Yes, our insults and expletives have been dumbed down to a 4th grade, Trumpian, school yard bully level. Let's not forget what led us to this moment. If I recall conservatives railed on President Obama for his elitist lexicon and for his obnoxious use of thoughtful vocabulary words. He couldn't connect with Joe the Plumber. I personally think the word troglodyte should be used more to describe the current mental state of Trumpy Republican voters, and their elected leaders. Troglodyte brings up visuals of heavy browed cave dwellers with a limited vocabulary beyond grunting noises and scary sounding words they spit out, even though they have no idea of their meaning. Troglodyte both encompasses their complete lack of coherent ideas or thoughts, and their unwillingness to change their backward ways. A troglodyte must use brute force to accomplish anything because he is not intellectually capable of adaptation or creative thinking. Exactly the direction Republicans are headed. Cave man brute force is their only plan, with the King Kong of troglodytes as their chosen leader.
Poltroon is a wonderful epithet, although unfortunately likely to be mistaken by most to be some kind of exotic serving utensil.
As for employing more imaginative, evocative ways to describe the person I prefer to call “Formerly”, until his ouster I had a moderately positive response to referring to him as “that idiot traffic cone currently occupying the Oval Office.”
Good work, Mr. Sykes. Please keep it going. We need you.
I agree with all of you. As per previous posts before these writings. MESSAGE, MESSAGE, MESSAGE. Make it about a single working poor mother with three kids, who work full-time to pay $2,000 per month in daycare. So somebody else gets to see her kids. Make it about a collapsing bridge in small-town Iowa. Make it about a father forced to return to work with zero maternity leave, needs to travel out of town for the job, sees his newborn for two days a week, and needs to take food stamps to make ends meet. Is the Bulwark microphone on Dems?
"If you want to burrow a message into a human mind. Work it into a story."
In response to Tim Miller, even those of us in the 10% don't know enough about BBB legislation. I have read plenty about fights over child care vs. free community college, etc. However, I still haven't seen details about how the federal government plans to execute most of these programs, some of which have not seen an observable federal role until now. Would small family run day care centers, or family child care providers be affected? How can the federal government mandate minimum salaries for child care providers? If a certain education level is required for pre-school teachers, won't this cause many good caregivers to lose their jobs? Where are the details???
In defense of Stacy Abrams, Georgia's digital voting system from the 2002 cycle through 2018 was suspect as there was no other record of one's vote other than the one 'in the machine.'
If you look over that time period, which coincidentally coincides precisely with the dominance of the GOP in the state - Democrats lost every state-wide election since - and challenges were moot as the "windows 2000" based system instituted statewide was the totality of the evidence. Notably, that system was obsolete, archaic and insecure which means it was possible to ... as that 'famous file found lurking on some machines in 2002 implied ... "rob.georgia."
You also know, don't you, that the court case brought by Ms. Abrams, forced the state to abandon the untraceable computer-only voting system that in fact, Mr. Raffensburger had specified until the courts forced the state to one that provided a 'paper trail.'
Do you think Sens. Warnock and Ossoff would have been elected on January 5th, 2021 if not for the 'auditable' voting system in Georgia.
Better yet, under the old, imminently hackable, paperless system in Georgia prior to 2020, I can't imagine anyway that Donald Trump could have lost Georgia. Even if the vote totals showed him losing, how do you think he would have reacted when confronted with a system of voting that was impossible to audit?
The point is, Stacy Abrams work in challenging possibly the worst, most easily corrupted voting system imaginable, likely saved the United States by forcing the state, through the courts, to adopt a voting system that provides a paper trail.
And don't forget Mar-a-lardo started challenging the veracity of voting in 2016.
This is the problem with trillion+ omnibus bills: Nobody knows what's in them, they cost a small fortune, and it's hard to build party consensus around what should go in or come out. Dems made a *huge* miscalculation trying to squeeze all their priorities--except the ones that really matter like voting and vote-counting laws--into singular bills they hope to pass before mid-term election season comes around. A fail for the ages if/when nothing comes through, a regular fail if they pass bills most people either 1) never cared about, or 2) didn't care enough about for it to matter in '22 or '24. I predict that the dems won't be in charge of more than a single branch of gov until at least 2028.
Let me make a few observations. First, most voters do not pay any attention to politics until the month before an election. That may infuriate many of us, who pay attention, but it's also why the body politic sends so many performative individuals to a job that requires actual work. Thus, talking about polls now is rather pointless. For example, ask yourself how important Obama's 2009 approval rating was in 2012. Or Clinton's in 1993. Or Trump's in 2017.
Here's the thing, and one thing that I think all media types who want to cover politics need to learn: not everything needs to be horse race politics. When you try to turn everything into a horse race, journalists and pundits become bookies, trying to sell the public that people who are not important have just as much of a chance as the people who are. It's how they turn '500 people left their job because of vaccine mandates' into a story when that's like, 1% of the entire workforce.
