This is how you move people and the country forward.
This is how Democrats can represent everyone and still get White votes.
If Democrats are to continue to represent fairness, which automatically means including those who have been and continue to be treated unfairly because of their ancestry, they must continue to teach that we are all one, including the descendants of both the oppressed and the oppressors.
We can argue all we want about whether the Democratic Party needs to focus more on economic issues, rolling back the power of big money. (Yes, it does, but we don't need to accede to the lie that the party is owned by corporate interests to make that point, it isn't.)
But whether Democrats win is not determined by whether we nominate a competent but uncharismatic insider who can't relate to why people don't trust her or nominate a populist who gets the one big thing right but has only a Reaganesque command of details in his core area and even less outside that area.
If you think Obama is a centrist and you think Clinton lost because she is a centrist, there are multiple things you need to better think through before you will be prepared to guide the Democratic Party in a productive direction Or if you think Sanders would have automatically won because in the absence of negative TV ads, his popularity poling was high, there are multiple things you need to better think through before you will be prepared to guide the Democratic Party in a productive direction.
OTOH, if you think dissatisfaction with Clinton was entirely based on sexism, despite her having lost the primaries to Obama when the overwhelming (and correct) opinion at the time was it would be harder for a Black man than for a woman to get elected, there are multiple things you need to better think through before you will be prepared to guide the Democratic Party in a productive direction. If you think a professional demeanor and prioritizing keeping people who may disagree with you from being inflamed is the way to build a majority, there are multiple things you need to better think through before you will be prepared to guide the Democratic Party in a productive direction .
We all need to stop focusing so much on last Spring's battles, unfinished business though there is, and learn from the differences between candidates who have won (Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama) and candidates who didn't. And make no mistake. Educating people--rhetoric at its best is about policy (and more). It's about moving the country's attitudes, so that better policies will be electorally viable.
E pluribus unum! Or, if you prefer an aphorism in English, we must all hang together, or we shall surely all hand separately.
pulsegulfcoast.com/...
(The transcript is abridged, despite saying it's not. If you skip the video forward to 19:12, you'll get all the meat of the speech, after the pro forma acknowledgments. There's a skip a couple of minutes in--the three missing paragraphs are in the abridged transcript.)
Monday, May 22, 2017 · 2:00:12 AM +00:00
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Dvd Avins
As pointed out by Louisiana 1976…
I should have asked explicitly and early for people to click through and listen to and/or read the speech in the link. Please do so. This diary is a comment on that speech as an example of how Democrats should act.
I haven’t posted here since the last major change in format (and mostly since before several changes in format) and I apologize for my unfamiliarity with recent local conventions.