{"id":13141,"date":"2022-02-20T03:30:35","date_gmt":"2022-02-20T11:30:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/?p=13141"},"modified":"2022-02-20T03:37:49","modified_gmt":"2022-02-20T11:37:49","slug":"can-dems-dodge-doomsday-the-new-york-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/?p=13141","title":{"rendered":"“Can Dems Dodge Doomsday?”, The New York Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

By <\/span>Maureen Dowd,\u00a0<\/span>Opinion Columnist, Feb. 20, 2022<\/p>\n

\n
\n

It may be a TikTok world, but sometimes old hacks know best.<\/p>\n

James Carville helped Bill Clinton get elected against stiff odds. David Axelrod helped Barack Obama get elected against stiff odds. And Stan Greenberg was the first to identify the fateful trend of Reagan Democrats.<\/p>\n

All three Dems are speaking out with startling candor<\/a> about the impending Repubocalypse. Many Americans are fed up. The jumbled Covid response has eroded an already shaky trust in government. Inflation is biting. War is looming. Things feel out of control. People are anxious and reassessing their lives. Democrats have to connect with that.<\/p>\n

The Democrats are stepping all over themselves. And Republicans are doing all they can to prevent the Democrats from accomplishing anything, and then are trashing them for not doing anything. Voters like to punish the people in power. So if the Democrats don\u2019t figure it out, Jim Jordan is going to be running the House and pushing investigations of Biden and Hillary. They can\u2019t quit her.<\/p>\n

Exhausted, confused, isolated and depressed Americans are not buying the Democratic line that things are better than they look.Biden\u2019s superpower was supposed to be empathy, but nobody\u2019s feeling it.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\n
\n

\u201cHe is depriving himself of his strongest assets: empathy and an identification with the day-to-day lives of people,\u201d Axelrod said. \u201cOne of Biden\u2019s strengths is that, at his best, he speaks the language of America, not Washington. But he has been speaking more in the voice of government officials than he has of Scranton Joe. He needs to get back there.<\/p>\n

\u201cGary Hart told me the smartest thing I ever heard in politics: \u2018Washington is always the last to get the news.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Axelrod understands, from his days in the White House, that the Biden team is frustrated because they feel the public doesn\u2019t appreciate their achievements, and they don\u2019t understand why. Biden\u2019s advisers are urging him just to sell harder and people will get it. Axelrod disagrees: \u201cYou cannot persuade people if their lived experience is telling them something different. We\u2019ve been through hell in America and around the world.\u201d<\/p>\n

In a Times opinion piece<\/a>, Axelrod said Biden should avoid \u201coff-key\u201d triumphalism in his State of the Union address, and remember the country is traumatized.<\/p>\n

Carville, still a Ragin\u2019 Cajun, took time out from his Mardi Gras planning to reiterate points he has made in a Vox interview and elsewhere: Democrats should not be defined by their left wing or condone nutty slogans like \u201cDefund the police.\u201d They should work not to seem like an \u201curban, coastal, arrogant party\u201d indulging in \u201cfaculty lounge politics\u201d that appeal to reason rather than emotion and use \u201cwoke\u201d words like \u201cLatinx.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cSeventy percent of the people in San Francisco tried to warn us,\u201d he said of the battle among Democrats that ended up with voters firing<\/a> three far-left school board members who mandated a long break from in-person learning during the pandemic and who wanted to rechristen schools named after Abraham Lincoln and George Washington.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n