It's also how we get things like 'the democrats are spending $3.5 trillion!' as though this is significantly different from saying 'the democrats are spending $1.5 trillion!' in the minds of people who do not know how large our national budget or gdp are. But perhaps worse, as Tim goes into, it obscures the fact of what's actually being done. No one cares about the price tag, just like no one cares about the debt. Voters approach all discussions of budget the same way: if they don't like something, we're spending too much money on it. If they do like something, we're not spending enough. Take any issue: healthcare, defense, infrastructure, whatever. I promise you that if you asked conservatives or liberals about this, they would all answer in this manner, and how they answer would likely make it easy to define them politically. It's literally the guns and butter concept in action.
The other thing we need to realize is that no one cares about process. Voters have short memories, and what they want from the government is for the government to get things done. That's why we vote for people. You elect people to do things. And if those things don't work, are unpopular, or end up being bad ideas, you elect different people to change that. That's literally how democracy is supposed to work. In fact, that's how our democracy is meant to work with two parties. One party is meant to get into power, and do things, and then the voters get to say if they want more of that or not. No one is electing people because they want nothing to happen.
Finally, I want to say that, of all the problems with the electorate, it's important to realize that this is not a new problem. A century ago was 'Mr. Smith Goes To Washington' a movie that mythologizes the idea that what's needed is 'common sense' of an 'outsider' to 'shake things up.' Well, it's a century later and it turns out that this is a terrible way of governing the same way grabbing people off the street is a terrible way to do surgery. But the point I'm trying to make is that Americans primarily vote for people like this on the idea that they're going to DO things. The fact that we keep having 'change' elections based on 'washington's dysfunction' proves that what people want is for things to actually get done.
Thus, we can make a few observations from this. Biden's 'approval' rating can be ignored for now. It's not important. What IS important is whether or not Democrats pass the infrastructure bill and voting rights. That's why they got elected, that's what people want. What is also important is that Democrats need to learn from the GOP on how to message effectively. They need to hammer home that 'hey, we're doing things for YOU.' The fact that most people got stimulus checks from Biden AND THEY DON'T REALIZE HE DID THAT proves that the democrats need to fire all their messaging people and start from scratch.
The only message that matters is this: Democrats want to end the pandemic and invest in your life to make it easier for you. The GOP wants to cater to people who think your child should risk getting a deadly disease because they think the vaccine has nanomachines in it. The Democrats want to spend money on making your life better, the GOP wants to give more tax cuts to the people that outsourced your job to China in the first place. The Democrats want to make the police better and more functional, the GOP wants to give them free reign to execute you if they see you carrying a gun.
Ultimately, Democrats will succeed or fail based on whether they can actually DO things, and whether they can actually tell people that they did these things.
I'm with Tim -- I consider myself a highly engaged citizen and I'm having trouble following what's in the human infrastructure bill. Here's what would help me (and perhaps the media as well) in actually discussing its benefits rather than its cost: a chart with each proposed element broken out by the House and Senate version. It could include an update column indicating where things stand on each proposal day to day.
Thanks for linking the tweets by Abrams’ group. I had no idea that they’d actually made claims similar to Trump’s. These types of allegations, no matter the source, are destructive to voting integrity and people’s confidence that their vote is and will be fairly counted.
I helped with the 2016 vote as a poll worker. The County Clerk, a very conservative Republican, was rigorous in making sure that votes were counted correctly and that the voting machines worked as intended. Do people not know how many checks and balances are built into the system to insure a fair election? I assume it is so in most states. Large scale fraud would be quite difficult to pull off. An argument can be made for voter suppression as well as the occasional one-off fraudulent ballots but a machine wiping out 100K votes? Not so much.
I too listened to The Focus Group podcast yesterday while walking my local park. I felt like screaming at the whiny D’s; WTF! The Biden presidency is 8+ months young and much correction-restoration is needed after the rape and pillaging of TFG’s presidency, so FTLOG have some patience!
Having written that, I’m wholly on board with Sarah & JVL’s criticisms about Democrats messaging and strategies.
I had no idea about what Raffensperger claimed regarding Stacey Abrams alleging voting machine shenanigans in GA; she went there, apparently, and that's not good. But what does it say about the current political environment, when a prominent Democratic politician makes such claims and relatively informed folks like me aren't even aware of them, but the standard-bearer of the GOP makes such claims and it takes over the entire party and its voters, by like 90% margins?
.
"Dear Democrats: Only 10% of People Even Know What You Are Fighting For"
Where tf is Kate Bedingfield*?
* So-called "White House Communications Director"
.
Aargh! Trotskyist not Trotskyite. This drives the college age version of me nuts (ok the middle age me too).
Great article as always. Keep fighting the good fight.
