Friday, August 15, 2025

AFTER FORTY-FIVE YEARS, SOME DEMOCRATS ARE FINALLY HITTING BACK

I have problems with some of Gavin Newsom's political positions, but I love the anger he's showing right now. Here he is addressing the fact that some of Donald Trump's ICE goons were sent to the venue where he was holding a press conference, clearly in order to intimdate him:

Newsom on ICE action outside his presser: "It's pretty sick & pathetic. It's everything you know about Trump's America & the authoritarian tendencies of the president. Wake up, America. You will not have a country if he rigs this election. You will a president running for a third term. Mark my word"

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) August 14, 2025 at 4:04 PM

I also like Newsom's ongoing mockery of Trump's Truth Social posts...


... even if stupid people don't understand what Newsom is doing:


Democrats don't have to be as aggressive and Trump-like as Newsom is these days. They simply have to have self-respect and not be intimidated by attacks. Zohran Mamdani has been criticized recently by Chris Cuomo's brother for having a rent-stabilized apartment. Unfazed, Mamdani is going on offense:
Independent mayoral hopeful Andrew Cuomo on Thursday again refused to release a list of clients he amassed as a private legal consultant in response to Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani’s video challenge to do so earlier this week....

In the video, Mamdani — a Queens Assembly member — attempted to link Cuomo to accused child-sex-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein via the former governor’s longtime friend: Andrew Farkas. Cuomo and Farkas worked together on a marina project in Puerto Rico, Mamdani says, citing The New York Times, after he resigned [as governor].

Farkas, he also noted, had at one point worked on a similar project with Epstein.

Mamdani also mentioned an April Bloomberg report that Cuomo advised a cryptocurrency exchange facing federal investigation and a Politico story that he did not disclose $2.6 million in nuclear stock options to the city’s Conflicts of Interest Board.
Mamdani's video is fast, punchy, and to the point, and the candidate is good-natured even as he repeatedly slips in the shiv.



This is how you do it, Democrats. Go on offense. Make the other guy explain himself. Don't be ashamed of who you are and what you stand for. Explain why your opponent is the one who should be ashamed.

Compare this with John Oliver's recent segment about Chuck Schumer and the Baileys, the imaginary couple he's invented and allowed to guide his actions throughout his political career.
For decades, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has invoked Joe and Eileen Bailey, a fictional Long Island couple meant to represent the average American and serve as the guiding force behind his political decisions.

“The Baileys have guided Chuck Schumer’s political life — which is a little weird given they don’t exist,” Oliver said during his Sunday night monologue on Last Week Tonight....

“I have conversations with them... one of my staffers once said I had imaginary friends to the press, got me in some trouble,” Schumer says in a clip Oliver played.

Schumer describes the couple as Reagan-era Republicans — socially liberal but fiscally conservative. He’s offered up intricate details about their fictional lives: their love of Kung Pao chicken, Joe’s habit of singing the national anthem at Islanders games, and Eileen’s father’s chilling run-in with prostate cancer....

But despite Schumer’s continued devotion, the Baileys have effectively abandoned him. Oliver points out that, by Schumer’s own admission, the couple voted for Donald Trump in five of the last six presidential ballots cast between them.

“Politically, it seems they’ve already broken up with you,” Oliver said....

