Democratic leadership has been tone deaf to their traditional, populist and progressive base for decades;ever since they decided to mimic the Republicans and cater to corporations and wealthy individuals reaching for big money donors
Campaigns should focus on the people's needs not increasing your bottom line.
Amen. Over the last generation, the dems have become an endangered species in my rural area in the Great Lakes. I'm gonna take a wild guess, but just maybe it has something to do with their embrace of a political capitalism that lavishes rich rewards on the corporate class while leaving ordinary Americans to experience the "creative destruction" part. Little things like NAFTA and MFN-China, which eviscerated the middle class, followed by the great bailout that saved the "too big to fail" banksters who threw millions of ordinary homeowners under the bus with subprime mortgages, while telling those same underwater homeowners to ... eat crow.
On the farm front, Big Ag (and everyone else) is allowed to consolidate and have monopoly control over every aspect of rural life, while all they give us is Michelle's organic garden and corporate toadies like Tom Vilsack. How come Obama's vaunted "task force" on agricultural consolidation quietly disappeared without even producing a report? These are all things I would expect Republicans to do.
Honestly, I'm surprised the Harris campaign didn't send the CEO of Cargill or ADM out to lecture us about how good we rural Americans have it, the way they sent Clinton to Dearborn to scold Arab Americans. This party continues to scale new heights of tone deafness.
Keep telling them, Jim! We would never vote Republican, but we would love to see Democrats get off their hobby horses which have nothing to do with the needs of most "ordinary" people. Thank God for those ordinary folks. Maybe the party will wake up in time for the midterms. Shout out to our farmers!
I am confused. I don't know how you could be writing about this same old complaint about Democrats when we have just had four years of turning the huge tanker of our country in a different direction, creating policies and changes that build wealth from the bottom up. From my experience, this has been revolutionary. But not very media worthy in our Trump obsessed world. AND we had a campaign that continuously stated plans to help those most in need. And maybe the democratic machine did not go to state fairs but at least there was a volunteer machine operating. The Trump didn't bother with any of that 'nonsense'. They just relied on the lies and magnetism of Trump, misogyny, China and Russia to do their farming practices.
And with what we are dealing with now, complaining about what democrats didn't do is like standing around as a house is on fire and being more concerned about who started it than getting to the job of dealing with the FIRE!
Trump is not the problem. Never was and never will be. The problem is that, from the working class point of view, which happens to be my point of view, Democrat "leadership" is, in function if not form, essentially the same as Republican leadership. When you can't tell the difference, there is no reason to vote other than to legitimize a long broken political system. Who would want to do that?! For my part I'll just stay home and read as much Thomas Piketty as I can get.
The bewilderment of the Dem faithful is amazing to me. The party is fine for the upper middle class professional and administrative elite, the ones this party actually represents. People who agree with that ugly "basket of deplorables" remark, sure the problem is the ignorant, bigoted masses who don't know what"s best for them.
"Different direction"?! Do you understand how the econ system works and its foundational assumptions? It dismisses the devastation of environments and human communities as irrelevant; it's term is 'externality.' It is organized around endless growth...on a finite planet. Speaking of "FIRE" (and floods and hurricanes,) the ecocrises are obvious to everyone not in thrall to a rapacious multinational corporatism. The 1/10th of 1% know it, too. Why they're buying private islands and megayachts to escape.
The D party was usurped by neoliberals (status quo econ apologists) in the late '70s. Probably due to the Powell Memo of '71, forerunner to Project 2025. These 'New Dems' promptly dumped the New Deal, so hated by the econ elite, and abandoned labor. Aka all of the non-upper middle class, the 80% majority. The Clinton admin. finished the process by supporting the WTO. And by deregulating the banks and Wall St. investors, which produced the crash of '08. Because of which the working class lost pensions and houses. We irrelevant and ignorant blue collar workers know the Ds did FOR the suffering, unemployed Rust Belt what they did TO the Wall St. vultures: NOTHING!
