals during that time.
Combine that with the fact that the ratio of median salary or wage income to per capital GDP dropped from 54% to 27% in the last 30 years, so that you're calling white men privileged as they're looking back at three decades of dropping wages (compared to GDP) and you're looking at a recipe for some electoral losses.
TBH, I don't see enough of a movement towards remedying the situation either in economics or race/gender stuff to make me feel confident in our electoral prospects this year. But the Trump administration's complete and total incompetence in *every* dimension, from destroying farmers international markets to oil prices to destroying medical research to scaring international students away to spending like a drunken sailor to forcing women suffering miscarriages to bleed out in hospital parking lots, *may* make this an election that even Democrats can't lose. At least this year.
Are you sure it wasn't Hillary who got us Trump?
Unfortunately it seems the answer may well be yes. Silver lining: if that happens, Bluesky really will be out of excuses, and I'd expect the Democratic Party to clean house. You can only lose to freakazoids so many times.
When does that actually happen, though? I'm starting to think excuses are the true infinitely-renewable resource.
The next time they lose a presidential election. I know it feels interminable, but social justice is a very strong memeplex. Nothing, however, can survive blowing it three times.
Lots of things survive blowing it three times. All you gotta say is "We just didn't do it right". See also "real communism".
Something something something boner joke.
I'm down for the rhetoric--my question is whether, if Ossoff should take office, he'll actually govern this way and tell the radicals "I need the normie centrists more than I need you" when they start making demands, something Biden did not do and Trump has not done.
Yes, I'm interested to see what policy position Ossoff takes. As the primary develops, each candidate will pick a lane, and I'll warm to some of them and cool on others. I wonder if Ossoff, Shapiro, and Buttigeig will end up in a cage match for the "torch bearer of Obamaism" lane but I guess we'll see.
Tom: He needs to start by not hiring any Ivy League SJW to work for him. The first question in the interview should be "have you ever written or said a land acknowledgement out loud?" If the response is yes, then a trap door opens up under them and they disappear.....
That would be a great start. "Are you active on BlueSky?" would be another good interview question.
You know, a trapdoor after land acknowledgments is quite poetic. Practice what you preach and get off the land, right?
You mean it's hypocritical and ludicrous to make your entire existence about Israelis being "colonizers" while you yourself live on "stolen land" which you have no intent of ever giving up or leaving? No way!
I think he'll be fine, mostly because to understand why Biden kowtowed so much to the left, you have to consider how remarkably weak Biden was as a party leader coming out of the 2020 primary. Sure, he took the moderate lane, but he got there by being everyone's "We've got to block Bernie" candidate. He wasn't beloved among his base. Then because he was the Bernie blocker, the leftists hated him. To unite the party, he kowtowed to the left.
Meanwhile, Ossoff is pretty popular with most Democrats, both the lefties and the moderates. If he wins the 2028 primary, he'll likely do it similarly to Obama, which is by being cooler than everyone else and being right on certain key issues that Democrats broadly agree with. A president everyone likes just has a lot of power to shut down the more troublesome parts of his coalition and tell them "right now we're focusing on x, you'll have to wait for later for your pet issue."
Biden came into office with the left flank of the party hostile to him, and so he worked overtime to accommodate them. Which, I know we like the narrative "everything Biden did was wrong," but his outreach to Sanders et al. was actually very important to managing the coalition to secure the very significant and positive legislation that was passed during his term. It's not easy to get Sanders and Manchin on the same page on how to spend trillions of dollars.
One "Biden kowtowed to the left" thing you see that I think is off base: the immigration surge wasn't about wokeness or accommodating the left, but I don't blame anybody for thinking that, because for whatever reason, nobody in the administration ever wanted to explain why they DID do it. It was to eliminate labor shortages and tamp down inflation aggressively, and inflation would have 100% without question been way higher without increased immigration. Maybe they thought it would sound too mercenary.
Trump has had one qualification for hiring which is "complete and total fealty to Donald Trump." It just happens that people with extremist politics also happen to be more likely to be craven sociopaths, so it's extremists who are willing to commit themselves fully to MAGA, and Trump ends up with an administration full of extremists. (And he doesn't care enough in any way about ideology or policy for it to even be a consideration, relative to loyalty.)
But anyway - if Ossoff came in it's likely we have a very united party, like when Obama came to office. And Obama was pretty good at saying "no" to the left, which made them really mad a lot. But his brand was capable of taking those hits. A President Ossoff would likely be in a similar position - he'd have a lot of flexibility to start his term. Everyone in the coalition would just be SO RELIEVED to have a President who is both competent and capable of explaining how he is competent.
