All three Democratic presidential losses in the Eighties were caused by centrism.

[Ken Burch]

240. Actually, yes.

This isn't a massively right-wing country. People will vote for progressive candidates when they combine both personal appeal and an ability to communicate their programs as practical solutions.

To get centrist voters, you don't HAVE to say "don't worry, I hate workers and the poor and protesters as much as you do". You get them by saying "yes, this will be change...and here's why we NEED change, and here's why it will work and be good for you".

Those who identify as "centrists" are actually driven mainly by pragmatism...they don't hate dreams, they just want to know how you can make the dreams into reality and how making them reality makes things better rather than worse.

Centrists aren't left-hating zealots...they just want to see the plan.

And voters don't like it when we send the message "If elected, I'll be as ugly-spirited as I think you are".

On poverty, for example, most centrist voters(as opposed to right-wing types)aren't lying awake nights cursing the poor for being "immoral and irresponsible". They know poverty is a problem and a blight on this nation, but they don't think what we've done in the past has helped(and, while it has helped some, it hasn't helped as much as it should have...a point people like Tom Hayden and others on the New Left were making as the War on Poverty programs were being implemented back in 1965).

You get them to commit to a new battle against poverty by linking it not to punishing poor people for acting in ways that anyone who lived without hope probably would act, but by creating real possibilities of breaking the cycle of poverty...not by saying "we're taking your benefits away, slut...go work at McDonald's"-an approach we all now know to be pointless since many people who work at fast-food franchises earn so little they are still eligible for social benefits)but by giving people in depressed areas practical training in rebuilding their hometowns and neighborhoods and then creating actual programs to let them do that...this would also be reparations for red-lining, since it was red-lining that caused urban poverty, and reparation to Appalachia for just deciding that the whole area should be left to die, and reparations to Native America for stealing the continent from them-maybe you wouldn't use those words, but that would be the concept.) And you seize derelict buildings wealthy landlords have deliberately kept derelict under "eminent domain" so that the people who live in those neighborhoods can go on living with them...so the areas can be revitalized without the current residents being forced to leave the only homes they've known.

The point is to use the language of practicality on all of this...not to stoop to what party strategists think is the LCD. It's a language male voters(and yes, white male voters)respond to.

That's the kind of thing I'm talking about.