Drew Magary at Defector is on the same page as me, at least, and probably more than a few of you:
[…] What is the Democrats’ product? Even Ken Martin, the eel who runs the DNC and just disavowed the party’s official postmortem analysis of the 2024 election, admitted that voters have no fucking idea what his party actually stands for.
"We can’t just be anti-Trump, we must have an affirmative agenda to sell the American people."
Correct. I’ve only been screaming this at Democrats for the past, oh, forever. Martin then uses this vital realization to spew the usual bunch of establishment Democrat loser shit:
"In the wake of the 2024 election, we have seen Democrats run and win on a positive message around affordability, centering on kitchen table issues and the needs of working families. It’s resonating."
Is it, Ken? Because I’ve been hearing your type refer to “kitchen table issues” (most Americans can’t afford a kitchen table, or a kitchen) and “the needs of working families” (a construct taken directly from the imagination of Chuck Schumer) for decades now. This is the formless, generic brand of centrism that Democrats have been dry-humping since before Joe Manchin was nursing at his mother’s teat.
There’s no affirmative agenda to sell in this messaging unless you pair it with actual, meaningful shit. Zohran Mamdani understood this innately, which is why he offered tangible proposals to help save voters money: free buses, frozen rent, and free daycare. You see how that works? The message, in this case affordability, only works if you have substance beneath it. But we know that Mamdani is The Great Satan to every Democrat in charge, because they don’t WANT policies that actually work. They just want the Democratic Party to be Republican Lite. That even includes the late Barney Frank, who spent a few of precious remaining moments on Earth doing his shittiest James Carville impression. Fucking lump.
So if you put me in charge of the Democrats' marketing team, and you should, I would insist on not just selling the product, but also conceiving of it. I can’t sell you a pen that has no fucking ink in it, can I? So here’s how I’d craft my RFP:
The Economy: Under us, every American will save a shitload of money and make even more than that. You won’t have to worry about paying for healthcare, for daycare, or for college tuition. We’re also gonna break up all the monopolies that are raising prices and ripping you off.
Crime: We’re gonna lock up all of THE REAL criminals, and make it so that they can never harm you again. Cue a photo montage of Donald Trump, Elon Musk, JD Vance, Pete Hegseth, Kristi Noem, Sam Altman, and the rest of the white-collar scum. They’re all gonna get put out of commission. Same with all ICE agents. These guys are some really bad hombres! THEY’RE EATING YOUR PETS!
OK, now I’m gonna go lightning round for the rest of my proposal.
Foreign Policy: We will put an end to all wars, especially this stupid Iran one.
Education: We will regulate the AI industry and end its deathly grip on our national education system. We’ll make pre-K and college free for everyone.
Immigration: We will make this country welcoming to anyone and everyone.
Abortion: We’re gonna bring back Roe.
The Judiciary: We will pack the court and end the Supreme Court’s reign of tyranny.
I didn’t bother to include the “how” in any of these, because there’s nothing Democrats love more than getting lost in the how of things. You bring up Medicare for All and some Pelosi wannabe immediately screams, "BUT HOW WILL WE PAY FOR IT?" Or when Democrats do support good ideas, they subsequently waste months on end over-explaining how they’ll get it done over the course of the next 40 years. Awful. Worthless. Stupid. The reason Trump appeals to voters—apart from all of the horrible shit—is that he never talks process. He only talks about results. Even if he doesn’t do something, he just says he did it anyway. Americans, who are big stupid babies who want everything right now, love that kind of shit.
That’s a lesson that Democrats either never learn or, because they want to hang onto their phony-baloney jobs, don’t want to. That’s why the second that party gets any momentum, they piss it away by droning on and on about how they must first navigate the 999 layers of bureaucracy in their way before they can actually make anything better. Nobody wants to hear that shit. You just say, “We’re gonna fix that fucking court,” and then you do it. You don’t say you’ll convene a bipartisan panel to explore criminal charges against the Trump administration, you just say, “We’re gonna ruin those assholes,” and then you prosecute one of the three dozen instances of fraud and corruption he's committed over the last two years.
It’s a big excerpt because it’s a subscription site. Plus, Lord knows I like a good rant.
Let’s contrast Magary’s take with this piece from the Bulwark about what the writer claims is the “new Democratic position on healthcare”.
The report comes from the Searchlight Institute, which sees itself as a source of ideas that can deliver progress while appealing to voters who might not identify as progressive or liberal. But the report’s core recommendations seem perfectly compatible with the priorities of progressives. They include blocking the formation of hospital monopolies, limiting the role of private equity in health care, and stopping insurance companies from denying coverage arbitrarily.
[…]
The month prior, the left-leaning Center for American Progress published a health care agenda that included a call to regulate hospital prices. And that’s on top of the more ambitious overhauls that many Democrats have been floating for years, like progressive proposals for a “Medicare for All” system, that very much remain part of the debate.
But the CAP and Searchlight proposals are notable because of those groups’ many ties to party leaders. And although the plans are different in their particulars and in their framing, both focus on the ways hospital monopolies have raised prices, just as both seek to curb the power of insurance companies to deny treatments.
The common element here is the contempt for corporations and conglomerates who seem to be putting shareholder profits before the best interests of their patients. There are good reasons both groups have landed there, and those reasons start with all the evidence that for-profit health care companies really are having some pernicious effects.
The piece, which is long and not at all entertaining, goes into some detail about how bad Private Equity and other terrible institutions have been when they’ve been fucking us in healthcare over the years. I won’t quote that because it’s obvious.
I bolded the part about “contempt” for corporations because it’s such obvious bullshit. You know how you can express your contempt for corporations? Support Medicare for All. Get the corporations out of healthcare as much as possible.
The electorate as a whole, and politically-engaged Democrats in particular, have little or no patience for the kind of incrementalism that the Searchlight Institute and CAP are proposing: “Hey, we know that Private Equity and Healthcare Corporations suck, so what we need to do is regulate them an eensy-teensy-tiny-bit more, and then your healthcare costs will maybe go down by a buck or two, isn’t that great? Also, we’ll make sure that your too-fucking-expensive insurance can’t deny as many claims as they have been. Wouldn’t you love that? Oh, and by the way, we’ll make damn sure that it’s a giant, prolonged fight that is so god damned boring that everyone will tune out.” This will ensure three things:
Democrats will own healthcare since there will be a lot of anticipatory headlines and media coverage proclaiming that “we’re really gonna fix it this time.”
People will be disappointed because this tinkering around the edges will at best cut their healthcare costs a tiny bit.
The Democratic brand will take yet another hit: The base will be pissed and demoralized because once again we worked really hard to elect institutionalists who delivered a lot of complexity with little or no real results. Everyone else will just think we’re wankers.
Nope. No way. Not buying it. Anyone who mouths this kind of shit needs to be primaried.