Except that the Democrats managing the leftward wing of the coalition and giving them something is tied to why people trust Democrats less than Republicans on the most important issues, because they always try to throw the left crazies a bone in their bills. Republicans are willing to ignore their crazies (when their crazies are not running things like they are now at least), and this ties in to the Democrats having a branding issue where every left wing nutcase makes the Democrats look bad when they go viral but the same is not true of the right wing nutcases for the Republicans, because Republicans in congress (when the crazies are not in charge) don’t actually pass things that pander to the crazies, but the Democrats do as a part of coalition management. At some point, not passing dumb shit needs to take priority over keeping the fringe of then party in the coalition and the Democratic keep failing this.
We agree on a lot. I was just looking retroactively. I worry that because Biden’s party lost, nobody will ever want to do anything like him again, even though his administration performed incredibly strongly in a ton of ways. So I just really worry about an overcorrection. People just seem to not care that the reason the country is holding together right now economically is because it was so well-managed for four years.
So, this is just kind of a hobbyhorse. I will fully accept the label of “apologist,” which is an ironic word in this case, because it’s all the other Dems apologizing for Biden, I thought he was great. 😜
But I would like to think that sensible people in the party now recognize that coalition management has gone as far as it can, and we actually have to start persuading people.
So, I think we agree that rhetorically, Dems should start calling stuff that is unpopular stupid, rather than embracing it for a fraction of their coalition - even if it alienates some of those people.
And oh, my sweet heaven from God above, any time somebody left of center starts to say something openly antagonist towards men or white peoples as a class I want the ghost of FDR to come up behind them and drag them into an alternate dimension.
I mean, what “crazy things” did Democrats actually DO in Biden’s term? There is very little in his signature legislation that isn’t popular. The “craziness” is palpable but doesn’t touch actual governance very often. “Transgender illegal inmate sex changes” was what became the goddam Daisy ad of the 21st century, and it was simply because of Harris’s inability to answer to the question “do you think that [seemingly cartoonishly exaggerated question about your views?]” with anything besides “sure do! Here is the best Republican talking point ever!”
So I agree with you 100% (at least!) that it’s a huge problem for Democrats that they are associated with the loons. I just disagree pretty strongly that there was anything about Biden’s governance that caused problems for us when the problem was post-pandemic hangover inflation and propaganda. The first problem isn’t coming back but the second isn’t going away.
At a macro level “bad Democratic brand” is almost entirely because half of the media is anti-Democrat propaganda, and it’s exhausting that people search for other explanations while doing nothing to address that one, accepting it as an apparent force of nature. But Dems need to acknowledge that the right wing media will convincingly associate Democrats with the fringe to their audience. That means Dems need to start Sista Soulja-ing our ass off.
I don’t know why our strategists don’t listen to what voters who don’t like Trump and won’t vote for us actually SAY. All we have to do is NOT BE SCARY to people. But nobody in the party seems to understand what is scary about us to people. They interpret all the fear as hatred.
"I mean, what “crazy things” did Democrats actually DO in Biden’s term?"
The "whole of government DEI order" and similar things pushing money out the door quickly; defying SCOTUS on student loan debt and just doing it anyway; handing over CDC COVID reopening guidelines to the teacher's unions; the continuation of "sue-and-settle" consent decrees and unaccountable slush-funds for progressive NGOs and causes (the same thing Trump tried with the 'weaponization fund', just when he did it it was gold-plated and incompetent, instead of sneaky, boring, and competently-done under Biden), yadda yadda yadda...
"I mean, what “crazy things” did Democrats actually DO in Biden’s term?"
Immigration. The increase in the labor supply may have decreased inflation overall (a somewhat dubious proposition), but at bare minimum, politically, "we let in millions of people because they 'claimed asylum'" is a really tough sell.
I think you are underselling the counter-inflationary effects. Don’t forget that in 2021 you could t walk ten feet without somebody complaining that “nobody wants to work” (while unemployment was low and the labor force participation rate was normal.)
But yes, it’s a tough sell.
And let’s be real, anti-immigration sentiment was overwhelmingly driven by what people saw on TV, not what they saw in their lives.
The only reason people think immigration is “crazy” at all is because they are 100% convinced the country is now overrun with dangerous criminals, and not drive thru cashiers who sleep six to a room and keep their Big Mac prices single digits.