The last election could have been very different, had the Ds taken up the issue of stock buybacks. Which was limited to 2% of corporate profits; nowadays 90%+used; tying up funds that could otherwise have gone for new production and benefitting only CEOs and banksters. The really nasty part is how this is funded by mass layoffs. Now millions of unemployed and underemployed workers. The D response? {*crickets*} Don't want to offend their corporate sponsors, right?
Now add the horror of Biden's Dept. of State run by neoconservatives trained by Dick Cheney. Look up PNAC if you want info on what this is about. They insist on a unipolar world, a de facto American empire, to be maintained by all the forever wars it takes to preserve their illusion. Cheney didn't endorse Harris because Rs were upset by a multimillionaire narcissist plutocrat; they haven't objected to that since the Progressive era. More likely because Trump and his loyal cultist cadres are unpredictable. The Ivy Ds have proven themselves reliable for neoliberal economics and neoconservative foreign policy.
My old blue collar co-workers may not know the terms neolib or neocon. But we all can see trillions for wars means nothing for infrastructure, healthcare, or much else. We know that low paying, non-union jobs results in little tax money available for local government, schools, libraries. We know the econ system is trickle up and has been for decades. For anyone who sees the system for what it is, "from the bottom up" would be laughable if it weren't so tragically blinkered.
For as long as I can remember (and my parents said it was true thoroughout their lives), farmers have voted conservative IN SPITE of conservatives bending them over all day every day.
So I would love to hear how Harris could have deprogrammed that many decades of entrenched idiocy.
You're right. The Democrats have forgotten who they're supposed to represent. On the other hand what about the millions of dollars donated to the Republicans? What about Russian interference? What about over 4 years of Trump's chest thumping and lies? And, really - did they expect all those middle America and Southern states to vote for a non-white woman? Dreamers.
The same is on them, not on Harris. Wouldn't vote for a woman? Not just Southern states--we all know Christian Nationalism wants to keep women, all women, in their place.
I got an EQIP grant this year and couldn’t be more pleased. Hoping the Republicans don’t figure out how to cut off the outyears. But, I sure didn’t hear the Dems standing up and taking credit for the good that came out of the Inflation Reduction Act. Don’t understand it.
The Democrats really bubbled the whole immigration issue. We were actually luring these workers to America with wages that are 25 times what they were making in Central America. A really good hourly wage in Costa Rica is 35 or $.40 an hour and you can pick oranges in California for nine dollars an hour. The math is simple if somebody offered me 25 times when I’m making now if I would move to Lithuania. I would be packing though. I don’t know where Lithuania is exactly can’t spell Lithuania and certainly don’t speak the language.
Lithuania is one of three small independent states on the Baltic Sea, used to be part of Russia, and a member of NATO. The other two are Latvia and Estonia. Like Ukraine, they would fight to the death for their freedom if Russia invaded. They speak English there, and they would give you a warm welcome. I don't know how much money you could make there, though.
I lived 10 of my growing-up years on a small farm in north Idaho, where I was a 4-H girl who got mostly blue ribbons at the yearly county fair and milked the family cow after school for many years. I've lived in Seattle for 50+ years, but I've never forgotten where I came from, in part because if I drive east for 60 miles, I'm in rural Washington, where some of my extended (mostly Republican and conservative) family members live.
I have to give the R's credit for somehow, some way getting the ears of middle Americans and convincing them they have their best interests at heart, despite evidence to the contrary. Dems haven't made the efforts. I vote for them in my state because they mostly are better candidates. Otherwise, I wait for the Dems to grow some spines and show up for most of us -- not just the few of us at the expense of the rest of us. I fear that, deep down, this is a country of many racist and misogynist people -- unrecognized and unacknowledged by them and the rest of us, too . I have not given up, though I'm searching for hope. Optimism will have to wait a while longer.
Endless war IS my red line in past elections & most definitely this one, & as a former Democrat, I once again voted 3rd party. The Democrats have abandoned the working class for AIPAC. 👇
Not only did the party never really get rural America involved, they failed to hammer home a message about tax reform to aid working people, and tax the billionaires. Also, cavorting around with Beyoncé, Oprah, and other celebrities that aren’t relevant to most of us, detracts from the message needed. Let us regenerate the party to be the party of and for the people!
