To all the young Democratic staffers out there:
Hi. We regret to inform you that we really fucked things up.
Somewhere along the way, our generation fell victim to the oldest DC adage in the book: We came to do good and stuck around to do well.
We decided it was more profitable to meet voters where they were than to lead them.
More lucrative to run ads to a vanishing TV audience than to do stuff that’s more effective but less remunerative.
Easier to spend millions — hundreds of millions — in the last sixty days than it would be to build a 24/7/365 operation.
We got cynical, oh how cynical we got, passing down our disdain and condescension for the voters to you.
We got lazy, choosing to do the same things over and over and over because nobody forced us to change.
So, we’re writing to ask you, implore you, beg you to blow up the existing state of things and build in its place a Democratic Party that is in touch with America and Americans and can do that winning thing again.
But first, some advice from someone who’s made all the mistakes and then some.
Most voters haven’t read Sartre or bell hooks. Baby steps.
Hire someone who’s never had a 202 area code.
Winning matters. If that means doing things that nobody else has done before or confounding conventional wisdom, then please do so. The failure to understand this has been a bit problematic as of late. (See: Trump, Donald J.)
Changing course when you’re in trouble isn’t stupid. It’s basic. So next time a consultant urges you to “stay on message” when you haven’t been able to sleep in a week, ignore them and follow your gut.
Ask hard questions.
Your audience is your vegan friend from college and the truck driver in Georgia and the retiree in Dubuque and on and on and on. Pathological voter segmentation got us into this fucking mess in the first place; please feel free to disregard.
Learn. What to do and more importantly, what not to do.
Stop playing the game and start playing to win. All the fat checks won’t do you much good if you’re cashing them in Portugal. (The exchange rate sucks)
People don’t talk like consultants or pollsters. Stop it.
Anyway, best of luck to you. There’s some stale birthday cake in the fridge. If you need us, we’ll be deleting our inbox and packing up our Pollies.
This democracy is your responsibility now.
If you can keep it.
2,763 is designed to encourage candid discussions about how we let that dumbass win twice and how we can prevent similarly terrible things from happening in the future. I’d love to know what you think, if you disagree, and if there are other hard questions that you think should be on the table. Everything is fair game, because, well, it needs to be at this point.