I am very confident that without immigration that was high enough for the right wing to exploit it, the economy would have been much worse, and we would have lost anyway. I know that’s not a common view, but I also think not many people have even thought about it that much. They say, “you shouldn’t have done that unpopular thing [and I have no questions whatsoever about the actual effect of that unpopular thing was and if it was good.]”
And I think you're underselling the inflationary ones. Sure, immigration increased the labor supply and drove down wages, while increasing the demand for housing, food, and the other basics of life, thereby increasing the prices of all those things. It is not a coincidence that Trump won in 2024 via gains among the working class (who were harmed) while Biden maintained among the college educated (who gained).
The democrats did nothing about immigration, including enforcing limits, their policy until 2024 was basically “nothing to see here” which extended to telling the border enforcement there was nothing to oversee, and look elsewhere. That is the left crazy position about open boarders, the mainstream Dems didn’t throw the crazies under the bus and actually put a border policy that includes recognizing the border exists and will be enforced.
Then look at the bills that were actually passed, and the everything bagel part of the bills to pander to every part of the coalition including the left crazies instead of making a functional bill (because bills are for managing inter-factional politics for the Democrats and not actually solving issues, at least that seems to be what their position is consistently over the past 10 years). At some point, maybe they should try something revolutionary like try to do something the public benefits from or likes instead of making sire the fringe of the coalition stays on board.
Seems to me Biden redefining what a woman is and changing Title IX from sex based to gender identity based via executive order on day one of his moderate presidency falls into the "crazy things" category.
How much did that affect your life?
I'm not playing that game. The better question would be why liberal men think they have the right to demand women explain themselves to them on a purely woman's issue.
Lenin had a couple of words for leftists who tried to co-op the left-mainstream-“Useful idiots”.
"Biden came into office with the left flank of the party hostile to him, and so he worked overtime to accommodate them."
To what degree was this intentional, vs. left flank adherents just naturally filling up the ranks of jr. staffers, low-level PR and comms staff, agency interns, etc.? Because if the latter, it's a much bigger problem.
He wins state-wide elections in Georgia. I'm pretty sure he gets this.
I'm certainly happy to see some Obama energy from a prominent Democrat. Bonus points for being from a swing state.
But I gotta ask, why do Democratic Presidential candidates always seem to come from the Senate these days? Obama, (Hillary) Clinton, Biden, Harris... they all came out of the Senate aiming for the White House. It's true that Biden and Harris served as vice president in between the Senate and running for the big job; but the last known estimate of the vice presidency's value is several liters of water mixed with urea at human body temperature, and its one actual function is breaking ties in, you guessed it, the Senate.
Used to be we elected governors to the Presidency. Call me crazy, but maybe the job of running the world's most powerful executive branch should go to somebody who's run a goddamn executive branch. Just, you know, once in a while.
(And no, Republicans, running a family business that's three-fourths of the way to being a Family "business" does not count.)
Governors simply have a hard time building a national profile in the 21st-century media landscape. Look at Scott Walker and Jeb Bush. George W. Bush in 2000 and Romney in 2012 were the only former governors to get a major party's nomination since 2000. Romney spent much of the 2012 primary running away from his record as a governor even though his constituents seemed to like him fine as a governor. Trump winning the GOP nomination just underscores how much media attention matters.
In the 21st century to date, the Republican nominees have been Bush, McCain, Romney, and Trump. That's two governors, one senator, and one deranged billionaire. Governors are regular contenders in their primaries.
Democrats in that time have nominated Gore, Kerry, Obama, Clinton, Biden, and (sort of) Harris. That's three sitting senators and three veeps-who-were-previously-senators. The last time a Dem governor got more than 0.1% of the primary vote was Howard Dean in 2004.
They're one in four, we're six for six. Even our bomb-throwing populist insurgent was a senator. Whatever is going on, it's specific to Dems.
You're overindexed on the Senator part and under-indexed on the national media profile part. Senators simply have more of a national media profile than governors. If anything, a celebrity winning the GOP primary shows what is happening is even more saturated in the GOP base than it is for the Democrats. Meanwhile, even among the GOP governors who have won their primary, Bush was the son of a former president and was able to have more of a national profile because of that, while Texas is also a state where the lieutenant governor does a lot of the work the governor does in every other state. Romney didn't even run for re-election as governor of Massachusetts and was mostly using his governorship as a springboard to run for president since he was unable to beat Ted Kennedy for a Senate seat in the 1990s.
Kasich put up a respectable third to Trump in 2016 (behind Ted Cruz). In 2024, Nikki Haley placed second and Ron DeSantis third. Governors are alive and well in the Republican pipeline. The last public executive to place in a Democratic primary was a small-city mayor. And he came in fifth.
