Dear Mr. President
Based on how your campaign has been managed so far, it’s clear that you understand it’s vitally important to paint your adversary into a corner. You’ve been hitting him hard each time he makes a “gaffe”—which in his case is something likely to frighten or disgust large swaths of the population. You are also highlighting the plans he is making for a second term, and showing how terrible those plans would be for the country.
However, what I’m not seeing is a grand design of your own for your second term. I’m seeing some proposals, some ideas, a bit of this, a bit of that. But I think you have a golden opportunity to offer what I’d like you to call The Big Deal—an updated, contemporary version of FDR’s New Deal (and a better plan than Truman’s Fair Deal). You might even call it The Big Effin’ Deal, to remind folks of the now highly popular BFD, as you so famously nicknamed the ACA.
The essentials of The Big Deal should be aligned with the key planks of the Democratic Party’s 2024 platform—and this is where it gets exciting. Because the idea should be that, if the country re-elects you and gives the Democrats control of Congress, you will be able to accomplish the priorities that poll after poll say are what the people actually want.
I think the real reason your approval is not where it should be is as much about Democrats being frustrated that those priorities are being less than fully realized as it is the opposition from conservatives.
In fact, I believe that if you lay out a truly progressive agenda and can get it passed with a Democratic Congress, a significant portion of the conservative opposition will be quashed—because those people will finally get to see how genuinely popular progressive policies really are when put into practice.
Mr. President, I think The Big Deal is what America is hungering for. Propose it, and you will win.