Trotskyite…..good grief.
Yes, our insults and expletives have been dumbed down to a 4th grade, Trumpian, school yard bully level. Let's not forget what led us to this moment. If I recall conservatives railed on President Obama for his elitist lexicon and for his obnoxious use of thoughtful vocabulary words. He couldn't connect with Joe the Plumber. I personally think the word troglodyte should be used more to describe the current mental state of Trumpy Republican voters, and their elected leaders. Troglodyte brings up visuals of heavy browed cave dwellers with a limited vocabulary beyond grunting noises and scary sounding words they spit out, even though they have no idea of their meaning. Troglodyte both encompasses their complete lack of coherent ideas or thoughts, and their unwillingness to change their backward ways. A troglodyte must use brute force to accomplish anything because he is not intellectually capable of adaptation or creative thinking. Exactly the direction Republicans are headed. Cave man brute force is their only plan, with the King Kong of troglodytes as their chosen leader.
Republicans need to start taking reading lessons from Jackie Beat...few people do a better crafted put-down than her.
I like "poltroon", but I LOVE "lickspittle", particularly the gasconnading variety, such as Ted Cruz.
Poltroons! That is the best.
Poltroon is a wonderful epithet, although unfortunately likely to be mistaken by most to be some kind of exotic serving utensil.
As for employing more imaginative, evocative ways to describe the person I prefer to call “Formerly”, until his ouster I had a moderately positive response to referring to him as “that idiot traffic cone currently occupying the Oval Office.”
Good work, Mr. Sykes. Please keep it going. We need you.
I agree with all of you. As per previous posts before these writings. MESSAGE, MESSAGE, MESSAGE. Make it about a single working poor mother with three kids, who work full-time to pay $2,000 per month in daycare. So somebody else gets to see her kids. Make it about a collapsing bridge in small-town Iowa. Make it about a father forced to return to work with zero maternity leave, needs to travel out of town for the job, sees his newborn for two days a week, and needs to take food stamps to make ends meet. Is the Bulwark microphone on Dems?
"If you want to burrow a message into a human mind. Work it into a story."
- Jonathan Gottschall
In response to Tim Miller, even those of us in the 10% don't know enough about BBB legislation. I have read plenty about fights over child care vs. free community college, etc. However, I still haven't seen details about how the federal government plans to execute most of these programs, some of which have not seen an observable federal role until now. Would small family run day care centers, or family child care providers be affected? How can the federal government mandate minimum salaries for child care providers? If a certain education level is required for pre-school teachers, won't this cause many good caregivers to lose their jobs? Where are the details???
In defense of Stacy Abrams, Georgia's digital voting system from the 2002 cycle through 2018 was suspect as there was no other record of one's vote other than the one 'in the machine.'
If you look over that time period, which coincidentally coincides precisely with the dominance of the GOP in the state - Democrats lost every state-wide election since - and challenges were moot as the "windows 2000" based system instituted statewide was the totality of the evidence. Notably, that system was obsolete, archaic and insecure which means it was possible to ... as that 'famous file found lurking on some machines in 2002 implied ... "rob.georgia."
You also know, don't you, that the court case brought by Ms. Abrams, forced the state to abandon the untraceable computer-only voting system that in fact, Mr. Raffensburger had specified until the courts forced the state to one that provided a 'paper trail.'
Do you think Sens. Warnock and Ossoff would have been elected on January 5th, 2021 if not for the 'auditable' voting system in Georgia.
Better yet, under the old, imminently hackable, paperless system in Georgia prior to 2020, I can't imagine anyway that Donald Trump could have lost Georgia. Even if the vote totals showed him losing, how do you think he would have reacted when confronted with a system of voting that was impossible to audit?
The point is, Stacy Abrams work in challenging possibly the worst, most easily corrupted voting system imaginable, likely saved the United States by forcing the state, through the courts, to adopt a voting system that provides a paper trail.
And don't forget Mar-a-lardo started challenging the veracity of voting in 2016.
This is the problem with trillion+ omnibus bills: Nobody knows what's in them, they cost a small fortune, and it's hard to build party consensus around what should go in or come out. Dems made a *huge* miscalculation trying to squeeze all their priorities--except the ones that really matter like voting and vote-counting laws--into singular bills they hope to pass before mid-term election season comes around. A fail for the ages if/when nothing comes through, a regular fail if they pass bills most people either 1) never cared about, or 2) didn't care enough about for it to matter in '22 or '24. I predict that the dems won't be in charge of more than a single branch of gov until at least 2028.
Let me make a few observations. First, most voters do not pay any attention to politics until the month before an election. That may infuriate many of us, who pay attention, but it's also why the body politic sends so many performative individuals to a job that requires actual work. Thus, talking about polls now is rather pointless. For example, ask yourself how important Obama's 2009 approval rating was in 2012. Or Clinton's in 1993. Or Trump's in 2017.
