Hack Dem Consultant’s Advice On Midterms: MORE COWBELL!

We’ll start, if for no other reason than it’s just too entertaining not to, with one of the best Saturday Night Live sketches of all time (how come they can’t do funny like this anymore?)…

Now even the cultural illiterates among our readers get the reference in the title.

Plus I trust you’re all suitably entertained. But there’s more, because we’re about to explore the unhinged delusion of the Democrat political class.

Doug Gordon is a neo-commie hack who runs Democrat political campaigns, and he just turned up with a column at Newsweek suggesting a strategy which isn’t quite novel given the Left’s reversals at the Supreme Court and the looming debacle the midterms promise to become.

Gordon says the answer to their political woes is…more cowbell!

In the hours and days after the Supreme Court ruling overturning Roe v. Wade, Democrats from President Joe Biden to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, as well as other elected Democrats from coast to coast, have echoed a similar message: Roeis on the line this November, and the path to undoing the damage the Supreme Court has done runs through the ballot box.

The message boils down to if you want to see the protections, rights, and freedoms that were taken by six extremists on the Supreme Court restored, vote for Democrats this November.

The conceit is that in this new post-Roe environment, it’s radicalism on the Republican side which animates the electorate.

Except the truly radical one is the position the Democrat political class has taken, which is that abortion has to be legal up until the trip down the birth canal begins. Less than one in five Americans is on board with that position, and it’s one which is exceptionally rare around the world. As Mollie Hemingway noted, when people don’t agree with your position, they’re probably not going to also agree that the position opposite yours is the radical one.

Particularly when this debate plays out against a backdrop of impending economic collapse everybody recognizes as having been brought on by Team Biden’s mismanagement of the currency, budgets, energy policy, the supply chain and other things, all of which the voters find more important than abortion.

Who among persuadable voters is going to be swayed by this?

Gordon goes further…

While the message is accurate, it is woefully insufficient. It also flies in the face of the reality of the last two years.

They still think they’ve got a messaging problem and not a substance problem. But this gets fascinating…

The truth is people did vote. In record numbers in the middle of a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic, more than 81 million voters delivered the White House to Joe Biden, whose popular-vote victory margin was larger than those of presidents Truman, Reagan, Clinton, George W. Bush, and Kennedy. Then, less than two months later, the people of Georgia defied all odds and delivered the Senate to Democrats too, giving Democrats full control of Washington for the first time in over a decade.

As a reward for voting, the agenda for which these voters voted in historic numbers has been largely stalled, or derailed completely, not by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) but rather by two Democratic senators more interested in grandstanding for the cameras than in getting things done. And voters have watched as the very ideology they soundly rejected is advanced by a Supreme Court hellbent on accomplishing through the courts what Republicans have failed to accomplish at the ballot box.

So it’s not the fact that Biden pulled out an election lots of Americans thought was stolen thanks to some pretty significant, and as it turned out, illegal, departures from state election law using COVID as an excuse for ballot harvesting and other chicanery, or that the Democrats managed miniscule majorities in both houses of Congress – actually losing seats in the House of Representatives – and nevertheless attempted to force a radical agenda through that bottleneck.

It’s Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, Democrats representing red states, who are at fault for not supporting the worst items of that agenda.

There’s more.

Voters rejected the very thing that has now happened. So, simply calling on people to just vote again not only rings hollow, it insults their intelligence.

Voters are not as stupid as some in Washington think they are. And a message that tells them to do the very thing they just did and expect a different result is not going to work.

This guy calls himself a political pro and he’s demanding that you believe the reason the country is circling the drain is Team Biden and the Dems on Capitol Hill haven’t gone far enough – and that this is what the voters were asking for in 2020.

Without question, history is stacked against Democrats this November. Since World War II, the party of the incumbent president in their first term has lost an average of 26 seats in the House and four seats in the Senate. Add in inflation, gas prices, and tremendous economic uncertainty, and the outlook for Democrats is particularly challenging.

See, the midterm blowout is just history. And the “economic uncertainty” just happened; it has nothing to do with bad economic policy at all. Inflation is an act of God. It has nothing to do with a presidential administration which throws mountains of cash out of helicopters to juice economic demand while regulating to death the suppliers of the goods and services that free cash is expected to buy, so their productivity takes a dive. Nobody’s really to blame for all that, you know.

And so these headwinds the Democrats face can’t possibly be self-generated.

Hilarious.

