As Democrats prep for Comey, some on left want them to give up Russia story

[PatrickforO]

28. Well, see, we have common ground.

I'm an economist, so naturally I consider economic issues very important to quality of life.

As to social justice issues, yes they are quite important. I will concede that for the affected groups, social justice may well outstrip economic justice in importance. But this is why the right wing keeps winning elections. We get divided, either purposely by opponents, who throw in wedge issues like this Kovalik seems to be doing, or stupidly, by doing it to ourselves. In the meantime, Republicans agree on a few major talking points, POUND on those over and over and over, and win elections.

That's all I'm saying. We surely have morality on our side and are generally the party of common decency. Where we fail miserably is agreeing upon, and then coalescing around, common, easily understood kitchen table issues. We just don't do that well, and our failure to set effective priorities that are attractive not only to our base, but to independent center voters, who outnumber us, is what keeps us irrelevant and out of power.

Obama is a great man, and was a great president. I worked as a volunteer in both of his campaigns, even though he governed a bit too centrist for my tastes. But the place he, Pelosi, Reid and the rest of the Dems failed on was trumpeting their accomplishments and how those accomplishments translate into jobs, better healthcare and so on for the common American. Sure, this information was all on websites for wonks like me, but it sure as hell didn't hit the mainstream.

We just do NOT message well. For example, ask a Republican about the ACA and he'll likely say, "oh, the JOB-KILLING Obamacare! Blah, blah, blah." The key phrase being 'job killing.' But look at the reality: between 2008 and 2016, during and after the implementation of the ACA, employment in the healthcare industry in the USA went from 13,642,846 jobs in 2008 to 15,646,503 in 2016. In other words, instead of killing jobs, Obamacare caused healthcare to grow 15% (just over 2 million new jobs) over the ten year period.

That's just one example. We had huge job growth in the private sector, but employment in government went down by 293,625 while private sector jobs grew robustly.

According to the BLS unemployment report published Friday, June 2, America only added 138,000 new jobs last month. But where are we talking about how anemic that job growth is! If Obama were in office, his average job growth from 2012 on was 241,000 jobs a month, while under the Trump 'administration,' job growth hasn't even averaged 200k per month. Where are we talking about that? We should be trumpeting that.

How will we pay for roads? Trains? What about net neutrality? What about fucking Flint, for God's sake? Those people still have undrinkable water. What the fuck? This is America!

And then we have the Dem who bowed out of the race in Iowa due to death threats from inbred, ignorant, illiterate, ku klux motherfuckers. What the hell? Why aren't we getting the FBI taking care of that???? That's fucking illegal and goes against everything this nation stands for.

Well, excuse the rant. Until we get the Russia-treason-act of war thing out of the way, all this other stuff necessarily goes back burner. But we really DO need to learn to message A LOT better. A lot.