Good Advice

"Good advice costs nothing and it's worth the price" ~ Allan Sherman


As luck would have it, I finished reading Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign by Jonathan Allen and Aime Parnes a couple of days before Jon Ossoff's quest to be the only politician in America that didn't vote for himself crashed and burned.

I enjoyed reading it. It had a happy ending. Ha. Ha.

Seriously, the book documents the reason why Clinton lost: Clinton.

Hillary Clinton has been around for a long time and the reason for her wanting to be President basically boiled down to "I Want To Be The First Woman President and You Owe Me".

Plus, one of her campaign honchos was a "numbers guy". We all work with a "numbers guy". The guy that looks at the numbers and tells you "what they mean".  Most of the time, the interpretation of the numbers are "wrong".

I thought of that during the Handel-Ossoff race. The numbers guys were telling the Democrats the 6th District was ripe for the picking because Trump only won it by one percentage point. They didn't add this:  Tom Price won 65 per-cert of the vote, which means there was plenty of people that didn't vote for Trump voted for Price.

This meant a Democrat would have an uphill battle to win The 6th District.

However, the national Democratic party took it to mean you could run a very young political cipher who didn't even live in the district and win as long as you pour buckets of money (30 million dollars) into the district.

Oops. It didn't work out. Give me 30 million dollars and I could get my cat, Gracie Manis, elected to Congress.

It reminded me of what Dave Barry said about Democrats: "They're the kind of  people who'd stop to help you change a flat, but would somehow manage to set your car on fire."

Unlike most of the people on my side of the river, I am not gloating over the Democrats' problem. Okay, maybe a little. I mean, they sort of deserve it. They always act like they're on the "right side of history" and they are genetically cooler than everyone else.

However, it is important for the country to have a strong two-party system. It is important for the Democrats to learn the lessons of the past couple of election cycles. The lessons are not: A) Yell louder and B) Cuss More.

I am here to give my friends in the Democratic Party some advice.

1)  Cut Nancy Pelosi loose.  Like it or not the face of your party is this San Francisco dingbat. She always looks like to me that she's lost her keys in her purse.

2)  Stop "The Resistance" mess. Trump is not an existential threat to anything except maybe himself. Trump has proven, time and time again, that he's his own worst enemy. Get out of the way and let him mess up. Plus, it is just silly to walk around dressed up as genitalia.

3)  Cool it with The Apocolypse.  This is the Democratic response to anything President Trump says:  "People will, literally, die".  Steve Goodman had a song about his dad that said, "He'd get all mad and start to shout, I knew what was coming and I tuned him out".   The Democrats are like that. They get mad and they shout people will die.  And people that do not live in Democratic strongholds tune them out.

4)  Come up with your own proposals.  A fair criticism of The Republicans is they had eight years to come up with a replacement for Obamacare and they didn't have one.  Well, Democrats don't have anything except the status quo on a whole list of items ranging from healthcare (keep Obamacare) to immigration (there's no problem).

5) Celebrities.  Democrats have always paraded their whoop-de-do show business friends around. From Lauren Bacall presenting her gams to Harry Truman to The Rat Pack and JFK to Jimmy Buffett wasting away again with Hillary Clinton, the Democrats have always had the cool celebrities. It just doesn't matter much to regular people.

 6)  People.  For a party that claims to be a party of "the people", they sure spend a lot of time throwing shade on folks.  They seem to only like a certain type of people. You know, usually, people from the East or West Coast who have gone to all of the right colleges and universities. They really need to get into contact with their inner Bubba.

7)  Speaking of Bubba, one of the things Democrats really need to do study Bill Clinton. He showed you how to win. Okay, sure he had (has) problems with his zipper, but the man knew how to win votes and get things done. Even if it meant working with icky Republicans.

Of course, The Democrats will come back. About eight years ago, magazines had cover stories proclaiming the end of The Republican party. The Republicans changed. Or they at least tried to. The Democrats should at least try.