2016 Postmortem
In reply to the discussion: What would re-establish trust here? [View all]Ken Burch
(50,254 posts)Our ads, for whoever we nominate next, need to emphasize the platform and what if offers, and need to do so AGAIN AND AGAIN AND AGAIN in order for the message to get through to people. Our candidates' stump speeches need to do the same, and if necessary we should buy tv time for our candidates to make nationally televised versions of those speeches now and then, especially towards the end of the campaign.
In order to make sure our fall campaigns do that, we need people running them who don't work from the assumption that the majority of the country is to our right and that we have to treat anything progressive in our "offer" as something to be embarrassed about and try to hide. For too many years the "braintrust" has run fall campaigns on the assumption that we can't win the argument, that little we propose can ever actually be popular.
This mindset needs to be changed, and that's one of the reasons a lot of us have called for a thorough personnel housecleaning at the DNC, the DSCC and the DCCC(and that's a lot of freaking acronyms to clean out).
We have good things to offer and we need to SOUND like we think they are good things.