Here is what happened: the Dems appear to be overly occupied with making sure girls can use boys' bathrooms and vice versa and boys can play girls sports and vice versa; so long as that appears to be the DEMS preoccupation it pisses off the people on the farm and middle America. Once the DEMS pull their heads out of their collective Eastern establishment asses and realize they need to dispel the WOKE label and explain to people who like the Trump tough talk (especially on immigration) that they are being buffaloed by Billionaires who want the middle class and farmers to pay more than their fair share of taxes so Elon and his gang can make more billions, farmers and middle America will continue to vote against their own economic interests and continue to put thieves, liars and downright crooks into the White House. You may ask WTF is wrong with people who vote against their own economic interest. My answer is nothing when their alternative is a group of clueless panderers to every perceived societal wrong (and don't misunderstand me: it is wrong to treat folks who identify differently from the mainstream in a disrespectful or discriminatory way; the Golden Rule is largely lost in political America). Once the Dems pull their heads from that unenviable location and start to explain why (and HOW) middle America is getting it tucked to them by the Trumpets AND offer viable alternatives that will impact their pocketbooks positively, they deserve to continue to lose. Elon Musk's position as Trump's new budget hatchet man is one perfect opportunity; this billionaire poster boy will help to show middle America what the DEMS have not to date. The consequences of the loss of our progressive tax structure impoverishes people, enriches the Elon's of America and burdens our deficit which kicks the can back to the beginning of the circle: back to more impoverishment. You can tie the increase of homeless in America to the early dates of the loss of our progressive tax structure. More focus is required on economic issues because people hurt in the pocketbook. Time to change the narrative to make it less about rights and more about the economy stupid.
Rural Americans were more drawn to trumps ads about Harris attemps to. Pay for gender swaps with tax dollars as was I, than to the Harris campaigns focus on reproductive rights a subject most people already have their minds made up about. There was an endless supply of reasons not to vote for trump. What a waste of campaign money.
And now Ken Martin of Minnesota has thrown his hat in the ring to lead the DNC. In Minnesota almost ALL of RURAL Minnesota is RED under the leadership of Ken Martin. Democrats have been successful in Minnesota under Martin, but NOT in RURAL Minnesota. How is THAT going to help turn things around nationally if RURAL Minnesota (and RURAL America) are NOT a focus of the national Democratic party. If you never show up - year round, every year - and don't work to listen to and work with RURAL Americans you are toast.....and will be if you do not change your approach to working with and for RURAL America!!!
Jim, are you on record for telling the Biden Administration to make rural outreach a big priority for Democratic campaigns? It's easy to criticize with 20-20 hindsight.
VP Harris had 107 days to put together her campaign. She had detailed policies on her website within a month, & kept adding. You can't fault her campaign, the enthusiasm of her supporters, the wow! of fundraising ability. Did I wish she'd talked more about *working* class instead of middle class? Sure, but it did not dim my enthusiasm for her. I don't understand how anyone could allow themselves to be roped in by RepubliQan tropes about gov't paying for sex changes (which happened in Ddump's first term), bathrooms & who's in them (gawd, I'm just here for one thing, ya weirdos), or children's at-school sex change operations (puhleze, if you had a kid for whom you were responsible - mine's 26 - you know that schools can't even give medication without a parent's say-so). Each group - the farmers! the LGBTQI+! the young men! - is looked at out of context. We are all in this together. If one's feefees are hurt for lack of handholding by the Party, just consider how we'll *all* do under Ddump. Maybe the young men think they'll do better? Just look now at the Afghan men, who stood by while women were Talibanned into non-humans. Now they are surprised to find *they* are expected to adhere to the Taliban's rules for attire, hair & beard styles, & religious behavior. So: no western clothes for guys, must have a beard & it must look a certain way, & you *will* pray at the mosque as often & as long as the Taliban says you will....
Democratic leadership has been tone deaf to their traditional, populist and progressive base for decades;ever since they decided to mimic the Republicans and cater to corporations and wealthy individuals reaching for big money donors
Campaigns should focus on the people's needs not increasing your bottom line.
