Guardian: It's time for Democrats to go low [View all]

[RainCaster]

This is from The Guardian.

It’s time for Democrats to go low

Democrats should make the next four years of Republican governance as grueling and painful as possible

by Peter Rothpletz

What the 2024 election results made clear is that the Obama coalition is dead. If Democrats are to have any shot at reclaiming power, so too must be the niceties and mores of the Obama era.

Yes, Democrats must get mean – ruthlessly, bitterly mean. This is not to say, however, that they need merely to cast aside the former first lady’s once-famous, now-infamous messaging mantra. No, what I prescribe is not just a new approach to political discourse but a new theory of opposition party politics.

Trumpsim has corrupted America in myriad ways, but one of the most obvious is how voters now expect lawmakers and surrogates to be truly vicious cultural warriors for them. One can see manifestations of this in Congresswoman Nancy Mace’s deranged bullying of Congresswoman-elect Sarah McBride, the endless and deliberate mispronunciation of Kamala Harris’s first name, and the fact that Marjorie Taylor Greene is one of the top fundraisers in the House of Representatives.

This phenomenon also exists on the left. The coffers poured open for Jasmine Crockett following a tet-a-tet with the aforementioned Taylor Greene, during which Crockett mocked her colleague’s “bleach-blonde bad-built butch-body”. And one could argue the strongest period of the Harris-Walz campaign – at least in terms of Democratic enthusiasm – was during the “weird” and “couch” sagas of Brat summer.

There is far more to read at the link, and it's worth your time.