Portland's leaders wised up

Trump, his MAGA followers, and Fox have a story to sell: 

Riots! Violence! Chaos!

Portland's leaders are responding correctly to the problem of protests about ICE. Portland, too, has a story to sell:

We have this under control.

Portland Police Chief Bob Day

Portland got a reputation as a place where left-oriented protests were allowed to turn violent and then persist. The brand has staying power because even a casual visitor to Portland sees conspicuous homeless encampments on the streets giving a disorderly and disheveled look to parts of the city. The Portland-has-gone-to-crap story is easy to tell, and a culprit is easy to identify based on memory of the summer of 2020: leadership that is too liberal and permissive to keep order, reflecting the wishes of a population of post-hippie progressives. 

That Portland brand is powerful enough that it is the butt of jokes.

Here is yesterday's Fox News story about Portland, depicting crowds, movement, people on the ground, chaos:

Rebranding Portland  is hard because action -- especially violence -- makes memorable video, even if there isn't much of it. ANY of it creates a powerful message, and there are, indeed, small, sometimes-unruly crowds at the ICE facility in Portland. There is some fighting between people there. There are arrests. There are incidents to film. It isn't much, but it is real.

The bigger story is that Portland police have those disturbances under control. Portland police chief Bob Day is telling that story. The police chief is a solid-looking White male with short hair in a dark blue uniform -- a credible spokesperson for law enforcement. He looks like a Republican -- or at least the kind of person chosen for Fox News interviews: no-nonsense Republicans who bash "Democrat" cities and their leftist communist radicals with their anti-Christian, pro-homosexual, anti-American, immigrant-loving agendas. Bob Day is a good choice to tell a credible law and order story. 

Here are short YouTube clips. In the first he addresses the issue of whether Portland ignores left-coded violence. It doesn't.

https://youtube.com/shorts/R8pt-4SwTXU?si=ECeus1qhliC8m9bA

In this clip he says that the problems are small and isolated and that the TV and social media stories give a false impression:

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/1HYfXQMWgjI

This third clip is a response to the question of what message he would like Trump to know. He wants him to know the Portland police is on top of this.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/3m3rITRZtW8

Changing a brand is long, slow work. But Portland has the right message and a good messenger. It will help enormously if two things are true: that Portland protesters do their protests legally, and that the Portland Police Bureau in fact does the job Chief Day says they are doing. 

There will be provocations, and keeping order will be hard. I am not worried about the National Guard being there making trouble. They are Oregon residents, drafted into this job. But I do worry about ICE. They are federal. They may be under instructions from their leadership, either explicit or implicit, to make trouble and seek confrontation. They have the power to create exactly the visuals Trump wants.

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"They voted for this. Let them suffer the consequences of their vote."

FAFO

The abbreviation is now commonplace.  F--- Around and Find Out.

It means people face the consequences of their own acts. 

The reader who sent me the quotation in the headline doesn't think Democrats should shut down the government over the health insurance issue.

Fighting Republicans over health insurance won't do Democrats any good, she writes.

The U.S. government is in shutdown. The sticking point for Democrats is the subsidies to the ACA's expansion of Medicaid, the program that makes health insurance affordable for America's working poor. Democrats are fighting to keep those subsidies. The Big Beautiful Bill passed by Republicans lets those subsidies end on December 31 of this year. That is what the shutdown fight is about.

My correspondent wrote me saying that she is tired of paying taxes to subsidize people who bite the hand that feeds them. "They say they hate Obamacare, do they? Do without it." 

My correspondent has liberal views. She wants higher taxes on wealthy Americans. "They have the priceless benefit of living in a rich country in domestic tranquility, and that costs money. Taxes should be worth it to them." She wants the working poor to have a bigger slice of the pie. My reader is an upper-middle class retiree in Portland, Oregon. She lives well. She pays a lot of taxes. She lives in a neighborhood of fellow Democrats; Kamala Harris beat Donald Trump with 79 percent of the vote in Portland.

She says that she hears all about the resentment felt by Trump voters. Well she is resentful too, she said. Portland subsidizes the rest of the state, and blue states subsidize the red ones. If the beneficiaries of liberal policies don't value them, and instead vote because they like the "make liberals cry" message of a constitutional vandal, then let them experience the consequences. FAFO, she says.

When insurance subsidies end, life will get harder for the working poor. Higher premiums will accelerate a death spiral of cancelled insurance, which will make the insurance pool smaller and sicker, therefore less viable. People will go into medical bankruptcy. Rural hospitals will close. People will put off medical care and get sicker and die. There are consequences. 

How much money are we talking about? The formulas are complicated. Here is a link that gives details. Here is a chart from a second article, but the bottom line from this is that poor people will pay more.