Amen. Over the last generation, the dems have become an endangered species in my rural area in the Great Lakes. I'm gonna take a wild guess, but just maybe it has something to do with their embrace of a political capitalism that lavishes rich rewards on the corporate class while leaving ordinary Americans to experience the "creative destruction" part. Little things like NAFTA and MFN-China, which eviscerated the middle class, followed by the great bailout that saved the "too big to fail" banksters who threw millions of ordinary homeowners under the bus with subprime mortgages, while telling those same underwater homeowners to ... eat crow.
On the farm front, Big Ag (and everyone else) is allowed to consolidate and have monopoly control over every aspect of rural life, while all they give us is Michelle's organic garden and corporate toadies like Tom Vilsack. How come Obama's vaunted "task force" on agricultural consolidation quietly disappeared without even producing a report? These are all things I would expect Republicans to do.
Honestly, I'm surprised the Harris campaign didn't send the CEO of Cargill or ADM out to lecture us about how good we rural Americans have it, the way they sent Clinton to Dearborn to scold Arab Americans. This party continues to scale new heights of tone deafness.
Keep telling them, Jim! We would never vote Republican, but we would love to see Democrats get off their hobby horses which have nothing to do with the needs of most "ordinary" people. Thank God for those ordinary folks. Maybe the party will wake up in time for the midterms. Shout out to our farmers!
Outstanding! YOU have great knowledge and great delivery! I wish you well! Tanks for everything you do!
I am confused. I don't know how you could be writing about this same old complaint about Democrats when we have just had four years of turning the huge tanker of our country in a different direction, creating policies and changes that build wealth from the bottom up. From my experience, this has been revolutionary. But not very media worthy in our Trump obsessed world. AND we had a campaign that continuously stated plans to help those most in need. And maybe the democratic machine did not go to state fairs but at least there was a volunteer machine operating. The Trump didn't bother with any of that 'nonsense'. They just relied on the lies and magnetism of Trump, misogyny, China and Russia to do their farming practices.
And with what we are dealing with now, complaining about what democrats didn't do is like standing around as a house is on fire and being more concerned about who started it than getting to the job of dealing with the FIRE!
Trump is not the problem. Never was and never will be. The problem is that, from the working class point of view, which happens to be my point of view, Democrat "leadership" is, in function if not form, essentially the same as Republican leadership. When you can't tell the difference, there is no reason to vote other than to legitimize a long broken political system. Who would want to do that?! For my part I'll just stay home and read as much Thomas Piketty as I can get.
Thank you. Exactly the problem.
The bewilderment of the Dem faithful is amazing to me. The party is fine for the upper middle class professional and administrative elite, the ones this party actually represents. People who agree with that ugly "basket of deplorables" remark, sure the problem is the ignorant, bigoted masses who don't know what"s best for them.
"Different direction"?! Do you understand how the econ system works and its foundational assumptions? It dismisses the devastation of environments and human communities as irrelevant; it's term is 'externality.' It is organized around endless growth...on a finite planet. Speaking of "FIRE" (and floods and hurricanes,) the ecocrises are obvious to everyone not in thrall to a rapacious multinational corporatism. The 1/10th of 1% know it, too. Why they're buying private islands and megayachts to escape.
The D party was usurped by neoliberals (status quo econ apologists) in the late '70s. Probably due to the Powell Memo of '71, forerunner to Project 2025. These 'New Dems' promptly dumped the New Deal, so hated by the econ elite, and abandoned labor. Aka all of the non-upper middle class, the 80% majority. The Clinton admin. finished the process by supporting the WTO. And by deregulating the banks and Wall St. investors, which produced the crash of '08. Because of which the working class lost pensions and houses. We irrelevant and ignorant blue collar workers know the Ds did FOR the suffering, unemployed Rust Belt what they did TO the Wall St. vultures: NOTHING!
