Jeet Heer, The Nation - While the disarray of the Republicans should delight progressives, the prospect for Democrats is no brighter. Democrats under the leadership of Chuck Schumer in the Senate and Hakeem Jeffries in the House have adopted the strategy advocated by James Carville, a consultant who last won an election in the Bill Clinton era: “roll over and play dead” in order to “allow the Republicans to crumble beneath their own weight and make the American people miss us.”
In theory, Democrats could “play possum” (to use another colorful Carville colloquialism) and just win by default in the midterms as the Donald Trump crashes the economy and alienates America’s traditional allies. But winning by default gives you no clear identity as a party and only reinforces the sense that Democrats are feckless, opportunistic, and weak. In truth, the “strategic retreat” advocated by Carville and presently being carried out by Schumer and Jeffries is leading to the party’s sending out wildly conflicting messages that only confuse voters. In response to Donald Trump’s first address to Congress, Representative Al Green of Texas staged a forceful act of resistance that got him ejected by the House and censured on Thursday. Ten Democrats in the House joined in the censuring, as my colleague Joan Walsh noted with dismay. Conversely, the official response to Trump’s address was given by Michigan Senator Elissa Slotkin, whose weak-tea attempt to win over moderate Republicans by praising Ronald Reagan replicated the failed strategy of Kamala Harris’s centrist campaign.
The upshot of this confused messaging is that the vast majority of voters rightly feel like Democrats are offering no real challenge to Trump. As Politico reports:
Voters still have a sour view of Democrats six weeks after President Donald Trump and Republicans swept into Washington with control of all branches of the federal government, according to a new poll.
A plurality of voters—40 percent—said the Democratic Party doesn’t have any strategy whatsoever for responding to Trump, according to the survey by the liberal firm Blueprint that was shared first with POLITICO. Another 24 percent said Democrats have a game plan, but it’s a bad one. A paltry 10 percent said that the party has a solid technique for dealing with Trump. And that’s coming from a Democratic outfit’s survey. More
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