Kaiser Family Foundation

Democrats are taking their stand at an imperfect place for political messaging. The lost subsidies are incremental, not black and white. Republicans are damaging a Democratic-coded program of Obamacare, so the disappointment may go against Democrats. Health care affordability is generally a good issue for Democrats, but it needs explanation, which is bad in a political issue. It isn't simple like, "No trans men in women's sports!" or "They are eating your dogs!" Plus, what Democrats propose costs money and voters weigh what's in it for them and who exactly gets the benefit.

Democrats need to harden their hearts, my correspondent tells me. Democrats use up political capital helping people who appreciate the benefit, but not the people who fight to get it for them. Instead, they vote for a con man with an imaginary promise of "wonderful, free best health care ever" when he is in fact helping himself and his billionaire friends get richer. They don't vote on this issue.

I asked my correspondent if she didn't feel guilty and cruel. Won't some innocent, vulnerable people be hurt?

"Yes. But they won't suffer in vain. Their misery will be a lesson. Some will go bankrupt. Some people will stay sick. Some children won't get vaccinations and will get sick or die. People will notice who screwed them. Republicans are in charge. Don't soften the consequences. Nothing Chuck Schumer says will get through to them. They need to experience that they screwed themselves when they voted for Trump. Let them learn that. You write about political messaging. Well, a sick child is a political message."

Then she quoted Poor Richard's Almanack: "Experience keeps a dear school, but fools will learn in no other."

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Democrats need a "Sista Souljah": event

Portland gives Democrats a priceless opportunity.

Use it, please.

First, let's acknowledge the status quo.

   -- 1.  American voters don't trust Democrats to bring law and order. For all the roughness and cruelty of Trump's language and policy, they think he is bringing order and Democrats are not. Reuters asked Americans who they trusted to deal with the problems facing America:

   --2.  Democrats blew something important: civil unrest. Five years ago Democratic cities, Portland most visibly among them, failed to stop hooliganism secreted within Black Lives Matter protests. The local district attorney wouldn't prosecute and the police wouldn't make arrests. It went on for months, providing video that locked in a brand identity.

   --3.  Democrats blew something else important: unchecked mass immigration. The Biden years had a giant increase in border crossings.  Americans were uncomfortable.

These extra people were needy, complicated houseguests, here under irregular circumstances, changing the status quo. Of course it was a problem, and Democrats didn't do anything about it. So Democrats lost the brand identity of the can-do party that could use government power to solve problems. 

   --4.  That brand endures because Democratic politicians and influencers focus on what Trump is doing wrong: masked ICE people in unmarked vehicles, unnecessary roughness, mistaken identity, and targeting workplaces. Democrats are naysayers. Monday-morning quarterbacks. Democrats do not dare say anything good about ICE enforcing immigration law. Their messaging is all anti-ICE, favoring instead immigrants being able to avoid capture and deportation. 

   --5.  Democrats are forgetting something: Americans want something done about immigration and crime. Trump is credited for sending military to Democratic-run cities because the public thinks that Democrats aren't doing a good job of keeping order and enforcing immigration laws because their heart isn't in it. 

That Democratic brand is catastrophic for winning elections. It elects whoever the alternative is, even a corrupt and deeply flawed Trump. 

A Democrat needs to say what American voters think, even though it means that some Democrats will complain bitterly. (Those complaints are essential and good. The public will see that it marks a change.) Portland lets Democrats address both issues. Don't let protesters block traffic. Arrest people who overstep boundaries. Don't apologize. Do it proudly. The public wants to see that Democrats can be firm. So be firm. Actions, not words, prove that federalized troops aren't necessary.

Democrats also need to say aloud the uncomfortable fact that ICE is doing a job Americans want done, and that local law enforcement has an obligation to give them a safe space to do their job. That is the Sistah Souljah moment. Criticize brutality, but not the ICE job itself. Americans wanted deportations of people here illegally and when ICE is operating correctly it is following the law. Eventually Americans will realize they don't like Trump's policy and that will be on Trump. Give Trump rope. Trump did win the election.

Face reality: Democrats lost the power to say we don't need or want ICE when Biden let some 13 million people enter the USA by gaming the immigration system. ICE deporting people is the inevitable consequence of that failure in a democracy. We are in repair mode, undoing some of the immigration of the first three and a half years of Biden's presidency. 

A courageous Democrat would announce an immigration policy proposal, perhaps an amnesty plan, perhaps a guest worker plan. Some deportations. Some system for keeping some immigrants here under legal cover. Start selling the plan. Stand up for it. Currently the only policy on the table is Trump's: crude mass deportation. In a choice between something and nothing, Americans will choose the something. Of course, that courageous Democratic plan will be a target from both right and left. What will hurt is criticism from fellow Democrats. That is why the real and enduring message of one or more courageous Democrats is the all-important one, that they have the courage to offend the sacred cows of their own team. They have the power to lead.

Americans don't want a Monday-morning-quarterback naysayer. That leaves Trump as the only one willing to lead. Americans want a quarterback who will stand up and risk being sacked for saying what he, and the public, believe to be true. 

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