Too long to summarize. Quotes:
We tell this story about how the working person is desperate. Listen to the rhetoric: “You poor, struggling working families. We’re here to get you a break so you can squeeze by.”
That doesn’t work for the folks where I grew up, and it doesn’t work very well anywhere else, either. Working class people, like everyone else, want to be regarded as prosperous, as forward-looking, as self-reliant and living lives that are full of possibility. The Democrats’ message often ignores the human need for respect.
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“Own” the libs? Nobody ever owned FDR, JFK or MLK. And can you imagine Lyndon Johnson having accomplished what he did, this historic legacy of progressive reform, without his high-dominance style? We need to recover that tradition.
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Democrats need to overmatch Trump’s dominance, not emulate his style.
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There is absolutely no contradiction between collaboration, cooperation and empathy on the one hand and dominance politics on the other.
These are two quite distinct things. The former presents a self-assured certainty in your position, the latter is more aimed at a willingness to call out another on the wrongness of theirs. It’s a tough role to play when the positions of any given constituent and legislator are so entrenched, but necessary. It’s a bit like the comics of the type where you have one side saying ‘kill all X’ and the other saying ‘protect X lives’ and it’s somehow a compromise to only kill a few X…