Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer picked newly-elected Michigan Sen. Elissa Slotkin to deliver the Democratic response to Donald Trump’s ersatz State of the Union message on March 4. She’s a former CIA officer who is currently staking out a position as 1992-style Clintonian centrist.
Before getting into her nostalgic pitch, I want to mention that she face-planted pretty dramatically recently on the issue of the genocide in Gaza. (1)
Her March speech is available here: Elissa Slotkin delivers Democratic response to Trump’s speech.
Early on, she resurrects Bill Clinton’s signature phrase “work hard and play by the rules.” Because everyone right now is oozing with nostalgia for 1992? She appeals to “shared values bigger than any one party.” She says that Americans all share three “core beliefs”: (1) “the middle class is the engine of our country”; (2) “strong national security protects us from harm”; and (3) “our democracy, no matter how messy, is unparalleled and worth fighting for.”
All this in the first two minutes. “Middle class” is the safest phrase in American politics. Because everyone who is in the “middle” between being homeless living on the street and being billionaire TechBro oligarchs is happy to call themselves “middle class.” It’s safe because it essentially means nothing. It just gives ConservaDems a chance to repeat they are in “the middle.”
She wants to bring down the prices on “groceries, housing, health care.” She wants to put price controls on grocery store chains, ban private equity firms from buying up scads of residential housing, and institute Medicare for All … oh, wait, she doesn’t mention any of those things. But at least she says she’s thinking about “groceries, housing, health care.”
She does manage to say that Trump will make all those things more expensive and wants to pass a huge tax cut for billionaires, which of course he and his loyal lackeys in Congress have done. But the word “Republican” appears in the address twice. Once in the opening part where she says her daddy was a Republican and momma was a Democrat, adding “but it was never a big deal because we had shared values that were bigger than any one party.” The other time is when she’s says “Democrats and Republicans should all be for … securing the border.”
This blather about Bipartisanship and Reaching Across the Aisle is actually a legacy of the 1970s, when the liberal/conservative dividing lines in Congress actually were spread across parties, with Southern segregationist-minded Democrats making common cause with rich-people-shouldn’t-have-to-pay-no-taxes Republicans and liberal Democrats making coalitions with a now-long-extinct species known as “liberal Republicans,” on both foreign and domestic issues. You can google Mark Hatfield and Jacob Javits to see that the long-ago political phenomenon of “liberal Republicanism” actually did once exist.
But that essentially ended with the Reagan Revolution of 1981. The party alignments in Congress coalesced fairly quickly along ideological lines, with Democrats pursuing big-donor money still often inclined to support conservative economic policies. California Congressman Tony Coelho, who became chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in 1980 was an avatar of that phenomenon.
On the national level, the Democratic Party was also affected by the fact that California was a swing state between Democrats and Republicans since the Second World War until 1994. That year, the Republicans pushed a xenophobic initiative known as Proposition 187, which won but which Democrats fought against and lost. Because of the xenophobia the Republicans displayed, voter participation among Latinos went up and the percentage of Latino voters going Democratic both increased. Because the Democrats had the good sense to fight for their own side in that instance, California has been a safe state for Democrats since, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Governorship being a quirky exception. Also, Proposition 187 was such a hack job that the courts almost immediately nullified most of it.
Bill Clinton had won the California in 1992. But the national Democratic Party has kept acting as though California was open to vote for Republicans Presidential candidates and as though the Democrats were still competitive in Texas and Florida.
The only rational reason to make that calculation is the idea that big donors demand conservative positions from Democratic Presidents. and John McCain’s bipartisan “reach across the aisle” rhetoric in his 2008 Presidential run – generally not matched by his stone conservative voting record and belligerently hawkish foreign policy – at least made sense because he knew he needed to appeal to voters who were not Dick Cheney fans.
Speaking of which: why in the name of Heaven Kamala Harris’ campaign thought it was a great idea to highlight the fact that anyone named Cheney supporter her Presidential campaign in 2024 is likely to remain one of the great enigmas of Presidential politics.
The March speech highlights some of the key weaknesses of a neo-Clintonian centrist politics in 2025 and the foreseeable future. Because you wind up repeating a laundry-list of issues without tying it all together with a distinctive Democratic narrative and conveying no clear sense of Democrats being willing and able to fight for their own side.
Meanwhile, the Republicans – not just Trump, the Republican Party – are out there shouting: ILLEGAL ALIEN BROWN PEOPLE AND TRANS TEENAGERS ARE GOING TO EAT YOU ALIVE!!!
Oh, and of course, Slotkin expresses her concern about increasing national debt. The reality is that everyone claims to be concerned about the national debt. But nobody votes based on the national debt.
There are some words and phrases the Democrats should just drop entirely from their vocabulary. Not because of “wokeism” – one of the dumbest polemical constructions of all time – but because it steps on the Democrats’ own messaging and branding. Those would include the following: bipartisanship, reaching across the aisle, Ronald Reagan, national debt, Cheney. And if they have to use the names Reagan or Cheney, it should always be in a negative context.
Slotkin turned 16 years old in 1992, making her a downright youngster in today’s US Senate.
So how did she manage to get stuck in a time warp where it’s perpetually 1992?
This is another speech of hers that seems to be mired in 1992 nostalgia: (1)
Here she picks up on the Ezra Klein “abundance” theme that basically says the solution to all our problems is to do away with those pesky local regulations on home-building. Deregulation! Free enterprise! Yeah, all these dang safety regulations about electric wiring and such, that’s the real problem. And if we say “middle class” and “work hard and play by the rules” over and over again, we can recreate 1992!
Come to think of it, though: FOX News didn’t exist in 1992, so that would be progress if they disappeared from the scene.
Notes:
(1) Slotkin Interview Has Washington Shook. The Majority Report YouTube channel 08/03/2025. <https://youtu.be/p699ttexr3c?si=xCQWgNSFt29sC2IP> (Accessed: 2025-03-08).
(2) Slotkin delivers speech on her Economic War Plan. Sen. Elissa Slotkin YouTube channel 06/25/2025. <https://youtu.be/pbFiKN48UxI?si=2CvP6Y_QNBGmbMdz> (Accessed: 2025-03-08).
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