After college, I lived in NYC for several years. Three of us lived in a two-bedroom apartment. We lived on the 14th floor of a 37-story high-rise. But we had other “roomies” as well.
Cockroaches.
If you’ve never lived in NYC, just know they are ubiquitous (I always wondered how they got up to the 14th floor - or the 37th floor; their typical lifespan is 3-6 months).
I still have a visual of coming home from an evening out on the town, unlocking the apartment door, and - when I flicked on the light switch - watching the roach hordes scatter and somehow disappear into the crevices of our kitchen and anywhere else they could scurry off to.
Kind of like what’s happening with Republicans up on Capitol Hill.
The result?
Commenter TBone Dinosaur (darn - I need a cool moniker like that!) mentioned a column by Tom Sullivan over at Hullabaloo. He writes about Dan Pfeiffer’s advice:
Dan Pfeiffer expects that with a spluttering economy, rising costs, the Iran war, and bipartisan outrage over Trump’s slush fund and ballroom, Republicans’ only campaign play is “to nuke the Democratic brand.” They will replay 2024 and paint Democrats as weak and extreme.
So what might Democrats do to counterpunch? (emphasis mine):
“But there’s an interesting wrinkle in some recent polling worth flagging. A February analysis by Strength In Numbers found that voter perceptions of Democratic strength were a stronger predictor of vote choice than perceptions of Democratic extremism.
I’d be careful about leaning too hard on a single data point. I don’t think this lets Democrats off the hook on the substantive policy questions about where the party should be positioned. But it does suggest something I’ve been arguing for years: how you fight matters as much as what you fight for. Voters reward candidates who project strength, fight for their constituents, and refuse to be pushed around — regardless of where they sit on the ideological spectrum.
For a downballot candidate facing the “woke, weak, and way too liberal” assault, the takeaway isn’t necessarily to soften your positions. It’s to project strength about whatever your positions actually are. The voters who will decide your race want to know you’ll fight for them.
Run your campaigns. Don’t swerve out of your lane, but look for opportunities to blunt the attack to come.”
Respond to attacks with a loud-and-proud, “Hell, yes!”
Yes! Just. Say. It.
Democrats as a general rule (there are exceptions) have been somewhat hesitant to proudly and strongly stand behind their beliefs and policies. But even Hakeem Jeffries seems to have found his spine in recent days:
“I guess part of how we as House Democrats view this moment: either MAGA extremists are going to break the country, or we're going to break them. And our goal is to break them.
We will defeat them.
We have to beat them electorally, and then we have to break their spirit because of the extremism that's being unleashed on the American people that's completely and totally unacceptable.”
There’s more in the article.
Republicans are actually and truly in disarray. #ETTD. And it’s finally taking a toll. While Trump’s blessing is still gold (sorry) in primaries, from a strategic perspective he’s killing Republican’s chances in the midterms. He’s driving the country into the ground and the public is taking notice. He’s alienating sitting R electeds and even though they are political cowards, they are belatedly starting to realize the poison that is our President.
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So, how did the institutional Dem brain trust at the DNC take advantage of this once-in-a-generation political opening? Did they pursue the fleeing hordes with the figurative “Epstein Class” and “It’s the Corruption, Stupid” hammers of Mjolnir in their hands? Did they announce plans for unofficial hearings on the Trump Insurrection Slush Fund?
Of course not. They picked this moment to finally defy conventional wisdom. They zigged instead of zagged. They pulled a dead rabbit out of a hat.
They released the long buried “autopsy” of the 2024 election. The report Ken Martin didn’t want to release in the first place because it might cause intra-party division and squabbling.
I could write volumes on it, but in the interest of relative column brevity, I’ll let The Guardian provide some insight:
The Democratic party has belatedly published a postmortem on its disastrous 2024 election defeat, after an initial decision to withhold the document triggered an angry backlash.
Ken Martin, chair of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), released the report – which fails to mention Gaza or Joe Biden’s age – accompanied by an apology to party members angered by his initial decision to keep the analysis of Kamala Harris’s loss to Donald Trump and defeat in both houses of Congress under wraps.
Martin had initially declined to publish the report, authored by a veteran Democratic strategist, Paul Rivera. He cited a need to focus on this year’s midterm elections and avoid re-opening old wounds.
The decision backfired, leading to a crisis of confidence in Martin’s leadership among senior Democrats and accusations that he was keeping the findings secret.
…
Notably, the autopsy does not delve deeply into Joe Biden’s decision to run for re-election at age 81, or his decision to effectively hand over his campaign to Harris after he dropped out. The report makes no mention of the role that the US’s support for Israel’s war on Gaza played in the wider Democratic defeat, despite widespread polling about the impact of those issues, nor does it engage with the criticism that racism and sexism were a factor in Harris’s loss.
Martin acknowledged the lack of comprehensive findings, saying that he was “not proud” of the report and cautioned that it would not “meet your standards”. But he added its release was dictated by the public’s need “to trust the Democratic party”.
“When I received the report late last year, it wasn’t ready for primetime. Not even close,” the embattled party chair said in a statement released after the report’s publication. “And because no source material was provided, fixing it would have meant starting over, from the beginning – every conversation, every interview, every dataset.”
After seeing the report, it’s easy to understand why it was kept under wraps. Because it was a piece of shit.
No mention of Gaza/Israel, Biden’s age, the trans “issue”. No “comprehensive findings”. No “source material”.
Martin apologized after releasing the report. Not for its deficiencies or clear lack of, well, true substance. No. He apologized for not releasing it sooner.
At this point, it was better to stay buried. Just tell people it was a piece of crap and move on, which is what he should have done after he had initially received it. Take the hit. You know - own it. Just say it.
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Politics is hard. It’s so easy to be critical and negative of others, even others on our team. I’ve been an elected official and candidate in multiple campaigns - local and federal. One of my first real lessons on school board was that you’ll never please everyone and everyone’s a critic. You do your best and do what you think is right and stand up for your beliefs. You work with others with whom you might not see eye-to-eye on everything but with whom you can make a difference. You make alliances for the greater good. You compromise without selling out or selling your soul. For those who’ve never been in Teddy Roosevelt’s arena, it’s difficult to truly understand.
But. But. But. Politics is policy and policy is politics. Strategy and tactics and framing and messaging matter. Big time.
In my view, this was as close to an “own goal” as you can find. Many of us, and I would argue most of the Democratic base, did not want an institutionalist like Ken Martin in charge of the DNC. They were objectively in the right.
The times don’t call for timidity and a lack of political ability (and, arguably, rank incompetence). Should Martin go? Tough call. We are closing in on the midterms. All attention should be on corruption and Epstein, and the Democrats’ plans to fix a broken system. There’s an old saying in politics; something along the lines of, “Don’t get in the way of a trainwreck.” More directly, in a quote attributed to Napolean, “Never interfere with an enemy while he’s in the process of destroying himself.”
Republicans are in the process of destroying themselves. Yes, they need to be pushed and they’re failings need to be highlighted. The spotlight needs to be on them and their destruction of the United States. Axing Martin would provide fodder for both a media predisposed to framing the Republican point of view and provide cover for Republicans to move the spotlight off of their failings.
However, at the very least, privately, behind the curtain, some Dems in position to do so need to step up to ensure he no longer has a role. Now is the time for true leaders to impose their will on our party. Who will that be? Van Hollen, AOC, Murphy, Pritzker, Ossoff, Raskin, Crockett, Sherrill, Harris? Heck, I’d take Obama if his stature is what is needed to get us on track.
We need to fumigate the building to kill the cockroaches. Who’s going to be the exterminator?
