Democrats Confront The Real Limits Of Their Messaging Problems

Washington, D.C. (October 16, 2021) Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, alongside leaders from across the Federal Government, including President Joe Biden, attends the Annual National Police Officers’ Memorial Service at the U.S. Capitol. (DHS Photo by Benjamin Applebaum)

Lately there’s been a LOT of digital ink spilled over the Democrats being in disarray, being underdogs, and virtually handing the House and Senate back to the Republicans next November. Were it not all so morbid it might be amusing. And you have to hand it to the media types – it does get the clicks flowing.

Problem is, it’s mostly smoke and mirrors, or as my esteemed OT colleague Dark Matter likes to intone — a perception problem. Take infrastructure. I’m pretty certain Donald Trump campaigned on new investment in infrastructure — and its support of blue collar jobs held by “real Americans.”. Many folks like to think he achieved something — he issued six executive orders directing the federal workforce to nibble around the edges of infrastructure. He proposed a $200 Billion package to congress in 2018 that he claimed would generate $1.3 Trillion in private sector investment, and even met with Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer in 2019. Yet there was never a bill to debate, and no real private sector investment. Promise Broken.

Along comes Joe Biden, and almost a year into his Presidency he’s gotten an actual by God bipartisan infrastructure bill passed. $550 B of that is new spending — the rest redirected funds — but it focuses on actual things that support actual communities that are sorely in need:

• $110 billion for roads, bridges and major infrastructure projects.
• $39 billion to modernize public transit
• $66 billion in passenger and freight rail
• $65 billion investment in improving the nation’s broadband infrastructure
• $17 billion in port infrastructure
• $25 billion in airports
• $65 billion to rebuild the electric grid
• $21 billion to clean up Superfund and brownfield sites, reclaim abandoned mine land and cap orphaned gas wells

That’s a lot of good, solid, middle America bread and butter there folks.

And yet to hear the media tell it, a Republican rout of the House and Senate are all but assured, even if Kevin McCarthy gets out of his own way and manages to not destroy his own caucus because they voted for things that might benefit their constituents.

So, what gives? Why the long media faces? And what if anything should Democrats do about it?

For starters I’d point them to my longtime friend and former OT mentor Mike Dwyer. His own take — now an entire administration old — on how bad the left mismanages their messaging to the right is still very salient:

They want quality jobs, but they do not want to have to move to cities to obtain them. Nor do they want their children to be forced to move away.

Dennis Sanders reminds us (still timely) that:

… Trump is President for a reason. (No, the answer is not Russia.) He is the Commander-in-Chief because both political parties had nothing to offer to an electorate that was upset and looking for someone, anyone to listen to them.

… Trump exposed something that we Americans are loathe to talk about — class. As hard as it is to talk about race in America, we like to pretend class doesn’t exist. But the fact is, it does, and it shows itself in how middle- and upper-income Americans look at low-income Americans, especially those who are poor and white. The well educated in American society tend to view the working class, especially the white working class with contempt.

… The Democrats, which were once known as the party of the working class, slowly but surely shed that title. The party became bifurcated party; a coalition of upscale whites and persons of color.

Where did the white working class go? You probably already know: the GOP.

… Trump won because he had a vision for the nation. It is a dystopian vision in reality, but it was a vision, nonetheless. The problem is that the president’s opponents don’t have a vision for the country. We don’t have an idea of what can give people hope. People who whose jobs may not be around tomorrow, people who see loved ones overdose on heroin, people who wonder if their children will do better than they do.

I quote those essays because their authors were right then and are still right. Joe Biden became president largely as the anti-Trump, with a healthy dose of middleclass white women recoiling for his misogyny, and the Democrats coalition (led by many many women of color) being willing to choose safe and sound over progress.

Even now the media and many here firmly believe that Joe Biden has no vision for America, and that liberals — on the best of days — are pesky flies to be swatted away by “real Americans”. We liberals have offered no real victories for the working man, so the thinking goes, and the unemployment rate now being 4.6% in a job seekers’ market is surely nothing to do with the President. Gas prices are SOARING (though nowhere near the Bush Administration highs and in line with Trump’s pre-pandemic high point). Inflation is already out of control (but historically it’s not)! Biden failed at getting us out of Afghanistan – though that seems to have been an argument of style, not substance as we did, actually withdraw. Another Trump campaign promise fulfilled by Joe Biden.

At the same time, however, Joe Biden is creating a different America. He’s creating an America where people are empowered to demand better wages, working conditions and benefits from their employers (HERE, HERE, HERE). He’s building an America where we actually spend the people’s money on the people’s needs – as that list above makes quite clear. He’s getting shots in arms by deploying the vaccine Donald Trump paid to develop, and so case counts are coming down — which means we will get to our new normal. And his Administration is fully cooperating (if too slowly IMHO) in Congress’s investigation of the coup on January 6th.

What he’s not doing is messaging this the way Trump did. He’s not rage tweeting about how few Republicans voted for the infrastructure bill. He’s not forcing his caucus to strip the committee assignments of those on the progressive left who fought to keep this bill and the Build Back Better plan from shrinking. He’s not perpetuating lies about the election.

And I don’t want him or Democrats to start doing any of those things. But maybe – maybe – they could grab some midwestern Democrats from the House and Senate who aren’t in the Squad and have those members be the face of announcements of the bill. Maybe he could get them, union presidents, and underpaid striking workers to attend a Rose Garden address touting the benefits of the infrastructure bill to ordinary Americans. Maybe Joe Manchin — having gotten this bill voted on separately and gotten the BBB plan negotiated down really close to his topline number — should be arm twisted to do some pressers on how good the infrastructure bill will be for West Virginia, and thus how good it will be for the rest of the U.S.

Maybe. But I’m not holding my breath.