No. of Recommendations: 12
So....after three weeks of Democratic and progressive efforts, a majority of people still either aren't aware of Project 2025 or have a favorable opinion of it? Not a great start.
Yes, as Democrats raise awareness of Project 2025 among Democrats, Actually it’s quite a good start. It’s how everything starts. You don’t start a movement among people who are opposed to that movement, you don’t sell sneakers to people who don’t run, and you don’t get people to oppose to the Vietnam war by starting with people who support the war. You start with people likely to support you, then you move to the middle, eventually even the other side
has to take a look and even better
have to respond . Once that happens you are winnng.
When Nixon said “I am not a crook” on national TV it was probably the first time a lot of his supporters said “Wow, enough people think he’s a crook that he has to deny it?”
The Right Wing echo chamber is terrific at this. Something starts on Fox, gets ping-ponged to the Wall Street Journal opinion columns, shows up in the New York Post and Washington Examiner, next thing you know the President is on the defensive in a Press Conference, and suddenly it’s all over main stream media.
Project 2025 is a chance to put Trump (MAGA) on the defensive. It is the richest target area MAGA has yet presented, and (unlike a slithery babble from a podium)
it’s all written down in black and white . ABSOLUTELY make them deny it, then make them deny it again, then flip a couple pages and make them deny that, and that, and that.
We’re in the time of hyper-aggressive politics. The West Wing days of comity and good fellowship are over.
Democrats Need to Wake Up From Their ‘West Wing’ Fantasy Ever since President Biden’s debate performance sucked Democratic leaders and political operatives into a looping vortex of panic, people have been debating how we got here and who is responsible. The president himself? His handlers? The media? All of the above, but I’d like to focus on a different factor: Aaron Sorkin.
A whole generation of political professionals is so enamored of “The West Wing,” Mr. Sorkin’s show about the travails of White House occupants, that they now suffer from what I think of as Terminal “West Wing” Brain.
The show portrays politics and policy not as ruthless powermongering pursued by nihilists but as a higher calling that flawed but idealistic people engage in from a place of civic pride. It depicts America as a place that is divided but that yearns for consensus, for the good of the country. Jed Bartlet, the fictional Democratic president, is often reaching across the aisle to a wrongheaded but often well-meaning Republican. It’s an attractive fantasy that bears little relation to the world we live in, where partisan animosity is about more than policy disagreements and is rarely resolved via civil debate.
Most voters will go to the polls in November not to vote for their guy but to vote against the other guy, a phenomenon known as negative partisanship. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/15/opinion/democra...
