Quote:
Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop
The way for Democrats to win elections is to reframe what they're about so that white grievances aren't so salient. I think this is another way of saying that Democrats lose when they make an election about competence (HRC, Dukakis) because while everyone is generally in favor of competence, no one really cares to vote that way, and other issues (say, Willy Horton) dominate. If Democrats can find issues to run on that have a real salience to ordinary Americans, they can win. For Obama in '08, one of these was health care, and another was Iraq. On this view, you can think that neoliberalism's agenda of targeted tax breaks and retraining is the best thing since sliced bread, and yet no one turns out to vote for sliced bread either.
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I don't disagree. But in '08 you got an expanded base because black people showed up in record numbers. The trick to what you stated above is finding what is salient to
all types of ordinary Americans, which necessarily means that you have to include some of the things that make up the broad spectrum of what so many dismiss as "identity politics." And there's the danger. Because fragile whites apparently can't stand it.
TM
