General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: James Carville is speaking the hard truth [View all]EarlG
(21,934 posts)Democrats have never not had a messaging problem (I'll say with the exception of Barack Obama in 2008).
It seems to me that that's because Republican voters simply do not care when their elected officials lie to them -- in fact, they find it comforting. So a Republican voter can be sold on any bullshit message that their politicians want to sell. Al Gore invented the Internet! John Kerry abandoned his swift boat colleagues! Hillary Clinton something something email server and kidnapping children!
Democratic voters don't like to be lied to by their leaders, and won't buy into a campaign built on lies. So right there, the GOP has an advantage, because as the old saying goes, "A lie can travel around the world and back again while the truth is lacing up its boots."
Any discussion of messaging and how Democrats are bad at it needs to start with the understanding that we're already fighting with one hand tied behind our backs.
That said, I like Carville, but the fact is that by complaining about "wokeness" he himself is buying into GOP framing. Older Democrats will hear what he's saying and think, "Carville is right, I don't know what this wokeness stuff is all about but it sure seems like something the Republicans are making fun of a lot." Younger Democrats -- who understand in their guts that "wokeness" is just another word for "empathy" -- will read it and wonder why some old has-been is telling them what language to use. All this discussion does is drive further inter-party division.
So what bothers me a bit about pieces like this is that Carville should be using his time to knock down these BS Republican talking points, not reinforce them. It should be easy enough for a poltical maven like him to flip this argument around and talk about how Republicans have no empathy. But he didn't do that.
In fact, I did find it rather ironic that in an interview in which he complains about Democrats' failure to frame things properly, he says his colleagues won't speak up, "because theyll get clobbered or canceled." Note how he just casually uses another piece of Republican framing ( "canceled" ) without even thinking about it.
Edit: I'm going to add to this post because I also want to propose a solution. The solution is simple: Counterattack, Counterattack, Counterattack.
You don't fight this:
REPUBLICANS: "Wokeness is a problem! Cancel culture is a problem! Political correctness is a problem!"
With this:
CARVILLE: "Wokeness is a problem. Cancel culture is a problem. Political correctness is a problem."
And again, a maven like Carville should know this. He could have easily sidestepped these questions, and come back to trash the GOP up and down for their racism, hatred, and general lack of empathy. Instead, he decided that he wanted to use this platform to publicly ponder the merits of the GOP approach and how we Democrats are failing to tailor our response to better meet their needs. Which to be honest doesn't seem a million miles away from the "Faculty lounge politics" he's also complaining about.