"A party actively engaged in shaping opinion can make the public blame the president for an oil disaster he had nothing to do with; a party that shirks these obligations can inadvertently help a dishonest president brush off a credible allegation of child rape."
This on stilts on acid from Hell. Dems have to stop asking the public how it feels and reacting in response to that. They should TELL the public how THEY feel (and, by implication, how the public should feel), and offer leadership to respond accordingly. It's not complicated or subtle. And fa chrissakes, we're talking about child rape. If that, with regard to a POTUS (or anyone else), isn't "salient," what is? Or do they need more than forty years of Republican bad faith and mendacity to finally really get mad?
Article after article (rightly) talks about how most Dems need to work much harder at shaping public opinion but doesn’t really answer the question of how we get them to internalize this.
It appears to me too many remain too scared of offending some random voters to factually and clearly state what’s going on with this regime and the GOP, and not just as it pertains to Epstein.
The so called MSM isn’t going to do the heavy lifting for Dems the way they do for the GOP, Democrats are going to need to force them to report on it.
The MSM could be maneuvered into putting gimlet attention on the corruption and perfidy of the administration (and its acolytes) were a Congressional Democrat, or a group of them, J’accuse the degradation of the EPA and public infrastructure that results in the pollution of the Potomac (MAPA), the flagrantly dishonest assertion that the Epstein Files contain no evidence of wrongdoing by Trump**, and the rampant public grift by the president and his family. Say it loudly and factually again and again and again.
If Democrats cannot find a way to harness and ride the horses of the apocalypse this president and his party have placed into their hands, they have failed at such a fundamental level that they should be barred from public life.
"Come senators, congressmen, please heed the call
Don't stand in the doorway, don't block up the hall
For me, the chief error Trump made re Epstein was campaigning on the issue. This worked since the Clinton era through the 2024 election, because too many voters assumed that the Democrat-liberal-hippie-feminist-gay blob was the sole source of “sexual immorality” in the body politic. This has never been true and, increasingly, this has been recognized, but Dems must not let it peter out. So I agree with Brian Beutler here.
But we need to look a little at our side of this. Trump was nominally a Democrat when he palled around with Epstein. One of our side’s most iconic grassroots orgs, MoveOn, was literally named out of a desire to “move on” from the Lewinsky scandal and “get back to the ‘real issues’”. I remember thinking during the Lewinsky scandal, why can’t he just keep it in his pants? But Dems did not for the most part go that way. Moving On didn’t work.
I think the “Epstein Class” meme is the right meme for our time. And it’s also true.
"A party actively engaged in shaping opinion can make the public blame the president for an oil disaster he had nothing to do with; a party that shirks these obligations can inadvertently help a dishonest president brush off a credible allegation of child rape."
This on stilts on acid from Hell. Dems have to stop asking the public how it feels and reacting in response to that. They should TELL the public how THEY feel (and, by implication, how the public should feel), and offer leadership to respond accordingly. It's not complicated or subtle. And fa chrissakes, we're talking about child rape. If that, with regard to a POTUS (or anyone else), isn't "salient," what is? Or do they need more than forty years of Republican bad faith and mendacity to finally really get mad?
Article after article (rightly) talks about how most Dems need to work much harder at shaping public opinion but doesn’t really answer the question of how we get them to internalize this.
It appears to me too many remain too scared of offending some random voters to factually and clearly state what’s going on with this regime and the GOP, and not just as it pertains to Epstein.
The so called MSM isn’t going to do the heavy lifting for Dems the way they do for the GOP, Democrats are going to need to force them to report on it.
The MSM could be maneuvered into putting gimlet attention on the corruption and perfidy of the administration (and its acolytes) were a Congressional Democrat, or a group of them, J’accuse the degradation of the EPA and public infrastructure that results in the pollution of the Potomac (MAPA), the flagrantly dishonest assertion that the Epstein Files contain no evidence of wrongdoing by Trump**, and the rampant public grift by the president and his family. Say it loudly and factually again and again and again.
If Democrats cannot find a way to harness and ride the horses of the apocalypse this president and his party have placed into their hands, they have failed at such a fundamental level that they should be barred from public life.
"Come senators, congressmen, please heed the call
Don't stand in the doorway, don't block up the hall
For he that gets hurt will be he who has stalled
The battle outside ragin'...."
For me, the chief error Trump made re Epstein was campaigning on the issue. This worked since the Clinton era through the 2024 election, because too many voters assumed that the Democrat-liberal-hippie-feminist-gay blob was the sole source of “sexual immorality” in the body politic. This has never been true and, increasingly, this has been recognized, but Dems must not let it peter out. So I agree with Brian Beutler here.
But we need to look a little at our side of this. Trump was nominally a Democrat when he palled around with Epstein. One of our side’s most iconic grassroots orgs, MoveOn, was literally named out of a desire to “move on” from the Lewinsky scandal and “get back to the ‘real issues’”. I remember thinking during the Lewinsky scandal, why can’t he just keep it in his pants? But Dems did not for the most part go that way. Moving On didn’t work.
I think the “Epstein Class” meme is the right meme for our time. And it’s also true.