Normally, when you touch a hot pan, you know from the searing pain in your hand that you shouldn’t try touching it again. Democrat strategists touch the pan, feel the pain, and think the reason they feel pain is that they didn’t touch the pan enough.
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Or so it seems, based on one former Harris consultant’s words on MSNBC’s “The Reid Out” with Joy Reid.
Former Kamala Harris strategist Alencia Johnson joined Reid to discuss how the DNC’s leadership needs a real change up. The solution? Get rid of the old white men running the party and replace them with “young women of color.”
MSNBC: “The Democratic Party should be led by young women of color.” pic.twitter.com/ABYgN1Fyax
— Natalie Winters (@nataliegwinters) December 18, 2024
Johnson made it a point to effectively say members of the squad are solid communicators, indicating that AOC had won over Trump voters in the past.
According to Reid, the “gerontocracy” needs to retire, and recalled a time when Barrack Obama pushed the DNC aside and created his own organization within the party. She notes that the party is run by donors and consultants who don’t want to embrace the new world media, and held up a solid example of AOC being able to reach people in that regard.
WATCH: MSNBC’s Joy Reid calls out the Democratic Party for being run like a “gerontrocracy” of consultants and donors pic.twitter.com/htc65zc7Jj
— TV News Now (@TVNewsNow) December 18, 2024
“Kamala Harris represented the generational change that base Democratic voters demanded, and yet when you go to the House and Senate, no generational change,” Reid went on to say. “Does that make sense to you?”
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No. It doesn’t.
The election of Donald Trump showed that people are interested in racial politics and the social/corporate fad known as “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” DEI has run its course and found to be more damaging than helpful in pretty much every regard. It’s this attitude that got the Democrat Party in trouble in the first place, as it forced the selection of leaders and advisors alike that are wholly disconnected from the people.
The choice of Johnson as a consultant is a good example of this. The choice of Kamala Harris as Joe Biden’s VP is another.
I do agree with the assessment that the Democrat Party needs better communicators in this new age, as Republicans have already done this and it’s paid off in big ways. However, it’s pretty clear too many in the Democrat Party are still blinded by what an effective communicator looks like. “Young women of color” isn’t going to cut it, and the lack of movement by AOC and “The Squad” in almost anything lately is proof that it takes more than melanin levels and plumbing to be “effective.”
If the DNC wants to improve, it has to ditch its addiction to racial politics, but seeing as how that’s not at all likely, it will keep making this same mistake over and over again until it fades into irrelevance.
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And that won’t be such a bad thing.
Still, I think it’s odd that there’s still an obsession with race and identity, despite the fact that there was a flat-out rejection of that focus in this last election. The left has a long history of seeing something not work and conclude that it didn’t work because they didn’t take it far enough. This is why you have outright racists in the party saying and doing blatantly racist things, and many leftists nodding along as if there’s not a thing in the world wrong with this.
But this is also why you had many Democrats walking away from the party over the last few years.
