Why is it that people in the leadership of the Democratic Party can't ever seem to run fast enough from a winning campaign theme, especially when it's, well, winning with actual voters? Don't they understand how the messaging game is played? The wingnuts sure do, and they've adhered to the same script for decades with bumper-sticker boilerplate like tax-and-spend liberals and burdensome regulations and gutting our military and Adam and Steve. And considering how stale most of their bromides are, they've had pretty good success winning elections with them. Because like it or not, that's how you win national elections in America: With easy-to-digest soundbites that don't require much analysis or thought to decipher and which appeal to universally held stereotypes about your opponents. Yes, this strategy is manipulative and cynical, and it treats voters as if they had the attention spans of five-year olds. It's also how you win fucking elections. Why is this so difficult for these people to understand?
Put another way: when you've got your opponent on the ropes, do you go for the knockout punch, or back off and let him recover his legs? Do you want to win, or continue to be derided for being such principled losers? In case you people haven't noticed, the other side is going to wage a billion-dollar scorched-earth campaign against the President and his party this summer. You'd better bring every brass knuckle and blackjack you can find to this fight---the other side doesn't play by Queensbury rules.
Notwithstanding the special added bonus that the Republican "war on women" also happens to be real. Women know this, and that's why they're flocking to Team Democrat. What, you want to give them a reason to stop caring about you and go away?
Then again, given the rosy health of our economy, perhaps they're convinced the President can run for reelection solely on his record. In which case they deserve to lose. Too bad the rest of us are going to be stuck in the same country.
---Vitelius
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