In his latest podcast, Steve Schmidt, in his slow methodical drawl, spent the first five minutes or so laying out the case for how Washington is broken and both Parties are to blame. He draws no distinction between the Parties, while observing that voters have had it with the corruption and want nothing to do with either Party.
This begins to alarm me. But what he does next surprised the hell out of me. He begins talking about Third Party runs, how Ross Perot could have won it all had he not gone nuts with conspiracy theories. He explains that you can’t force feed voters what they don’t want, and they clearly don’t want either Trump or Biden. Then he makes a shocking dive into how the Common Sense Party, holding their unveiling of their 73 page manifesto in NH, may be the very thing that Americans are looking for to save them from the corruption in Washington.
Now he puts up a picture of Manchin, a power shot, ¾ angle from below, Manchin glancing defiantly over his shoulder with a bright blue sky behind him, sun dancing off his wind swept hair, and begins explaining how the Common Sense Party is a bipartisan Party with Democrat Joe Manchin at the helm and Republican Jon Huntsman in second chair. He plays a short clip of the NH presentation where Manchin is explaining how both Parties have lost their way and how he and Huntsman are providing a common sense approach to politics.
Schmidt never comes out and says he hopes they run or that he would support them, but it is pretty obvious that he sees Manchin as a Knight in shining armor come to save democracy. “We’ll see” is how he ends it.
Understand what a big shift this is from him. In all of his past podcasts he wails on Trump while throwing his support behind Biden. The Lincoln Project always talks of Biden in glowing terms. Now he is saying Common Sense can win this and infers that Manchin should be the true leader of the Party, only he is forced into a Third Party role due to Washington corruption. Yes, you heard that right, one of the most corrupt men in the Senate is going to save us from corruption. And he’s doing it not because he will soon be unemployed but because he feels this deep sense of responsibility toward future generations, or whatever the fuck.
Why is this a big deal? Because Democrats do not know how to talk to working class people. Their most powerful voice has been Brian Tyler Cohen, who I really like. But he speaks to maybe the top ten percent and younger voters. Working class, particularly men, aren’t going to be drawn to Brian’s rapid speaking style replete with sarcasm and dry wit. They are drawn to people like Schmidt, or even Rachel Maddow, who have a slow deliberate almost plodding rhythm laced with frustration bordering on anger, not snappy sarcasm. These people are angry and they want to hear someone who speaks to them. That is why I have been such a big fan of Schmidt and Lincoln Project. They fill a huge void in our ability to communicate with working class voters.
This podcast by Schmidt should be a wakeup call to Democrats in 2024. We shouldn’t allow Common Sense to define itself in this manner. Since the late 90’s, at least, voters have soured on a government in Washington that panders to the wealthy at their expense. That means we have been in a time of transition, a time demanding revolutionary change, and we win or lose based upon how we adapt to that reality. We allowed Trump to define himself as the outsider willing to break things in 2016 and against all odds he won. We only won in 2020 because Trump was so awful. Now we are seeing the same posturing from Common Sense and we can’t allow that to happen. That we are seeing one of our erstwhile strongest proponents among the middle class shifting allegiance to Manchin in 2024 should worry us. We need to find communicators like Schmidt who can talk actual sense to voters.
And here is the most worrisome part. This also means we need to sever all connections with Manchin who has now made himself a potential threat to success in 2024. More than that we need to paint him as corrupt to undermine his posing as a voice of honesty and authority. How do we do that when leadership have had his back through even his worst betrayals?