The Frustrating, Post-Obama Democratic Party

Ok, let's be honest- Hillary Clinton's messaging didn't work. The identity politics that her campaign ran on, the assumption that you could just talk to the groups you thought you'd win and you would win the election, was wrong. They took all the wrong lessons from President Obama's victories, namely in the fact that they underrated his appeals to blue-collar voters when he defined Mitt Romney as the guy who fired you and closed your factory, and when he promised to address the Great Recession in 2008. You have to talk broad economics in this country, that is how you win.

Can we be honest here though- Bernie Sanders' message is a loser too. You cannot pretend that identity politics don't exist, or that talking about women's issues, civil rights issues, and issues that are unique to people-of-color are some sort of distraction that wastes our time and energy. The Republican Party ran on identity politics in 2016, and it worked for them. This isn't an optional thing, people in America want to know how your platform is actually going to help them.

What Donald Trump did well was he stopped listening to the activists and Beltway conservatives. All that "small government" crap went by the wayside, and it was replaced with deportation forces, walls on the border, hyper-nationalism, tough guy talk, and talk of protecting "traditional" American life (including factories, mines, guns, and "white-ness"). He realized all that ideological stuff that motivates Beltway staffers, media, and activists is irrelevant in Ohio and Pennsylvania, and he put out the stuff that his voters want to see. Both parties literally have thousands of policies, and what Trump understood was that you put the policies out front and center that get people through the door. Democrats on the other hand spent so much of this election arguing niche policies, and pitting interest groups against each other for attention to pet causes that frankly, 90% of the electorate doesn't care about. Sure, they might poll well, in the abstract. I like lots of ideas that I actually don't care about every day.

Democrats don't have to argue over whether they should appeal to identity politics, or appeal to the economic interests of all voters. They can, and should, do both. They have done both, very recently. President Obama's re-election campaign spent plenty of time in Michigan talking about his auto-bailout, and the tens of thousands of jobs that it saved. We seem to forget how he both argued for marriage equality, immigration reform, and criminal justice reform on the one hand, and also slammed Mitt Romney for his time at Bane Capitol, called for an increase in the minimum wage, and talked about his efforts to stop the Great Recession back in 2009. President Obama put out the most attractive policies on both sides of the ledger, and sold people a bill of goods that they wanted, It's not one or the other.

There is one last point to put out there on this subject- stop equating campaigning and governing. While Donald Trump campaigned on all kinds of nationalistic and "white traditional" policy positions, that seems to have very little to do with his governing agenda when he takes office in a few weeks. Congress appears ready to cut taxes, repeal regulations on banks, housing sales, and energy, repeal Obamacare, and to gut out Medicare and Social Security. Are these the things Trump ran on? No, mostly not. These are the things Congress is going to do though, and Donald Trump is going to sign them into law. Democrats would be wise to learn the lesson from that- don't hamstring your candidate's ability to present an agenda to the public under the false pretense that you can't also do other things once in office.

In other words, yes you can have your cake and eat it too, just stop listening to all the wrong voices in this party.