"Why Winning Is Bad for Democrats by Anonymous Democratic Consultant"
- Sadly on-point satire by Francesca Fiorentini for The American Prospect.
https://prospect.org/politics/2025-09-26-why-winning-is-bad-for-democrats/



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"Why Winning Is Bad for Democrats by Anonymous Democratic Consultant"
- Sadly on-point satire by Francesca Fiorentini for The American Prospect.
https://prospect.org/politics/2025-09-26-why-winning-is-bad-for-democrats/
@pluralistic "None of this is to say that winning isn’t important. It is. And Democrats will eventually win again. But we must manage how, when, why, where, and with the support of what billionaires this win happens."
@pluralistic At this point, I almost got Poe's Law'd in the first paragraph.
@pluralistic This is so goddamn brilliant, I seethe with the best kind of jealousy I can muster. Fiorentini is a fucking legend.
@pluralistic Australian television shows on US politics often have a tone of despair at just how bad the Democratic Party is at the art of politics. And, related to that, how the Party lacks the ability to make necessary hard decisions.
Especially around asking people to retire. Arguably that one failing has doomed the Party (Ginsburg, Biden, Feinstein, Connolly, Pelosi, ...). Even Harris and Walz were coming to a Presidential election at the end of their careers. There is a different timeline where the Democratic Party retained power in the national legislature and courts simply by not dying in place.
@glent @pluralistic And believe me, Australia knows all about their alleged left leaning party being completely unable to make hard decisions.
@pluralistic ableist erasure of candidates incapable of holding a conviction 😊 humor is hope in fearful times.
@pluralistic All this hostility over someone who hasn't won yet. He would still have to face laws and lawmakers, budget constraints, and the overwhelming corruption in nyc. His heart seems to be in the right place, though.
@pluralistic @lisamelton I literally can’t tell if this is satire or stupidity, bravo.
I am in the kind of mood where I now consider centrists and establishment centrist very fine people.
There’s a point where everyone else should make a moral ruling on what’s going on because it’s an abomination.
The Democratic establishment is a moral abomination and should be repudiated in the strongest terms
@pluralistic
Democrats won so decisively in 2008 that they could basically pass any legislation they wanted. Their supermajority in the Senate made them completely immune to the Republican filibusters that would later grind things to a halt.
So isn't it weird that Democrats have never even *tried* to run the same kind of campaign they did with Obama? I mean, if I was even half that successful at something, I'd at least give it another shot, you know?
It's also not like they don't have tons of data to know exactly what would get people out to vote in those kinds of numbers. Yet they always handle those kinds of topics like they're wearing oven mitts.
Do you really need someone as charismatic as Obama to just confidently state that you're going to make universal healthcare happen? Is it beyond the grasp of all but a once-in-a-generation political operator to realize that compromising with yourself on your own policies will stop your momentum dead in its tracks? They can't have possibly thought that voters were dying to hear all about how they were going to means test the hell out of student debt relief, right?
None of it makes any sense in the context of a political party that is doing its honest best to execute a legislative agenda. It does, however, make perfect sense for a party that wants to maintain an extremely unpopular status quo but knows they would never get elected if they just said that. A party like that would need to trip themselves up just enough to keep elections close so that they could always blame their inability to pass substantial legislation on not having enough political power.
Otherwise, they have to make bizarre excuses for why their legislative centerpiece amounted to nothing more than a repackaged Republican healthcare bill. I'm supposed to believe that the reason we don't have a modern, functional healthcare system is because the entire Democratic Party was brought to its knees by *Joe motherfucking Lieberman*? His opposition to a public option was so principled, so full of moral courage that there was no bone that the entire Democratic establishment could throw him tempting enough to get him on board with the single most important item on the Democrats' agenda? They had absolutely no choice but to go, "Oh well, we tried, I guess we just have to copy Mitt Romney's healthcare bill?"
No, it's much simpler to just say, "We really want to do all these cool things for you, but those mean ol' Republicans won't let us."
@jargoggles @pluralistic But isn't it also weird that *despite* having a filibuster proof majority the democrats *STILL* weren't able to really do anything meaningful* on the scale of the wholesale dismantling of democracy that we're seeing today?
* they *did* pass the ACA… but, like, *barely*.
@octothorpe @jargoggles @pluralistic
FWIW? The ACA was modeled after a Republican proposal and was a giveaway to the medical insurance companies, not a true socialized medicine program.
The fact Republican's pretended to fight it at the time and continued to complain endlessly and bitterly about it since was – and remains – posturing.
Stop thinking of the Democratic Party as liberals. They are Center-Right and get the liberal vote only because their opposition are worse.
@jargoggles @pluralistic big donors don't want that
@pluralistic Old enough to remember Hillary Clinton's campaign briefing journalists in 2008 primaries that Senator Obama should drop out and accept job of secretary of state under Clinton candidacy "so that he could have the moral high ground" 🤔
That "logic" didn't make any sense back then either. They were obviously panicking that Obama was winning.
@pluralistic seizing defeat from the jaws of victory, it’s the Democrat’s way.
@pluralistic "creature comforts like healthcare and education" 😆🥹😭
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