Mitt Romney and Democratic messaging

Democrats have trained themselves - I should say ourselves since I'm a registered and active Democrat - to take stories like this as encouraging: Romney denounces multiple IG firings as 'threat to accountable democracy' The Hill 05/16/2020. And to a certain extent, it is:

Republican Sen. Mitt Romny [sic] (Utah) on Saturday denounced President Trump's firings of several inspector generals in various federal government offices as a "threat to accountable democracy."

"The firings of multiple Inspectors General is unprecedented; doing so without good cause chills the independence essential to their purpose. It is a threat to accountable democracy and a fissure in the constitutional balance of power," Romney tweeted. ...

Romney was the sole Republican in the Senate to deviate from his party and vote to convict Trump on one of the two charges of impeachment brought against Trump by House Democrats.

Trump has since targeted Romney, and the president's son, Donald Trump Jr., has even called for the Utah senator to be ousted from the Republican party.

We know what a oligarch Romney is, both in his personal identity and his politics, from his losing 2012 Presidential campaign as the Republican nominee against Obama. His most memorable campaign line was, "Corporations are people, my friend." Romney didn't oppose Citizens United with essentially authorized unlimited campaign contribution by corporations and the wealthiest. He didn't advocate rolling back the massive Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest that were set to expire. (Neither did Obama and Biden, as it turned out soon after the election.)

He didn't advocate better regulation of business and banking, or more aggressive measures against climate change. He certainly didn't want to ban the kind of predatory capitalist practices that he used as head of Bain Capital. He didn't advocate for a more peace-oriented foreign policy, or oppose new corporate-deregulation "trade" treaties. Lord knows he didn't advocate for higher wages for workers or laws to facilitate union organizing!

He didn't advocate to protect the right to abortion. He pandered to the Christian fundamentalist right, even though many of them in theory regarded Romney's own Mormon faith as a false religion and refused to acknowledge the Mormons' self-identification as Christian. And, of course, he had no criticism of the Obama Administration for declining to prosecute banker executives for crimes committed in the massive mortgage fraud prior to the 2007-8 crisis. Or for advocating "looking forward, not backward" de facto impunity to people involved in the torture crimes during the Cheney-Bush Administration.

He was a standard conservative Republican, in other words, who was completely fine with the continually radicalizing direction of his Party. The process that in 2016 put an incompetent Orange Clown in the White House.

It made some obvious political sense for national Democratic campaigns to highlight points of bipartisan overlap with the Republicans up through 1992. When Clinton carried California that year, signaling California's transformation into a "safe" Democratic state in Presidential elections. That meant there was less incentive to fish for Presidential votes in Republican-leaning Southern states by putting forward Republican-lite positions and themes.

Unfortunately, the Democrats went right on doing just that. And neglected to do what they really did need, which was a prolonged effort to build the Democratic Party in more conservative states so that the party could successfully contest Republican dominance on the basis of a "national" (i.e., not conservative) basis. Just being able to actively contest Republican House and Senate and gubernatorial candidates would have forced the Republicans to use more resources on campaigns in those states instead of using them on more competitive states against Democrats.

The shock of having Donald Trump as President is something the more establishment Democrats have responded to by doubling-down on their desire to highlight whatever Republicans they can find to agree with them. The NeverTrumper group of conservative Republicans from Butcher's Bill Kristol to Jennifer Rubin to David Frum and various others have been particularly attractive for Democrats to glob onto and post to Facebook, tweet out, and generally look to for rhetorical insights.

This gets to the problem of political "framing" to which the linguist George Lakoff has been calling attention for years. The problem is that when Democrats defer to conservative Republicans like Romney and the NeverTrumpers and more-or-less hide behind such Republicans for cover, they wind up deferring to Republicans on the framing of issues instead of promoting their own framing.

It's not that Democrats shouldn't try to exploit Republican criticisms of Trump. Of course they should.

But if Democratic politicians and publicists are hiding behind Republicans because they don't believe in their own positions or don't have the imagination to defend them properly, that's not a good thing.