Here's the thing, and one thing that I think all media types who want to cover politics need to learn: not everything needs to be horse race politics. When you try to turn everything into a horse race, journalists and pundits become bookies, trying to sell the public that people who are not important have just as much of a chance as the people who are. It's how they turn '500 people left their job because of vaccine mandates' into a story when that's like, 1% of the entire workforce.
It's also how we get things like 'the democrats are spending $3.5 trillion!' as though this is significantly different from saying 'the democrats are spending $1.5 trillion!' in the minds of people who do not know how large our national budget or gdp are. But perhaps worse, as Tim goes into, it obscures the fact of what's actually being done. No one cares about the price tag, just like no one cares about the debt. Voters approach all discussions of budget the same way: if they don't like something, we're spending too much money on it. If they do like something, we're not spending enough. Take any issue: healthcare, defense, infrastructure, whatever. I promise you that if you asked conservatives or liberals about this, they would all answer in this manner, and how they answer would likely make it easy to define them politically. It's literally the guns and butter concept in action.
The other thing we need to realize is that no one cares about process. Voters have short memories, and what they want from the government is for the government to get things done. That's why we vote for people. You elect people to do things. And if those things don't work, are unpopular, or end up being bad ideas, you elect different people to change that. That's literally how democracy is supposed to work. In fact, that's how our democracy is meant to work with two parties. One party is meant to get into power, and do things, and then the voters get to say if they want more of that or not. No one is electing people because they want nothing to happen.
Finally, I want to say that, of all the problems with the electorate, it's important to realize that this is not a new problem. A century ago was 'Mr. Smith Goes To Washington' a movie that mythologizes the idea that what's needed is 'common sense' of an 'outsider' to 'shake things up.' Well, it's a century later and it turns out that this is a terrible way of governing the same way grabbing people off the street is a terrible way to do surgery. But the point I'm trying to make is that Americans primarily vote for people like this on the idea that they're going to DO things. The fact that we keep having 'change' elections based on 'washington's dysfunction' proves that what people want is for things to actually get done.
Thus, we can make a few observations from this. Biden's 'approval' rating can be ignored for now. It's not important. What IS important is whether or not Democrats pass the infrastructure bill and voting rights. That's why they got elected, that's what people want. What is also important is that Democrats need to learn from the GOP on how to message effectively. They need to hammer home that 'hey, we're doing things for YOU.' The fact that most people got stimulus checks from Biden AND THEY DON'T REALIZE HE DID THAT proves that the democrats need to fire all their messaging people and start from scratch.
The only message that matters is this: Democrats want to end the pandemic and invest in your life to make it easier for you. The GOP wants to cater to people who think your child should risk getting a deadly disease because they think the vaccine has nanomachines in it. The Democrats want to spend money on making your life better, the GOP wants to give more tax cuts to the people that outsourced your job to China in the first place. The Democrats want to make the police better and more functional, the GOP wants to give them free reign to execute you if they see you carrying a gun.
Ultimately, Democrats will succeed or fail based on whether they can actually DO things, and whether they can actually tell people that they did these things.
I'm with Tim -- I consider myself a highly engaged citizen and I'm having trouble following what's in the human infrastructure bill. Here's what would help me (and perhaps the media as well) in actually discussing its benefits rather than its cost: a chart with each proposed element broken out by the House and Senate version. It could include an update column indicating where things stand on each proposal day to day.
Thanks for linking the tweets by Abrams’ group. I had no idea that they’d actually made claims similar to Trump’s. These types of allegations, no matter the source, are destructive to voting integrity and people’s confidence that their vote is and will be fairly counted.
I helped with the 2016 vote as a poll worker. The County Clerk, a very conservative Republican, was rigorous in making sure that votes were counted correctly and that the voting machines worked as intended. Do people not know how many checks and balances are built into the system to insure a fair election? I assume it is so in most states. Large scale fraud would be quite difficult to pull off. An argument can be made for voter suppression as well as the occasional one-off fraudulent ballots but a machine wiping out 100K votes? Not so much.
I too listened to The Focus Group podcast yesterday while walking my local park. I felt like screaming at the whiny D’s; WTF! The Biden presidency is 8+ months young and much correction-restoration is needed after the rape and pillaging of TFG’s presidency, so FTLOG have some patience!
Having written that, I’m wholly on board with Sarah & JVL’s criticisms about Democrats messaging and strategies.
I had no idea about what Raffensperger claimed regarding Stacey Abrams alleging voting machine shenanigans in GA; she went there, apparently, and that's not good. But what does it say about the current political environment, when a prominent Democratic politician makes such claims and relatively informed folks like me aren't even aware of them, but the standard-bearer of the GOP makes such claims and it takes over the entire party and its voters, by like 90% margins?