Sunday, July 17, 2022

Learning From Republicans: The Personal Call-Out

 

"Democrats need the Democratic Party, not the president, not a Speaker, not an elected officeholder, the party infrastructure, I think, has to organize with more ferocity of focus, more determination to set the agenda, set the course, and put the other party on the defense.

What I had in mind was more like this, really. In the first place, in my response to what seems to me like whining about the absence of leaders, that we need to be the leaders ourselves. You know what the "party infrastructure" is? Infrastructure is people, my friends, organizers, activists, and shouty people online like you and me.

And in what I say about some unified partisanship: everybody needs to criticize a Democrat now and then but we need to be more careful about how we do it:

This guy annoyed me so much. Why does he suppose I care who he votes for? I care about whether he might have an influence on his 34,000 followers. We all know what kind of damage people like that did in 2016, with a little help from Russian intelligence, Wikileaks, and Roger Stone.

And then as to putting the other party on the defense, that's kind of what got me here in the first place, in the context of the poor little Ohio girl who had to travel to Indiana to get an abortion. Republicans were extraordinarily quick in trying to do that after Biden mentioned the story, questioning its veracity, but got rolled when the story turned out to be true. My contribution:

You can be brutal without bending the truth. Nobody was even talking in particular about Governor DeWine when he finally managed to trot out and make a declaration of sorts. My idea was to force him to respond, or be revealed as a coward when he didn't. Of course I don't have the push to make that happen, and it didn't, but an actual working Ohio politician came out and copied it the next day, tagging the attorney general:

No need to credit me, Rep. Weinstein, I'm delighted to see it going to some use.

Here's another example of the personal call-out, which also failed to raise a response (McMegan was responding to a lot of people, too, so could be I really scared her):

And our cowboy friend asked her for an apology:


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