And that's a big aspect of the asymmetric partisan polarization that is unfortunately so strongly defines the American political scene today.

Never Trumpers - and a Mark Shields stuck firmly in 1990

On Friday's PBS Newshour's Political Wrap, David "Bobo" Brooks dn and Mark Shields grumped about how it was obvious that what the Democrats really need is to be more like Republicans. Shields and Brooks on Democratic debates, Supreme Court rulings 06/29/2019 (transcript here);

Shields, if anything, was even worse. Shields has always been anti-abortion and only mildly supportive of women's rights on the issue, if at all. Here, he sounds like he actually thinks the Republicans have more-or-less surrendered to the Democrats on abortion!

Just think of the 80 yards of the field that Republicans have surrendered to them on the abortion issue. [R]epublicans have been running away from what Republicans did in Alabama and Georgia and in Missouri, in Ohio. And the president has been distancing himself even.

And what do Democrats do? I mean, they basically just endorse abortion and throw in — well, how about trans people, covering abortion?

I just — I mean, to me, they just — wasn't thinking in terms strategically. I mean, they owned the majority position in the country, safe, legal, rare. And so, to me, I just don't understand the strategy.

Abortion rights are under siege across the country. And Shields thinks the problem is - that Democrats are fighting back.

He also repeats what he must know is a propagandistic polemic against national health insurance, aka, Medicare for All, that doesn't really make any sense (to put it generously):

And at great political cost, the Democrats, without any help from the Republicans, with total objection and resistance, passed it in 2010, under a Democratic president, Barack Obama. And ever since then, five consecutive elections, Republicans have run on, we're going to repeal it, going to repeal it.

As a consequence, Democrats — public by 2-1 thinks the Democrats are better on health care. So what do the Democrats suggest? We're going to get rid of it. We're going to get rid of it, going to get rid of — you like private health insurance that you have and guaranteed for preexisting conditions covered under the Affordable Care Act, we're going to get rid of private insurance.

Bobo's fellow Never Trumper Bret Stephens also thinks - surprise! surprise! - that Democrats aren't being Republican enought (): "None of this means that Democrats can’t win in 2020. The economy could take a bad turn. Or Trump could outdo himself in loathsomeness. But the Democratic Party we saw this week did even less to appeal beyond its base than the president. And at least his message is that he’s on their — make that our — side."

Stephens seens to be preparing for a "I didn't leave the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party left me" moment. Even though, he isn't even a Democrat. I never trusted the Never Trumpers. This is why.

Digby is slightly more generous in Hey, NeverTrumpers: Please quit lecturing actual Democrats about how to win Salon 06/26/2019. But she has their number (italics in original):

I'm not a NeverTrumper-basher. ...

So I hope the NeverTrump troops don't take this the wrong way. But they really need to zip it when it comes to haranguing Democrats about their primary. They particularly need to stop speaking to the Democratic base as if they were a bunch of fools who need remedial lessons in politics from Republicans, the people who couldn't stop Donald Trump from snagging the nomination right out from under them. They should know better than anyone that running against him is like running against an alien from outer space. There is only one race that Democrats and NeverTrumpers can look to for clues about how to defeat him — and neither of them were successful, so nobody gets to claim the high ground here. ...

More importantly, NeverTrumpers telling Democrats what they shouldn't do is even worse. It's not just insulting, it's also strangely naive. In a way, it explains why some of these folks were so surprised that a demagogic con man took out that venerable list of GOP all-stars back in 2016, with none other than the odious Sen. Ted Cruz being the last man standing. These are not normal times, and simply assuming that the way for Democrats to win is to be more like pre-Trump Republicans is going to fall on deaf ears, and for good reason[.] ...

But if there are Republicans and GOP-leaning independents who are appalled by Trump's assault on the system and the Republican Party's descent into madness, these NeverTrumpers could make their best contribution e by helping those folks realize that stopping Trump means we can all live to fight each other another day on the issues where we may strongly disagree. There's no guarantee of that if Trump wins again.