So Unindicted Co-conspirator Bottomless Pinocchio wants to interrupt your Tuesday night Prime Time with an address that a growing number of people say should not be carried at all on the Broadcast Networks unless vetted and fact checked (the very foundation of it is a racist lie). I guess it’s a bridge too far even for him to get in the way of the Tide and the Tigers who would roll over him like a ratings juggernaught.
It won’t bother me at all because I’ll be watching Oak Island where last week we discovered what might be the 90 Foot Stone in the basement of a Halifax Book Bindery. Priorities folks.
As his policy deteriorates and crumbles by the minute I found these remarks by Bill Curry (I admit some ‘homeboy’ sentiment, I voted for him twice) instructive-
(T)he Clinton shutdown – which really should be remembered as the Gingrich shutdown and was perceived that way overwhelmingly at the time. Polls showed that by 20 and 30 point even margins, peopled blamed the Republicans squarely, as they should have. And it was, Gingrich thought at the outset, a really good idea for him to shut down the government. Notice the first parallel to our present moment, that Trump, like Gingrich, seems to feel that this is an idea that’s very much in his interest and for some of the same reason that it excites his base.
And the public … Clinton had been so far down when Clinton hired me after the 1994 election, I had lost a close race for governor in Connecticut, Clinton called and asked if he thought there was any chance that he could come back and win, and I said sure, not really having an opinion on the subject at the time. But Clinton was way down. Two things happened. He did very well with the Oklahoma City bombing and that bumped him up. People thought that he demonstrated empathy, some character in that. And then came the event that made his re-election, and that was the shutdown. And people decided that Clinton had acted as an adult, that he demonstrated maturity and reason.
(T)here’s a tendency sometimes to underestimate our base in terms of what we’re willing to talk about. And again, these trade, immigration issues, every Democratic president nominated in my adult lifetime has supported untrammeled free trade agreements. Most of our base is against it. The debate within our party has only begun in the last couple of years, and we’re still not at a point where we’re capable of engaging. So this international trade debate and the international immigration debate, there’s been too much silence.
The good news, I suppose, about this shutdown is it’s taking the two biggest leaders in our party, Schumer and Pelosi, and forcing them to engage and to begin to make arguments, like the one we talked about earlier, that begin to tell people the real story of border security and what it means. And so, I think Democrats – this is my constant message Democrats, is that policy precedes message. First you figure out what you believe and then how to tell people about it. We need to be better at making a brief. We need to be better at arguing the facts. The good news is the public opinion on almost all these great divides, on almost all these issues, is on our side already. We don’t have to create a market for it, we have to address it and we have to put a blueprint on the table that shows people we can fix those problems.