The key to winning in the fall isn't "moderation"...it's leadership and offering solutions.
We need to avoid looking at the question of how to campaign in the fall in terms of where on a spectrum the party should be. Instead, we should focus on crafting a message that reads to the American people as leadership and a program that connects with the times and the problems of the times.
The defining question of American politics and American economic policy in 2016 is this...who shall have the say?
The defining need is for an economic and social model that treats no one as expendable and which creates the sense of prosperity and security needed to make people give up tribalism and paranoia about "the Other".
Whatever we offer to the voters in the fall needs to address this question and this need.
It needs to reshape our discourse so that all of us, in whatever way possible, are heard and are treated with respect by the political and economic model we live in. It needs to reshape our lives so that no one is lying awake nights fearing that their home will be foreclosed or their apartment will be taken away from them by rent hikes, that their job will be shipped to Mumbai or Nogales(or that people in Mumbai or Nogales won't be driven by fear and poverty to try to compete for jobs here).
Addressing those sets of fears is essential to ending the cycle of backlash politics that keeps racism, sexism, homo-and-trans phobia, Islamophobia and antisemitism alive in this country...because that backlash cannot be stopped until everyone is shown that a gain for someone else is always going to be a loss for them(in truth, there are very few times that a gain for someone else is actually a loss for the people who fear the other, but the specter of that loss is what keeps the backlash alive and what keeps us from building the mass majority coalition for justice for all that this country desperately needs).
If we want to win, we need to address that, and we will be rewarded at the polls for doing so, because we will look like a party of leaders by making that effort.
The person who wins the election this fall will be the person who can do
