The Ds have chosen Joe Kennedy III to deliver the English-language response to Trump’s SOTU. This isn’t even good messaging, even if messaging were an appropriate response in our present crisis.
Giving the response to Kennedy was a mistake partly because of his name. We still think that the electorate yearns for the heir to a political dynasty? Even if Joe Kennedy III was, on substance, because he was the uniquely qualified advocate on some key public policy, the best choice to deliver a response, his name alone argues powerfully against his being given this task.
But it’s worse than that. Kennedy was chosen solely for his name. He isn’t a unique and irreplaceable voice for anything our side thinks or feels. He’s a name that evokes an incomparably more competent president, and that’s it. Choosing him says that we don’t want to say anything, we just want to put forward a symbol that conveys the message that Ds nominate actual competent people to be president. I can’t argue with that idea, that we should have a president who isn’t incompetent. But is that the best we can do? Is that our bar, that the parties should nominate the competent for the office?
This is especially unfortunate because, purely as a matter of messaging and optics, Trump will almost certainly deliver a SOTU that will tend to downplay concerns over his competence. He’s gotten pretty good at reading a speech off a teleprompter written by people much better than Trump at simulating normal humanity in a way that fails to convey, more so than any other communications modality, the full horror of the fact that we have a mentally incompetent person in the WH. Trump has given such ample cause for concern for his competence in those other modalities that we are almost certainly going to have in the SOTU the latest in a series of occasions in which the mainstream media, desperate for balance in their reporting, is going to proclaim that “tonight, Trump became president”, that “he’s finally turned that corner and made that pivot to being president”, etc., etc. Our messaging about competence is going to be successfully countered by theirs.
But even if choosing Kennedy didn’t seem so likely to be a bad messaging strategy, the real problem here is that this year, choosing messaging over substance is a terrible mistake. This year, with this president, we face a crisis that demands that the leadership of the party take on the task of responding to Trump. Having Kennedy deliver the response is a clear choice for messaging and against the risk of saying anything.
Trump's success should have told us that the electorate is sick of messaging. In Trump, they at least had a choice to vote for someone who eschews messaging in favor of just saying what he thinks. What our side seems to be gambling on is the idea that these swing voters will have buyer’s remorse now that they've had a year of hearing exactly what Trump thinks, that it's alright to persist in having our side do messaging instead of saying what we think because these voters will go back to settling for the party that avoids saying anything because that now seems a better bet than the party that says what it means, but what it means is pretty horrible.
This may work. There is plenty of evidence that the electorate is having buyer's remorse. But it seems to me to be unnecessarily cautious to not use the opportunity of this buyer's remorse to do some truth-telling about what our side thinks. We could get some badly needed credibility back for our politics by eschewing messaging and saying what we think and believe, what we will do if given the trifecta, while avoiding the damage this has done the other side of revealing that what they really think and believe is pretty horrible. What we think and feel, what we intend if given the trifecta, is not at all horrible. But for our side to choose to continue messaging tells the electorate that we have no confidence that what we truly think and feel is not something that the electorate is going to think is pretty horrible.
Taking stands, on any subject, is difficult. Any public policy is going to have losers, and the more complicated and involved, the less clear that the losers may not be quite numerous. The question of what to do about the 11 million undocumented is an excellent example. The fears of the working class that they steal jobs, that failure to punish them for violating immigration law will encourage further economic immigration, are not obviously wrong, and not even completely wrong. But these fears are wrong, in that the preponderance of evidence is that the 11 million — and the future prospective immigrants who will follow if the 11 million are simply, at the extreme, given complete amnesty and immediate citizenship — are a net plus for the native-born working class. The unwillingness to make that argument is the strongest argument, at least in the minds of people who aren’t paying and won’t pay close attention to the economics of the question — but who can do the simpler task of reading our side’s messaging as the avoidance it is — that there really must be something to the false argument of the other side that those Mexicans are stealing our jobs.
It’s hard to follow an economic argument because most of us don’t live in a world in which macroeconomics is part of our daily experience. Unfortunately, the microeconomic environment we do live in daily tends to support narrow-minded, zero-sum, short range, supply-side thinking. But all of us have daily experience of weasels trying to avoid saying what they think and feel. So, sure, it’s risky for our side to come out for any sensible and humane solution for the 11 million. I understand that. What I don’t understand is why we think it’s better, less risky, to keep trying to avoid saying what we think and feel on the subject of the 11 million.
Before Trump threw away his party’s dog whistle, of course the at least short term sensible thing for our side to do was play it safe and go no further than messaging the hint of a more humane and sensible approach. But he did throw away that dog whistle, and did it to make a point of our side’s unwillingness to just say what we think and feel. We’re only fooling ourselves by failing to just say what we think and feel, and that yes, we mean to go with amnesty as our policy if given the trifecta. Nothing else is any longer consistent with a sensible or humane approach. Amnesty is the essence of DACA, even if it is only a partial amnesty. Why not just come out for amnesty?
That’s why neither Pelosi nor Schumer will be responding to Trump’s SOTU, that the times call for our side to take a stand, to come out, with an openly stated rationale, for at least some degree of amnesty, for at least some of the 11 million. We don’t want to do what the crisis demands of us, so instead we have chosen to have a junior Congressman with a famous name present our response. Even if he unexpectedly does an amazingly great job of public speaking, our actions will speak far more loudly than his words. I am sympathetic, to an extreme, towards our side, but even I can’t escape concluding that our actions here are the behavior of a bunch of weasels.