The last election could have been very different, had the Ds taken up the issue of stock buybacks. Which was limited to 2% of corporate profits; nowadays 90%+used; tying up funds that could otherwise have gone for new production and benefitting only CEOs and banksters. The really nasty part is how this is funded by mass layoffs. Now millions of unemployed and underemployed workers. The D response? {*crickets*} Don't want to offend their corporate sponsors, right?
Now add the horror of Biden's Dept. of State run by neoconservatives trained by Dick Cheney. Look up PNAC if you want info on what this is about. They insist on a unipolar world, a de facto American empire, to be maintained by all the forever wars it takes to preserve their illusion. Cheney didn't endorse Harris because Rs were upset by a multimillionaire narcissist plutocrat; they haven't objected to that since the Progressive era. More likely because Trump and his loyal cultist cadres are unpredictable. The Ivy Ds have proven themselves reliable for neoliberal economics and neoconservative foreign policy.
My old blue collar co-workers may not know the terms neolib or neocon. But we all can see trillions for wars means nothing for infrastructure, healthcare, or much else. We know that low paying, non-union jobs results in little tax money available for local government, schools, libraries. We know the econ system is trickle up and has been for decades. For anyone who sees the system for what it is, "from the bottom up" would be laughable if it weren't so tragically blinkered.
For as long as I can remember (and my parents said it was true thoroughout their lives), farmers have voted conservative IN SPITE of conservatives bending them over all day every day.
So I would love to hear how Harris could have deprogrammed that many decades of entrenched idiocy.
You're right. The Democrats have forgotten who they're supposed to represent. On the other hand what about the millions of dollars donated to the Republicans? What about Russian interference? What about over 4 years of Trump's chest thumping and lies? And, really - did they expect all those middle America and Southern states to vote for a non-white woman? Dreamers.
The same is on them, not on Harris. Wouldn't vote for a woman? Not just Southern states--we all know Christian Nationalism wants to keep women, all women, in their place.
I got an EQIP grant this year and couldn’t be more pleased. Hoping the Republicans don’t figure out how to cut off the outyears. But, I sure didn’t hear the Dems standing up and taking credit for the good that came out of the Inflation Reduction Act. Don’t understand it.
The Democrats really bubbled the whole immigration issue. We were actually luring these workers to America with wages that are 25 times what they were making in Central America. A really good hourly wage in Costa Rica is 35 or $.40 an hour and you can pick oranges in California for nine dollars an hour. The math is simple if somebody offered me 25 times when I’m making now if I would move to Lithuania. I would be packing though. I don’t know where Lithuania is exactly can’t spell Lithuania and certainly don’t speak the language.
Sorry, but it was the GOP, at Trump's insistence, that tanked a bi-partisan immigration bill. Please do your research.
Lithuania is one of three small independent states on the Baltic Sea, used to be part of Russia, and a member of NATO. The other two are Latvia and Estonia. Like Ukraine, they would fight to the death for their freedom if Russia invaded. They speak English there, and they would give you a warm welcome. I don't know how much money you could make there, though.
I lived 10 of my growing-up years on a small farm in north Idaho, where I was a 4-H girl who got mostly blue ribbons at the yearly county fair and milked the family cow after school for many years. I've lived in Seattle for 50+ years, but I've never forgotten where I came from, in part because if I drive east for 60 miles, I'm in rural Washington, where some of my extended (mostly Republican and conservative) family members live.
I have to give the R's credit for somehow, some way getting the ears of middle Americans and convincing them they have their best interests at heart, despite evidence to the contrary. Dems haven't made the efforts. I vote for them in my state because they mostly are better candidates. Otherwise, I wait for the Dems to grow some spines and show up for most of us -- not just the few of us at the expense of the rest of us. I fear that, deep down, this is a country of many racist and misogynist people -- unrecognized and unacknowledged by them and the rest of us, too . I have not given up, though I'm searching for hope. Optimism will have to wait a while longer.
Endless war IS my red line in past elections & most definitely this one, & as a former Democrat, I once again voted 3rd party. The Democrats have abandoned the working class for AIPAC. 👇
Not only did the party never really get rural America involved, they failed to hammer home a message about tax reform to aid working people, and tax the billionaires. Also, cavorting around with Beyoncé, Oprah, and other celebrities that aren’t relevant to most of us, detracts from the message needed. Let us regenerate the party to be the party of and for the people!
