Democrats trotted out a stunning lack of self-awareness at the House Democratic Caucus retreat in Philadelphia today, continuing their emphasis on “middle class politics” and testing the waters with a messaging strategy that will likely drive their 2016 campaigns.
From CBS News:
“To state the obvious, the past six years have been really, really hard for this country,” said Biden.“And they’ve been really tough for our party. Just ask [former DCCC chair] Steve [Israel],” continued Biden. “They’ve been really tough for our party. But together – and together — we made some really, really tough decisions — decisions that weren’t at all popular, hard to explain.”
Together! TOGETHER, damn you!
It’s telling that Biden focuses on the “together” aspect of the fact that Democrats did a terrible job—if Obama goes down, they’re all going down with him? Is that the goal? The past six years have been tough not because people don’t understand what’s happening in this country, but because they can see it reflected in their lives, and their pocketbooks, and they don’t like it.
Americans used their votes in 2014 to give the administration a poor review, but apparently Obama missed that memo:
“Even though their policies haven’t quite caught up, their rhetoric is starting to sound pretty Democratic,” Obama said of Republicans at the House Democratic retreat on Thursday. “I consider imitation the highest form of flattery.”He added that Democratic policies have been successful where Republican positions have failed.“What we know is that middle-class economics works,” he said. “That’s pretty rare where you have two visions, a vigorous debate, and then you test who’s right. And the record shows that we were right.”
This morning I wrote about Democrats’ messaging strategy for 2016, and their increasing need to dig themselves out of the hole they dug in 2014 before they begin to re-target voters in the run up to 2016.
Behold, the digging.
It’s this type of messaging—this, you don’t understand, you’re better off now, we know it hurts but we can make it better—that Republicans will have to not just debunk, but counter. It’s condescending, but by all appearances, Democrats are comfortable with the path Obama and Biden have chosen.
h/t the Weekly Standard
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