Oh, I know, we're not supposed to "bash" Democrats, but there is such a thing as legitimate criticism. No one with the slightest combination of knowledge and objectivity would accuse Pelosi and Schumer of being effective communicators in the Age of Trump. Believe it or not, there are even whole articles about this:
Two years into the Trump presidency, the prominent Democrats who are called upon most frequently to speak on the party’s behalf about our many national crises—Pelosi, Schumer, other high-ranking legislators, the officials and surrogates of the Democratic National Committee—seem congenitally incapable of communicating in a way that is not beside the point and laden with clichés. This is in and of itself not totally crippling to the party’s electoral chances—there’s a lot that goes into messaging besides catchy sound bites.
The toothlessness of establishment Dems is even somewhat understandable, given the way Pelosi, Schumer, and others came of age in an era in which the deployment of cautious, folksy rhetoric was a winning strategy. But it seems at least worth considering that, in 2018, being more direct, more aggressive, and more not-world-historically-lame—being, say, more like Florida gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum, who concisely and virally said during a debate with his opponent Ron DeSantis that “I’m not calling Mr. DeSantis a racist. I’m simply saying the racists believe he’s a racist”—could help the party rally supporters, establish a rapport with new voters, frame news coverage in advantageous ways, and, like, actually win elections for once.
...Another recurring, futile trope is the theatrical performance of hope that Republicans are about to begin respecting civic ideals. (Narrator: They aren’t.) On the March day that Trump fired Secretary of State Rex Tillerson via tweet and news broke that a woman who’d helped cover up torture would be nominated to run the CIA, Schumer announced that he hoped new Secretary of State Mike Pompeo would “turn over a new leaf” in U.S. diplomacy. (He hasn’t.) Pelosi’s statement complained that Tillerson had been treated in “humiliating” fashion, as if the personal feelings of an oil executive who’d signed on to carry out the whimsical demands of an idiot president are of any concern to anyone.
Both statements seemed more directed to imaginary sympathetic Republicans in the Trump administration than to the general public, much less to potential Democratic voters—and as Splinter’s Libby Watson noted, neither mentioned torture.
...
The national party’s stale sloganeering seems closely linked to its strategic tendency toward borderline-comical caution and overestimation of Republican good faith. In April, when media reports indicated Trump may have been planning to fire Robert Mueller’s boss and protector, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, National Journal reported that Virginia Sen. Mark Warner—the vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee—had told his fellow Democrats that, in the event Rosenstein were fired, the party should withhold comment until a “one- or two-day cooling-off period” had passed, during which they could organize bipartisan opposition. (Warner’s staff denies that he said this.) The DNC, for its part, suggested in distributed talking points that Democratic media surrogates respond to another Mueller-firing rumor by stating, “It is time for the GOP to draw a line in the sand and make clear that any attempt by Trump to fire Mueller would cross a red line.”
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/11/pelosi-schumer-democratic-messaging-is-extremely-bad.htmlDemocrats have been having conversations with themselves about the better angels of Republican nature for far too long. It needs to stop. And yet, many are invested in a front runner who's repeating the same mistake. At some point, I would stop blaming our leaders and start questioning our voters.
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