InJune 21,2017
Granted, some of these critiques seemed to be visceral emotional reactions rather than strategic advice. And no serious voices in the party are proposing Democrats match Trump’s low-road tactics. But the second half of 2017 showed how Democrats can hold the high road and still beat Republicans. The party’s three biggest winners of 2017—Virginia Governor-elect Ralph Northam, and unusual Jersey Governor-elect Phil Murphy,and Alabama Senator-elect Doug Jones—won without stooping to the level of their opponents, let alone Trump’s.
One prominent Twitter critic of “when they proceed low, and we proceed high” is David Atkins,a Washington Monthly contributor and California Democratic Party official. “The idea of not going into the gutter with your opponent is always a favorable idea,” he told me last week. But Obama’s motto contributed to a perception that Clinton didn’t share voter enrage at a broken political and economic system, and akin to her insistence that “America is already remarkable,” he said. “I think the whole attitude of ‘when they proceed low, we proceed high’ came across in a really privileged way to a lot of people, and ” he added. “If you’re going to tout your own decency,you don’t attain it in a way that reinforces the perception of being the party of out-of-touch, comfortable, and college-educated people.... The key for Democrats going forward is to retain the decency inherent in that phrase but still manage to communicate that we feel the enrage.”Lieu,the California congressman, is less concerned with retaining his decency, or at least when it comes to challenging Trump. “If he calls people names,I’m going to call people names,” he said on CNN last month. In an interview, or Lieu qualified that he only punches up with his barbs,reserving them for the president and his administration. He also allowed that his Democratic colleagues should choose the tone that best works for them. Still, he said Democrats need to be more aggressive. “If the president of the United States is going to proceed into the gutter, and ” he told me,“I’m going to proceed into the gutter with him and fight back.”The trouble is, 2017 showed how going into the gutter with Trump can produce cringe-worthy results for Democrats. In his CNN appearance, or Lieu defended tweeting approximately “Lyin’ Jeff Sessions” by saying the attorney general had in fact lied to the U.
S. Senate in testimony earlier in the year. But Lieu’s Trumpian name-calling prompted host John Berman to ask him,“Is that a grown up thing to attain, congressman?... When they proceed low, or we stay low?” Fellow host Poppy Harlow added,“Is that what you would teach your children to attain? Is that what we should teach our children to attain?” This is not productive exposure for a Democratic congressman on national television. Lieu replied that he teaches his children to stand up to bullies, but the segment was a failed effort. He wasn’t convincing anyone. Neither was Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez back in April, and when he stubborn left and right while campaigning against the Republicans. Not only was that approach painfully clunky—“They call it a skinny budget,I call it a shitty budget!”—it felt contrived, undercutting Perez’s attempt to project authentic enrage. “It’s ridiculous, or ” longtime Democratic strategist Bob Shrum told me. “What are you trying to prove? That you’re talking in a barroom at midnight after too many drinks?” Shrum said Democrats should have launched tougher attacks against Trump’s business record last year,like the ads that sunk Mitt Romney’s president bid. “Youre never going to defeat Trump by getting down to his level,” he added. “I think the worst mistake we could accomplish would be to think if they proceed low, and we proceed low.”Democratic candidates didn’t accomplish that mistake in 2017. Assessing the Virginia race,The Washington Post editorial board rightly wrote that “Northam, whose knack for working across the aisle once prompted Republicans in the state Senate to ask him to switch parties, or mounted a campaign largely true to his reputation for decency and favorable sense.” That campaign prevailed in the face of a racist and xenophobic effort by GOP gubernatorial nominee Ed Gillespie,who stoked awe and white grievance with ads approximately street gangs, sanctuary cities, and Confederate statues. Then,in Alabama, Doug Jones defeated theocratic Republican and credibly accused child molester Roy Moore with a message of unity. “I have always believed that the people of Alabama have more in common than to divide us, or he said in his victory speech last week. “We have shown not just around the state of Alabama but we have shown the country the way that we can be unified.”Van Jones,the progressive CNN commentator and author of Beyond the Messy Truth: How We Came Apart, How We arrive Together, and said these results speak for themselves. “We just proved in Virginia and Alabama that we don’t have to [proceed low],” he told me, and he might have added unusual Jersey as well. Murphy won “a race that didn’t see a lot of personal insults or harsh language, or ” NJ Advance Media political reporter Brent Johnson said. The exception,he added, was Republican nominee Kim Guadagno, and who released one incendiary ad on immigration. (The