If it's about national profile, why is it that Democrats can only seem to build a national profile as senators?
You're really overstating how well Kasich, Haley, and deSantis did to make your case. Their runs were largely jokes. If anything, Buttigieg as a former mayor did more to raise his profile in 2020 than Haley did in 2024, with the latter also already being a former cabinet member.
Couple guesses:
1) too few Dem governors from purple-ish states to have a deep bench of candidates that can win nationwide.
2) The Dems have become the institutionalist party, and especially institutions at the federal level. The Senate is theoretically the most serious and esteemed part of the federal government. At least, it’s supposed to be.
Possibly because when the moderates decide they need to fend off Bernie, the senators tend to band together and pick one of their own because they spend more time together, and they also have a strong sense of it being a certain person's "turn" so they pick the person who's "turn" it is. The governors are just not networked together this way, nor are they heavily networked into the senate's seniority system.
I'd like to move to ranked choice specifically to get rid of this problem. It would also be nice for the Democrats to adopt a candidate age limit.
"Used to be we elected governors to the Presidency. Call me crazy, but maybe the job of running the world's most powerful executive branch should go to somebody who's run a goddamn executive branch."
Because populous blue state governors haven't been doing a fantastic job recently. The last one to leave office with any real popularity iirc was Jerry Brown in CA, and he was halfway a fossil when he left office. Not Presidential material.
Sure, but that still leaves Democratic governors in purple and red states. They mostly have a solid track record, because they'd have been kicked out of office if they didn't. There's a similar dynamic with Republican governors; the good ones mostly show up in purple or blue states.
That's the nice thing about governors. You don't have to wonder how well they'll handle being chief executive, dealing with a legislature, etc. You can look at the record.
I disagree; I think the most successful recent GOP governors have been of states that either started solidly red, or which went hard red during and after their governorates; Mitch Daniels of Indiana, Mike DeWine of Ohio, Bill Lee of Tennessee, and Ron DeSantis of Florida.
The computer voice attached to your Substack post pronounced
"Amerikkka" in a very hilarious way 🤣.
Your post is short today but it's well done and does a lot with less.
That can be a good thing!
I used to have a "Rat Patrol" lunch box in elementary school in the late 1960's. "Rat Patrol" was a TV show about G.I.'s in World War 2 running around the Sahara desert in jeeps killing bad guys. Those jeeps had a .50 caliber machine gun mounted in the back. Such a cool manly show!
Man, I loved that lunchbox.....
jumping sand dunes and spitting fire with that machine gun and wearing cool hats!!
Rat Patrol was awesome
👍
When you say Make America Great Again, you are faced with a few responses, such as "Do you think it's not great now?" or "It was never great."
If I was to run for office, my slogan would be Make The Good Parts Of America Great And Make The Bad Parts Of America Not As Bad, because I want to send an optimistic but realistic message, but how the hell would you pronounce MTGPOAGAMTBPOANAB?
Maybe "Increase the Greatness of America," with "ITGA" as the initials?
Dillon: Or fit it on the front of a baseball ⚾️ cap.....
It's a strange feeling when expressing a once bog-standard, non-controversial political platitude seems edgy again. I get a similar feeling around some of my more lefty friends when I suggest that the nation of Israel has as much right to continue existing as any other nation.
Not verbatim, but I remember Mark Liebovich recounted being invited over to the Obama WH during the 1st term and finding the president and an aide “kicked back”, drinking beer and “watching the game”. After Liebovich politely calls bullshit on this phony baloney tableau, Obama sheepishly replies “trying a little hard are we?” Similarly, Ossof’s bit makes my eyes glaze over like I just ate an entire bag of potato chips. Trump’s relentless meta-trolling and our ceaseless saturation in social media have, for better or worse put paid to this sort of soaring, inspirational horse dooky
Glenn: Mark Leibovich (last name spelled correctly here) has written three excellent books but gosh darnitche (what did spell check just do? Darnitche?) has used Joe Barrett as the narrator on all three and the man sounds like he is nervously recording the text from a sound booth with defective egg shell style soundproofing. Arrgh!
Nothing ruins good writing quite like bad sound. Like the New York Times new audio computer voice.
Aargh! She sounds constantly out of breath and scarily depressed. The perfect voice to not make NY Times staff feel "unsafe." Unlike Jeffs' Substack audio computer voice, who sounds like an Asian woman who has ingested a few black Molly's.
Ok, rant over. Please tip the wait staff.....