Here is what happened: the Dems appear to be overly occupied with making sure girls can use boys' bathrooms and vice versa and boys can play girls sports and vice versa; so long as that appears to be the DEMS preoccupation it pisses off the people on the farm and middle America. Once the DEMS pull their heads out of their collective Eastern establishment asses and realize they need to dispel the WOKE label and explain to people who like the Trump tough talk (especially on immigration) that they are being buffaloed by Billionaires who want the middle class and farmers to pay more than their fair share of taxes so Elon and his gang can make more billions, farmers and middle America will continue to vote against their own economic interests and continue to put thieves, liars and downright crooks into the White House. You may ask WTF is wrong with people who vote against their own economic interest. My answer is nothing when their alternative is a group of clueless panderers to every perceived societal wrong (and don't misunderstand me: it is wrong to treat folks who identify differently from the mainstream in a disrespectful or discriminatory way; the Golden Rule is largely lost in political America). Once the Dems pull their heads from that unenviable location and start to explain why (and HOW) middle America is getting it tucked to them by the Trumpets AND offer viable alternatives that will impact their pocketbooks positively, they deserve to continue to lose. Elon Musk's position as Trump's new budget hatchet man is one perfect opportunity; this billionaire poster boy will help to show middle America what the DEMS have not to date. The consequences of the loss of our progressive tax structure impoverishes people, enriches the Elon's of America and burdens our deficit which kicks the can back to the beginning of the circle: back to more impoverishment. You can tie the increase of homeless in America to the early dates of the loss of our progressive tax structure. More focus is required on economic issues because people hurt in the pocketbook. Time to change the narrative to make it less about rights and more about the economy stupid.
Rural Americans were more drawn to trumps ads about Harris attemps to. Pay for gender swaps with tax dollars as was I, than to the Harris campaigns focus on reproductive rights a subject most people already have their minds made up about. There was an endless supply of reasons not to vote for trump. What a waste of campaign money.
And now Ken Martin of Minnesota has thrown his hat in the ring to lead the DNC. In Minnesota almost ALL of RURAL Minnesota is RED under the leadership of Ken Martin. Democrats have been successful in Minnesota under Martin, but NOT in RURAL Minnesota. How is THAT going to help turn things around nationally if RURAL Minnesota (and RURAL America) are NOT a focus of the national Democratic party. If you never show up - year round, every year - and don't work to listen to and work with RURAL Americans you are toast.....and will be if you do not change your approach to working with and for RURAL America!!!
Jim, are you on record for telling the Biden Administration to make rural outreach a big priority for Democratic campaigns? It's easy to criticize with 20-20 hindsight.
VP Harris had 107 days to put together her campaign. She had detailed policies on her website within a month, & kept adding. You can't fault her campaign, the enthusiasm of her supporters, the wow! of fundraising ability. Did I wish she'd talked more about *working* class instead of middle class? Sure, but it did not dim my enthusiasm for her. I don't understand how anyone could allow themselves to be roped in by RepubliQan tropes about gov't paying for sex changes (which happened in Ddump's first term), bathrooms & who's in them (gawd, I'm just here for one thing, ya weirdos), or children's at-school sex change operations (puhleze, if you had a kid for whom you were responsible - mine's 26 - you know that schools can't even give medication without a parent's say-so). Each group - the farmers! the LGBTQI+! the young men! - is looked at out of context. We are all in this together. If one's feefees are hurt for lack of handholding by the Party, just consider how we'll *all* do under Ddump. Maybe the young men think they'll do better? Just look now at the Afghan men, who stood by while women were Talibanned into non-humans. Now they are surprised to find *they* are expected to adhere to the Taliban's rules for attire, hair & beard styles, & religious behavior. So: no western clothes for guys, must have a beard & it must look a certain way, & you *will* pray at the mosque as often & as long as the Taliban says you will....