“Schumer’s devotion to his imaginary friends may help explain why he and the Democratic Party have been so underwhelming in recent years,” Oliver said.“He seems to be focusing a huge amount on the Baileys from Long Island — while forgetting other voters actually exist.”
This is the most powerful Democrat in Washington, and he has neurotically concocted a human-like pair of superegos who tell him that he's a bad person if he tries to move to the left -- or presumably, if he takes strong, foreceful action on anything. Meanwhile, nearly every Republican in Washington struts around in a state of absolute certainty about the party's righteousness. And so we get moments like this, which I learned about from a post by the pseudonymous Sister Toldjah at RedState:
Amid the rise of radicals in their party like Zohran Mamdani, Democrat pushback on cleaning up the streets of Washington, D.C., and the opposition from Democrats to arresting criminal illegal immigrants across the country and deporting them, Kennedy went off in a segment with Fox News host Sean Hannity, saying the "loon wing" of the Democrat Party had taken over and that the "mainstream wing" was terrified of speaking out against them:
The mainstream wing of the party is scared to death of the loon wing. They won't speak up. And they don't stand for anything anymore. All they stand for is against whatever President Trump stands for. That's why we find ourselves in the extraordinary position of mainstream Democrats have now come out firmly and passionately in favor of crime in Washington, D.C. Why? Because Trump is trying to do something about it."
Kennedy agreed that it was unlikely that House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) and Sen. Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) would ever stand up to the radicals who have taken over the Democrat Party, but he called on them to man up anyway, as only he can:
No, but they could. And I don't mean any disrespect. I don't know Mr. Jeffries that well. I know Sen. Schumer very well, so I say this with respect: Chuck and Hakeem need to go to Amazon, buy some testicles, and stand up to the loon wing of their party. And until they’re willing to do that - I haven't heard Senator Schumer say anything bad about Mamdani. I mean, the guy's a socialist. He's a whackjob. They're scared to death. And the party is not going to get better until they do.


I realize that this wasn't an important moment in our political life. It was just another night's programming on Fox.

But this is an example of what Josh Marshall, more than twenty years ago, referred to as "the Republicans’ Bitch-Slap theory of electoral politics":
One way — perhaps the best way — to demonstrate someone’s lack of toughness or strength is to attack them and show they are either unwilling or unable to defend themselves — thus the rough slang I used.... Someone who can’t or won’t defend themselves certainly isn’t someone you can depend upon to defend you....

Hitting someone and not having them hit back hurts the morale of that person’s supporters, buoys the confidence of your own backers (particularly if many tend toward an authoritarian mindset) and tends to make the person who’s receiving the hits into an object of contempt ... in the eyes of the uncommitted.
Marshall came to regret his name for this approach to politics, but he was right about how it works, although I'd add one more thing: when you attack someone this way and the attacked person doesn't punch back forcefully -- or decides that the best way to respond to the attack is just to ignore it, which is the usual Democratic approach -- the public may come to believe that the attacker is right on the substance. Attack John Kerry by saying he didn't deserve his Purple Hearts and when he won't respond, people will assume he really didn't deserve them. Attack Chuck Schumer as pro-crime and if he doesn't respond, people will assume he is pro-crime.

Imagine if Schumer surprised Kennedy by punching back. Imagine if he pointed out that Kennedy's home state of Louisiana has one of the worst crime rates in the country, and that his state's largest city, New Orleans, has the third-highest murder rate of any city in America -- more than twice as high as Washington's murder rate. Imagine if Schumer noted that a just-released study from WalletHub ranks Louisiana as the second-worst state to live in, a state that's dead last economically and second-to-last in terms of education and health. (To be fair, it's only 40th out of the 50 states in terms of safety.)

But Democrats rarely push back on these ad hominem attacks, just as they rarely push back on the widespread belief that big cities are all crime-ridden hellholes. In reality, crime has dropped significantly all over the country in the past three decades or so. Some analysts scratch their heads trying to understand why voters believe the opposite, but to me the answer is obvious: the Democratic Party, which runs most of the cities that are perceived as high-crime, don't say Republicans are lying when they insist that crime is running amok.

Democrats needs to believe in themselves. Mamdani believes in himself in part because he was too young to live through the three thrashings Democrats suffered in presidential contests during the 1980s, an experience that left politicians like Chuck Schumer with an apparently incurable case of political PTSD. Newsom is older than Mamdani, but he can read the room: he's figured out that we live in a political culture formed by Fox News, talk radio, and Newt Gingrich, and then Trump. He knows that meekness and niceness won't cut it.

People like the Baileys exist, but Republicans try to shape what they believe, and frequently succeed. Democrats need to do the same.
Posted by Steve M. at 1:31 PM

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