In someways it's better than Obama- Obama dismissed the idea of American Exceptionalism as just another term for patriotism. Ossoff uses it as something more than that.
It is interesting to listen to the crowd's reaction as he begins that part of his speech. The clapping is very hesitant at first when he says our greatness is not from our blood or genes. They seemed a little nervous that he was going to talk about a colorblind society. But once it became clear he was going to do a full broadside at Trump's anti-immigrant policies, they were onboard.
Ossoff's a good politician and the fact that he's a US Senator is a reminder how stupid it was the GOP to rally around Trump's stolen election rhetoric in 2020/2021 which had the effect of depressing voter turnout in the reddest parts of Georgia for runoff election.
WJ Hayes: Hey whatever works!
Do we hear the nuclear hellscape vision of America from the majority of Dem candidates? I know we hear it from their fans, and it's the token of Trump's realm, but "America sucks" seems like much more of an "activist you hear about from other people and have never actually seen in person" talking point than a campaign message.
We hear it from the DSA wing. Which -- and I think this is your point -- gets attention far out of proportion to their actual influence.
Jeff: Yes, many such cases!
The other Dem candidates usually give you some upbeat, Ossoff-like rhetoric-- but it generally turns out that the America that's great is only the idealized version which exists in their own heads. Getting them to say anything good about the actually existing country is like pulling teeth. Whether and how much Ossoff fits this mold is impossible to tell without hearing the rest of the speech.
Well, I personally used to respect "the electoral process" . . . until early voting, mail in voting, no ID voting, no signature-matching voting, mysteriously programmed voting machines, and the alchemy of weeks-long out-of-sight vote counting: "Respecting the electoral process is not Trump’s bag, baby." I will have my respect for the electoral process restored with one-day voting, paper ballots, and voter ID.
Going to the polls to vote is insanely unnecessary, full stop. Couldn't disagree more with your comment. WA state mail in voting works well, is convenient, respectful of the voters' time, and I'm unaware of any significant fraud concerns. Most eligible voters don't vote, but some folks have created a narrative in their own mind that millions of non-voters somehow do, creating a ballot on adobe I guess and operating with a motivating driven 65% of regular voters can't even imagine. Be well -
It is very difficult to verify the identity of a mail-in voter, and outright impossible to verify that they aren't being coerced in how to vote by someone standing over their shoulder. In-person is the only way; anything else is lethally unserious.
I just want to emphasize what you wrote, and then followed up with "lethally unserious". You're concerned that people in sufficient numbers to move an election are being coerced by someone physically standing over their shoulder while filling in their ballot if they can do so from their home. That is an amazing worry. Be well -
Not at all - I've seen it happen. In non-fraudulent areas, voters cast their votes in actual privacy. They are not allowed to photograph their ballots and the circumstances in which someone can accompany them are very limited, mostly cases of severe disability.
As for being enough to move an election - it is not uncommon for a local election to hinge on a small number of votes. Moreover, the right to vote is an individual right, which does not inhere in some nebulous aggregate but in each specific voter. The correct amount of voter fraud is zero. And if you disagree, surely you would voluntarily give up your vote? After all, your vote is unlikely to move an election on its own.
There is also the practice of seeing who doesn't vote often, stealing their ballots, and using them as you please.
Wow, I've made 5 comments already (this is #6 for those following at home) and it's barely 6am.
Sorry about that! My new meds came in yesterday.....
> this country’s founding documents are explicitly universalist
Are they? The Constitution's Preamble says a bunch of stuff about being for the benefit of "Ourselves and our Posterity", which is pretty explicitly not universal.
The "Jimmy Neutron" theme song is some pretty legit indie rock-style commercial music. Way better than any Free Credit Report stuff, and probably even Five Dollar Footlongs.
I think Ossoff is the perfect candidate because he seems moderate to moderate and progressive to progressives (which is the opposite of what Harris was: too progressive to moderates and too moderate for progressives). He’s also young which is what every voter wants right now.
"No matter when we arrived on these shores".
I do appreciate a good "pro coloniser" platform.
Yes, aboriginal inhabitants of north, central, and south america were specially created here? Or did they colonize too? And whoever was in a given area in 1500, did they colonize, enslave, conquer, or otherwise displace those that were here before them? One moment in time is not specially privileged over prior moments, no one is native to any land here (or all of us born on it are native to it, you pick). Be well -
Hey, I don't make the rules, I've just witnessed them be applied. If this message gets acceptance among Democrats, let's not pretend it's not a massive deviation from the last few years.