Matt Novak: I really think it’s because they’re operating from a centrist playbook that worked for Bill Clinton in the 1990s and hasn’t been updated for 21st century sensibilities.

I really think it’s because they’re operating from a centrist playbook that worked for Bill Clinton in the 1990s and hasn’t been updated for 21st century sensibilities.

Why are Democratic strategists always so wrong?

I love going on TV and talking about how my opponents' crimes don't move voters instead of pointing to polls that show it absolutely did, in fact, move a bunch of voters

I don't know if James Carville is actually influential, but he still gets attention, thirty years after he was last connected to a successful campaign.

The thing about that guy is he has a distinctive voice and he looks like an alive skeleton so people just want to put him on TV. It doesn't matter if his ideas are bad he just keeps having a platform cause like, lookit him go

"Biden is like a skint possum on a filé gumbo farm: if Professor Longhair tells you it's raining, you best be bringing pot liquor to the levee. And that's why the Dems should support a nationwide abortion ban."

Pitch fkn perfect

Carville calling the House Speaker a "skinflint" like it's some kind of devastating slam & every single voter not old enough to remember 1976 in vivid detail has to run to Urban Dictionary to find out what that sex act means

Family Guy nailed it 25 years ago when the show was funny: “Did somebody open the Ark of the Covenant?”

He's still good copy.

The thing is it only worked for Clinton. It was a failure at the state level. It was a failure and the congressional level. And, considering it was the mode for Democratic presidential campaigns from 1980-2004, then again in 2016, it was a failure at the presidential level.

Not only were all the people who are now running campaigns and strategy shaped by those of that era, the strategists from that era won’t go away

I think it's more this. There's a ton of talent at the state level

Chasing money from major donors combined with contempt for the people explains a bunch of Democratic Party consultants being wrong.

A lot of Biden’s generation specifically recall Clinton as this breakthrough after a few decades of genuinely being locked out of power. The 70s and 80s basically convinced them that the country is actually conservative and triangulation works

I mean, they never get fired, so there's that.

100%. It's treating society and the world in the same way the Fallout universe was preserved with America's "Atomic Age" Post-WW2 aesthetically but instead it's Fukuyama's "End of History" and 1997. I mean, fucking Seinfeld is in the god damn news again... NEWT GINGRICH STILL IMPACTS OUR POLITICS.

I do feel bad if there’s like one person with relevant ideas who snuck their way onto the staff. Good luck changing Biden’s mind about anything, he thinks he’s having lunch next Tuesday with Golda Meir

I also never forget the oligarch/power elite types who have always ruled behind the scenes own people in both parties and the DNC leadership, both nat'l & state level, has always seemed to me to be more controlled by those forces than the electorate.

Not a single person involved seems to have considered that the Clinton playbook just let the right go further to the right without electoral consequences.

This and Carter. He talked about sacrifice in the face of climate change and equity - and Reagan promised the equivalent of coke orgies. America chose the coke orgy. We always do. So all these politicians still seem allergic to any progressivism while embracing the first win we had after that.

YUP

Yes this sounds right

Plausible theory. What I think they are also getting wrong is this assumption that certain things are self-evident to the American people. Before Biden was elected, all economists predicted huge problem with inflation was going to occur coming out of the pandemic. Not “Biden” inflation.