He is a moderate progressive Democratic governor who got elected in a red state.
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| Steve Bullock |
Steve Bullock could beat Trump.
Steve Bullock, who?
He is a nice guy, with a young family. No scandal. He is a peacemaker governor who expanded access to health care in a red state with a red legislature. He got legislation passed to limit campaign expenditures on state elections. He has all the normal positions a Democrat should have on reproductive rights, restoring taxes on the wealthy, and making college affordable again.
Imagine the poll question: "Would you like an articulate, experienced, moderate, fifty year old Democratic governor, heterosexual and a family man, from a heartland state, with a liberal/progressive platform, as an your candidate to defeat Trump?"
A majority of Democrats would say "yes." Replacing Trump is their highest priority.
Of course, not every Democrat. Some want Bernie and only Bernie. Some want a woman. Some say they want a person of color. But there would be a big niche for that generic Democrat.
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| Email to donors this morning. |
Trump has been on center stage under bright lights for four years. He is trouble and he is exhausting. Biden's continued strength with voters suggests that people so avidly desire normalcy, they will overlook Biden's age, gaffes, loquaciousness, and Hunter, to get it. Or they support Buttigieg and ignore the problem of youth, lack of appeal to blacks, and the untested issue of being a man married to a man.
What can we learn from the Steve Bullock campaign?
1. You got to have a niche, a brand. Being broadly acceptable and electable is not enough. Polls and donors pick favorites, not acceptable. Biden's niche is that he is well known, having stood with Obama. Buttigieg's is a constituency niche of gay-friendly people who want to make a statement. Sanders' is that he is the lifelong Socialist prophet. Warren's is that she is the energizer bunny who agrees with Sanders mostly, but doesn't have his Socialist baggage. Yang has the $1,000 a month thing. Williamson has love and self actualization. Gabbard has war and peace.
2. If you don't have a brand niche then you need money. Tom Steyer made himself famous with his money, spending for ads on climate and impeachment. Michael Bloomberg can do the same and more. Money can buy fame. This will likely prove pointless for them since the unintended message of their national fame through ads is that they got seriously rich in this economy and are part of the corporate status quo. Trump got there first and ruined the brand category for Democrats.
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| Lots and lots of choices. |
Who has a national brand and could have been a candidate? People familiar from TV, news, and show business in credible, transferable roles: Oprah; Rachel Maddow; Ellen DiGeneres; Brian Williams; Chris Cuomo; George Stephanopolis, for example. Others could have added political first person serious advocacy to their acting or comedic brand had they started a year ago: Tom Hanks; Tommy Lee Jones; Matt Damon; George Clooney; Steve Colbert; Seth Myers.
4. You need to dominate your niche. Steve Bullock got lost in the muddle. If someone likes Bullock they also like Bennet and Klobuchar and Buttigieg and Booker and there isn't sufficient reason to focus on one. Here is Bennet's photo. Could readers have distinguished him from Bullock?
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| Michael Bennet. NOT Bullock. |
Bullock's leaving makes a bit more room for someone else.
Niche, not consensus. There is no guarantee that Democrats will pick the strongest candidate to replace Trump. In the early winnowing phase of the process, the process elevates the candidate with the most mental shelf space in the minds of voters. That won't be a consensus candidate. It will be a fractional one, someone who dominates a niche with a segment of the Democratic coalition.
4 comments:
Yes, before I finished reading this installment I was thinking but we already had a Steve Bullock in Michael Bennet.. a perfectly good, "white bread," intelligent, moderate progressive. So who IS electable?
Bernie and Elizabeth should drop out.
Like, now!
Let's do Biden/Klobuchar (I'm serious)
Let the moderates run.
It will be fine.
Peter Sage said it correctly yesterday;
"The Democratic electorate has moved to the left in this post-Obama era of Trump, and every candidate has shifted along with it. A consensus has emerged, that Hillary Clinton lost because her campaign message did not address the justifiable discontent of the public over problems left unresolved: unaffordable health care, drug costs, student debt, the loss of family wage jobs, ongoing wars, the gig economy, the power of special interest money. She was too establishment. She didn't understand populist discontent."
So no, Rick, Warren and Sanders should NOT drop out!
I fear that Biden will just be another Dukakis or Kerry. Too bland to inspire the voters to turn out.
The most vital goal in the upcoming 2020 presidential election is for the nation
to rid itself of a mythomaniac whose fabrications and distortions of the truth outdo thosepf the legendary Baron Munchausen. To defeat and oust the Russian Candidate Democrats must offer a candidate who is the antithesis of the cretin presently inhabiting the White House. Of the approximately twenty individuals who have announced an interest in winning the nomination three stand out primarily because of their success in raising campaign funds: Sanders; Warren and Biden. As the traditional method of selection is uncertain, awkward, and bears the stigma of nefarious schemes hatched in smoke filled hotel rooms, it should be bypassed. Defeating Trump should trump all other considerations.
While it is well within the power of Sanders, Warren and Biden to greatly influence the final selection of a candidate, the question arises as to whether or not all the members of this triumvirate possess the degree of self sacrifice it would require. Would they all be able to rein in their bloated egos to achieve this outcome?
As you may have already surmised, my hope is that the current top three Democratic candidates would join together in a pact, discarding personal ambition for the good of our nation. (I also believe that Barack Obama would be extremely effective if asked asked to lend his expertise to the task.)
Let’s be frank in guesstimating the chances of the three top money raisers as candidates: By constantly speaking the unvarnished truth Bernie Sanders is more often than not correct, but unvarnished truth is anathema to the hoi polloi. While one might agree with many of his notions and ideas he’s too far out in front. Nor can the recent reports of heart health issues be simply ignored.
Elizabeth Warren would no doubt be pilloried by the Republican propaganda machine (as was Hillary) as a pushy broad who is no spring chicken. An old woman. And speaking of old, Joe Biden, the eldest, already exhibits tell-tale signs of “ losing it” in dropping careless comments which eager reporters often delight in misinterpreting. And why the hell was his son on the Ukrainian payroll? He had no business being there. And while seventy-six years of age may no longer be considered as one foot in the grave, Biden is unquestionably an “old looking” seventy-six year old.
But if Sanders, Warren and Biden were able to put aside their dreams of the presidency and act in concert they could perhaps insure that the Democratic candidate possessed the virtues and abilities now absent from the Oval Office.
Someone perhaps like Steve Bullock, a moderate, experienced Democratic governor from a Red state. Bullock is in his early fifties, a heterosexual family man and one persuasive and accomplished enough to pass progressive legislation in a Red state. To date he has not humiliated either his wife or family by
contracting the services of prostitutes. He has no personal or business connections with Soviet Russia and unlike our current leader, has never kissed Putin’s ass.
While the foregoing may constitute nothing but the pipe dreams of an aging idealist perhaps only old fashioned idealism will save us from the current quagmire our nation jumped into three years ago.
Bob Warren
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