To hold on to power in Congress, Democrats are going to need historic turnout. And they’re not going to get that by asking voters to repeat a strategy that has failed to deliver.

Wait until you hear the strategy that he thinks would deliver.

For years, Republicans have been explicit with their voters: vote for us and we will use a take-no-prisoner approach to using every lever of power to advance the agenda. It has been a widely successful strategy for them. It has allowed them to do everything from pack the Supreme Court to pass former President Donald Trump‘s tax cuts for the ultra-wealthy with 50 votes in the Senate, instead of the usual 60.

Republicans play for keeps, and their voters know it. It is time for Democrats to play by the same playbook.

LOL. Has this guy ever heard of Bill Cassidy or John Cornyn? Play for keeps? The Republican establishment can’t wait to cut deals with the Democrats. They’re just so off-the-rails it isn’t even possible. The slightest belly rub you give these guys, you can get practically anything you want out of them and somehow Gordon thinks it’s take-no-prisoners?

It gets worse.

To win, Democrats must replicate the Republican strategy. Democrats need to drop the generic vote blue and “everything will be OK” message and make an explicit pact with voters: If you reward us with an even bigger majority, Democrats will get rid of the filibuster and end senators Joe Manchin and Krysten Sinema’s unlimited veto power over an agenda the vast majority of Americans support.

Democrats need to be clear that if voters deliver them a slightly expanded majority, they will codify Roe into law, pass universal background checks for gun purchases, restore voting rights, expand the Supreme Court to restore balance, and advance much-needed economic relief with 50 votes, not 60. It’s what the Republicans would do.

This is precisely the promise the Democrats tried to make into reality for pretty much all of 2021, and it got them a debilitating loss in Virginia and almost as bad of one in New Jersey. And running against Manchin and Sinema is probably not going to help turn any red-state Senate races (you don’t get a bigger Senate majority when Republicans knock out Sens. Warnock, Masto, Kelly and Hassan); it also probably doesn’t help Tim Ryan and John Fetterman.

The politico types like Gordon might think AOC-style democratic socialism is the new, cool hotness, but there are a lot of Democrat rank-and-file voters wondering what on earth happened to their party. I’m not sure how he thinks that the same bad policies yelled louder are supposed to get those voters out on Election Day.

In this moment of acute crisis, Democrats need to tell voters in very clear terms what their vote will mean and what Democrats will do with the power voters give them. Democrats need to be clear they will respond to the threat of the rise of extremism in the Republican Party, not with the same old failed playbook but with the urgency and raw political power the moment requires.

More urgency and raw political power? Like what? More care pregnancy centers firebombed? More unlawful arrests of political prisoners? He honestly doesn’t think those over-the-top tactics won’t hurt more than help, apparently.

Nor does he think that stupid stuff like that won’t also gin up voter turnout on the GOP side.

Six unelected people just overruled the will of the people and took away fundamental rights and freedoms from more than half the population, and they made it clear they’re just getting started. Now is not the time for politics as usual. Nor is it a time for the tired, stale, and generic messaging and strategies that helped get us to this place.

Simply asking voters to do the same thing they have done and expect a different result is not only the definition of insanity, it is a failed message and strategy.

Fundamental rights and freedoms. To kill another human being. All the Dobbs decision did was make state legislatures the fundamental deciders of abortion law, meaning that blue states might very well become even more permissive on abortion. So no, more than half the population didn’t lose fundamental rights or anything like that (abortion isn’t anyone’s fundamental right, and the attempt to fake it with Roe negatively colored Supreme Court jurisprudence for half a century).

And the Obama-style “fundamental transformation,” this muscular leftism in which trying to push through societal changes nobody on the other side can stomach? That’s what’s tired and stale. It was one thing when you had a front man the public wanted to like. You don’t have that. You have Joe Biden who has nobody’s trust, and you have Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer who are hated. You have to have some support to push things which are contentious if not downright unpopular, and they don’t have it.

Now you start to see why the Dems are in trouble. There isn’t much dexterity in this message of Gordon’s.

Here’s how he finishes…

Voters have done their job. They did so in 2018 when they gave Democrats the majority in the House of Representatives to be a check on the runaway Trump administration. And they did so again in 2020 in historic fashion to reject MAGA extremism and give the White House and Senate to Democrats.

Now it is time for Democrats to do their job.

Here’s hoping they listen to every word of this drivel. Doug Gordon might as well be Bruce Dickinson, and maybe one day when we look back at when the Democrat Party disintegrated we can call it the Cowbell Party.