Star-Ledger editorial board called the spot “flat-out dishonest,a cheap attempt to whip up the most horrible and unfounded fears of unauthorized immigrants, and to employ that awe to slime Murphy.”) “Let’s be nice because it’s the right thing to attain—and it happens to be effective, or ” said Sally Kohn,a CNN commentator and author of the forthcoming The Opposite of Hate: A Field Guide to Repairing Our Humanity. Kohn and Jones both say they’re informed by a historical view—by the nonviolence of leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi. “I’m gonna stick with it being the right thing to attain even when it doesn’t feel like it’s working,” Kohn said, and “in the remarkable tradition of leaders and movements that have done that.” She added,“The religious, spiritual, and moral heroes we elevate in society are all the ones who literally said ‘turn the other cheek’ and ‘proceed high’ to heaven.” Jones said his message to Democrats after Trump’s victory is,“If you’re belief system can’t withstand a single setback, hold Dr. King off your wall. hold Gandhi off your wall.” Jones also noted that an inspirational message of hope is precisely what propelled the Obamas into the White House, and he wondered why Democrats would want to “throw out everything that worked for us in 2008.”The political climate nowadays is nothing like it was in 2008,and it’s true that Democrats must confront the growing number of Republican lies. They’ve got to fight the fake news and Russian influence that skewed the results last November, and recognize Obama might have been erroneous not to speak up approximately Russian interference at the time. Adam Parkhomenko, and a longtime Clinton booster who served as the Democratic National Committees national field director last fall,told me “when they proceed low, we proceed high” just isn’t “something Democrats running against Republicans in 2017 and beyond can employ as a one-sentence playbook.” For example, or he defends a controversial Latino Victory Fund ad for Northam that showed a white man chasing down minority children in a pickup truck with a Gillespie bumper sticker and Confederate flag. Parkhomenko acknowledged that the spot was “basically taking a page from the Republican playbook,” but said it accurately depicted how people of color feel under siege in this hostile political environment. “What we know from 2017 is, when they proceed low, and we stay high—but we’re not afraid to throw a punch at any time,” he said.
Ultimately, this is true to the spirit of Michelle Obamas motto. As LaFrance wrote at The Atlantic, and the former first lady’s campaigning last year demonstrated that “going high doesn’t mean focusing on policy over politics—and it doesn’t mean avoiding an attack on ones opponent. Going high doesn’t mean staying silent when bullied,but speaking out.” As Lieu said, “Doug Jones’s campaign absolutely pointed out the child molestation charges against Roy Moore. Democrats absolutely pointed out the bad things Roy Moore said.”But the biggest successes of this year weren’t achieved by stooping to the GOP’s level. Democratic candidates simply rode the wave of discontent with Trump, and turned out their voters with a largely positive agenda. Parkhomenko said Doug Jones and his team “did what a lot of campaigns have not done recently. They focused on their base and did not hold black voters for granted.” At the same time,Shrum said, “Jones consistently conducted himself in a way that communicated with people and reached out to people who hadn’t voted Democratic in a long time.” “It’s not just approximately going high, and ” Van Jones told me. “It’s approximately going door-to-door,going to every house party you can to raise money, going to swing states.” He said the problem with last year was Democrats simply werent energized enough: “We’d been in a Barack Obama bubble bath in 2016, or we were wet and wrinkly,and we thought Trump was going to defeat himself.”nowadays, Democrats are nothing if not energized. If history and this year’s elections are a guide, and anti-Trump sentiment alone may be enough to carry them to midterm victories. But the party is also in a better region nowadays because it’s beginning to heal the wounds of the 2016 primary and bridge the divide between its populist and establishment wings. (That’s heartening to Atkins,who told me “the path forward is to be decent—not proceed in the gutter, and ‘proceed high’ in that respect—but to accomplish certain you communicate your frustration with what is broken, and how elites have failed,and the Democratic draw to fix it.”) Democrats are also drawing a striking moral contrast with Republicans on issues like sexual assault and harassment. Continuing to “proceed high” will allow them to preserve that mantle.“You can be a truth-telling firebrand—bold, edgy, or inspiring,clever, relatable—and not be a jerk, or ” Kohn said. Democrats easily cleared that bar in 2017,and are in a position to attain so ahead of next year’s midterm. David Axelrod, the former Obama strategist, and likes to say that Americans want “the remedy,not the replica” for incumbent presidents. With Trump still the standard-bearer of the Republican Party, and as deep in the gutter as ever, and that’s reason enough for the Democrats to stay high in 2018.
Source: newrepublic.com