OPINION

JOHN BRUMMETT: A message that connects

The state Democratic Party's executive committee invited me Saturday to talk about state politics for 2018. I'd never delivered a pre-emptive eulogy before.

I accepted with typical graciousness, telling the group that the first thing it needed was to bring in better speakers.


But it's true. I'm not a Democrat. I'm a newspaper opinion writer who, by thinking independently, happens to get disgusted much more frequently with Republicans than Democrats.

A partisan Democrat's assignment is to win elections, an objective probably undermined by hearing from a columnist whose essays are agreed with statewide by dozens.

A newspaper opinion writer's purpose is to be read and considered expressing what he holds to be a thoughtful and properly argued view. That's how I've presumed to advise Democrats to de-obsess on President Trump personally even as I obsess on the preposterous second-place president in my columns.

Democrats need a message that connects with people. As the Georgia special election demonstrated, simple resistance to Trump is not it. Nor is immersion in the latest developments of the Russian investigation, which is going to be what it's going to be.

Conversely, I need to tell readers from time to time--whenever there is fresh evidence, as tends to be the case at least twice a week--that Trump trivializes the presidency and diminishes our country by his megalomania, narcissism, dishonesty and simpleton's demagoguery.

Most recently: He had no tapes. He was full of it before, as ever.

I'm not looking for votes with that commentary. I'm looking for truth. I'm like political moviemaker John Sayles, who once said, "I just want to be part of the conversation."

It is an important conversation. Republicans are imperiling compassion and decency on health care and taxes. The country and flyover states like Arkansas need better alternatives than what the Democrats have given them.

The following will sound like comic hyperbole, but isn't: After the Georgia defeat, congressional Democrats began meetings to decide what their message will be on the economy for 2018.

A genuine message crystallizes from passionate belief. A late-coming and contrived one is probably doomed.

A national party that didn't have clarity on an economic message already is not a party that will be of much use as it presumes to dictate talking points to beleaguered minions in Arkansas. Democrats here are on their own, and lucky to be.

Here, then, is why Democrats ought to de-obsess on Trump:

Republicans obsessed on Bill Clinton in the 1990s to the point of impeaching him for lying about sex. Clinton's job approval rating went up. A Gallup analysis said it was because lying about sex had nothing to do with Clinton's job as president.

Similarly, Democrats now obsess on Trump. But his job and personal approval ratings never were much, anyway.

He got elected by people who didn't approve of him. That's right: Exit polls showed fewer people approving of Trump than voted for him.

Those voters' disdain for Hillary Clinton was implausibly greater. She and the Democrats failed to present a message as simple--if bogus--as making America great again.

U.S. Rep. Tim Ryan, a Democrat from Ohio, put it this way: "Our brand is worse than Trump." Worse even, he should have said.

It's brutally true, at least between the coasts. While Democrats can't score on Republicans by invoking Trump, Republicans score every time by invoking Nancy Pelosi.

The story on Trump and potential criminality is that Russians interfered in our election in ways that helped Trump but do not indicate that he individually conspired with them. And Trump asked the FBI director to back off on Michael Flynn, then, months later, fired the FBI director, who hadn't backed off.

That's either obstruction of justice or utter stupidity, or both. But it does not go to Trump's job performance, which is transcendentally inept on its own.

Yet the stock market is exploding, which retirement savings appreciate, and employment is steady, which working people appreciate. Lucky remains better than good.

In Georgia, the Republican candidate achieved a four-point victory. Seven months ago, Trump nabbed only a one-point victory in that heavily Republican district. It's clear, then, that the obsession on Trump personally during those seven months did not enhance Democrats or harm Republicans.

Democrats basically took $40 million and set fire to it north of Atlanta.

They need to be advancing a credible bill to fix and preserve Obamacare--and reaching out to four or five moderate Republican senators, who do, in fact, exist--rather than merely railing that the Republicans are ruining health care.

Of course they are. It's what they do.

Republican Senate moderates might not accept Democratic overtures on a credible fix. But at least Democrats could try.

Acting in good faith in the face of Republican rebuffs to revise your own law to save health insurance and make it work better ... there might be a seed of a voter-connecting message in that.

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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.

Editorial on 06/25/2017

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