HAVE YOU TRIED NOT PUNCHING YOURSELVES IN THE FACE EVERY DAY?

Here was the lead story at Breitbart about an hour ago:

Don't get angry at Breitbart and the right-wing media for the tone of this story, because it's based on an article that appear in a media outlet that's perceived as friendly territory for Democrats: The Washington Post.

Democrat midterm campaign chief Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney (D-NY) over the weekend in Philadelphia said his party is the “problem” as to why they are having trouble relating to voters.

At the House Democrats’ retreat, Maloney, head of the Democrat Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), said that as much as everyone says, “The problem is not the voters... The problem is us.” He made the statement during a part of the conference weekend that was supposed to be designed to forge unity, Washington Post reported.

“They think that we’re divisive and too focused on cultural issues. They think that we’re preachy. They think that we act like we know better than parents when it comes to their kids in schools,” he added.

Why do Democrats say these things in the presence of reporters? How does it help Democrats to make "Yes, we suck" a key component of the party's public messaging?

This goes hand in hand with thr party's compulasion to valorize Republicans. Liz Cheney is so brave! Bills are so much better when they're bipartisan -- they're barely valid if we pass them with just Democrats voting yes! Strom Thurmond was a racist, but he was a great pal to Democrats in the Senate back in the '70s!

Here's the Republican Party's core message: Republicans are awesome. Democrats are awful. Here's the Democratic Party's core message: Republicans are awesome. Democrats are awful. If Democrats keep telling voters the Republican Party is full of swell people and the Democratic Party is full of elitists, radicals, and snobs, what reason are they giving voters not to vote GOP? How do they expect to avoid a midterm bloodbath?

I know that there's infighting among Republicans. There are old-guard Republicans who don't like Madison Cawthorn or Marjorie Taylor Greene. I originally thought that Mitch McConnell and Rick Scott were playing bad cop/worse cop with Scott's 11-point plan, but it's clear that they genuinely disagree on it, and that Scott and McConnell are each happy to tell sympathetic reporters that the other guy is an idiot.

But Republicans never tell reporters that the Republican Party as a whole is a mess. Only Democrats do that. And they do it a lot.

Some of you will argue that Maloney knows Democrats will lose in November and is setting up a blame-the-left narrative. I'm sure that's true, but this narrative is already well established. Maloney doesn't need to reinforce it. And he can shift the blame all he wants, but as the head of the DCCC, he'll get a considerable share of the blame after a Democratic drubbing, so you have to assume he's trying to prevent a serious drubbing, so it's clear that he thinks talking this way in the presence of a reporter won't make the Democrats' problems worse. If he believes that, he -- like most members of the Democratic leadership -- is very, very bad at the voter-persuasion part of his job.