Conservatives have one super power and one major weakness. Progressives have one super power and one major weakness. Every election cycle sees the collision of these strengths and these weaknesses. We saw both flare up during that fateful debate and we continue to see it in the aftermath. The sad truth is that the Democratic party has placed themselves in a no win scenario of their own making.

Republicans can craft a narrative and they have the discipline to stay on that narrative. That is their superpower. Whether that narrative has any truth to it, whether it is raging hypocrisy, or whether it ignores large swaths of truth doesn’t matter. Of course, we are seeing their weakness in full display here in Texas. They couldn’t govern a two car funeral. Yet, I digress.

The whole business about Joe Biden and Ukraine early on in the Trump presidency was a test balloon. Trump was able to paint Hillary Clinton as corrupt and right or wrong that label stuck. So maybe he could paint Biden as corrupt. Obviously that has never worked. He continues to try to fight a two-front war but the vast majority of people don’t see Biden as corrupt. They do see him as old and that is the other plank they have fought on. Watching conservatives fight on both fronts is maddening. One cannot be a criminal mastermind and senile at the same time. I suspect deep down inside they know this, but they almost see it as an insult buffet. You take your pick.

As Democrats/progressives we do one thing really well. We govern. When we are in charge things get done. Legislation passes and people in control do the things day to day that need to be done for things to run smoothly. The economy starts humming and people get the services they need. When polled without labels, people routinely favor what Democrats and progressives do and what they call for. That is our superpower. When we look back at these last three and a half years we see a ton of good in the Biden presidency.

Our weakness is that we care what people think. If you think back to every major progressive achievement, you see we have spent far too much time and energy asking people that will never support it to weigh in. We lost a public option in the Affordable Care Act that way. Now, we see ourselves at the precipice of a national crisis. We see a collision of the GOP strength (discipline in messaging) matched squarely against our weakness (we care what others think). What is one to do?

We blew this one folks. Joe Biden should always have been a one term president. A successor should have been groomed (the positive meaning of that word) and introduced to the public long before now. At this point it doesn’t even particularly matter if he is capable of doing the job for another four years. Politics and reality are at best estranged lovers. What we shouldn’t do is worry about the 40 percent that will vote Trump religiously. Those folks won’t vote for anyone you put up. The key now is the other 60 percent.

Yet again, this is where we burn ourselves. We worry about the narrative.Kamala Harris is too liberal and too abrasive. Gavin Newsom is too California and California is a hell hole. Bernie and Elizabeth are too old and too extreme. Secretary Pete is just too gay. Remember, these are all things the 40 percent will say and they are the folks that would never vote for them anyway. I personally don’t care what they say. I say let’s ask the 60 percent.

Anyone you put up at this point will have about a week or two where they are the darling. Then, the right wing noise machine when craft a new message and start chipping away. That’s the way these things work. So, as hard as it is we have to dial out the noise. We cannot listen to people that won’t vote for anyone we put up. This is all about people that might support the cause. Who are they more likely to support? The clock is ticking.

One of the things that some loyal readers of this blog have asked me is to outline a battle plan for liberals, progressives, and Democrats. Admittedly, those are three different things and that’s one of the things that presents a problem. However, it is a fair question.

My first suggestion is easy and yet it hasn’t successfully been done. We have a list of problems people commonly agree on. At least we agree that they are problems. The first thing you do is list all of the things that you have done to fix those problems. That includes mostly legislation passed by the House. You include what the bill was for, how many Republicans voted for it, and what percentage of Americans were in favor of it. Usually, these things died in the Senate and that’s also something you have to mention.

Believe it or not, Congress has enacted 139 laws since January 3, 2021. So, Congress is always acting more than people think. Most of these laws are ones you’ve never heard of, but it always is a good idea to remind them of the good stuff you have done. How many Republicans voted for those measures? What percentage of Americans were in favor of those measures?

The picture you begin to see is the fact that Democrats (be they progressive, liberal, or moderate) are trying to address our nation’s problems. The way they are addressing them are popular with a majority of the American people. The other side is not. They are actively blocking those things even when a majority of the people want them.

The second thing we need to do is the harder thing. Hearts and minds are tough to change, but the conservatives in this country have managed to beat the drum on gas prices, supply chain issues, and inflation. They have pulled off two major coups. First, they have convinced enough people that these are the main issues of the day. Secondly, they have managed to successfully blame Joe Biden.

You can tell people that the president doesn’t set the gas prices. You can tell people that the president can’t control world markets. You can tell people that world markets are terribly complex and susceptible to numerous factors out of everyone’s control. Then, you are explaining. When you are explaining you are losing.

This one is hard because it requires resetting people’s priorities. If the price of gas is the most important thing in your life then you don’t have much of a life. If the availability of a particular product or rising costs of goods are the most important thing then you’ve lost them. In many cases it will be. Some people can’t be bothered to care about quality of life issues. They can’t be bothered to care about safety. They can’t be bothered to care about anyone else’s life and how it has been improved by something Democrats have actively done. You won’t capture everyone or even most. You can capture some.

From there, you simply circle back to what is currently being done to alleviate that problem. You also go back to the fact that the other side hasn’t done a damn thing or even suggested a damn thing. They’ll tell you something Biden has supposedly done wrong. Make sure to fact check those things. Did he actually do that? If he did then did it have the negative impact those people say it did? Again, we won’t capture the majority, but we can capture some. Some is what we need.

Sometimes you can be surprised where you find good writing. Bill James is the preeminent baseball statistician from the last 50 years. However, what makes him unique is not necessarily how good his statistics are, but in how artfully he uses them to craft a narrative. I still remember his foreword in the first edition of the Fielding Bible.

He simply described watching video of Adam Everett and Derek Jeter play shortstop. He instinctively knew that he was watching the best and the worst defensive shortstops in the game. Without seeing the numbers he couldn’t tell you which one was which, but the eyeball test didn’t fail. They were polar opposites of each other.

The same thing is happening in Texas in the governor’s race. You can approach these things with snark, sarcasm, and all of the disdain you can muster. I imagine many people will. What I’m prepared to say beyond a shadow of a doubt is that one of these candidates is the kind of human being we should all aspire to be. The other is just not a very good person. I’m not sure of any other way to put it.

The juxtaposition can be seen most clearly in what is happening with a North Texas family. Greg Abbott has them under investigation because they have a transgender teen. Beto O’Rourke visited them on Mother’s Day and even cooked dinner for them.

To be perfectly fair, it is reasonable to ask whether O’Rourke would have visited them in a year when he wasn’t running for statewide office. I’m guessing he wouldn’t have. Would he have helped them cook dinner if the cameras weren’t there taking pictures? Again, I’m guessing the answer is no.

Then again, we could ask the same of Abbott. Would he be investigating a family for child abuse if this weren’t an election year? Would he threaten Texas families with charges and family separation if the movers and shakers in his party weren’t applying that pressure? My guess is also no.

So, here we are. We are left with the most vivid example of the difference between the two parties. One party wants to help make the world a better place and safer for all of its citizens. One party does not. One party wants to reach into homes and into people’s bodies to impose its will. One party does not. At this point it doesn’t make much sense to point out who is who and which is which. Everyone must answer that for themselves. What we can’t do is assert that they are all the same. Clearly they are not. One of these must win and one of these must be driven from polite society. I’ll leave the which is which up to you.

We have to start with the basic facts. Most of the major news sources are reporting that the Supreme Court has secretly voted to overturn Roe v. Wade. Obviously, the way case law works is a little complicated. You can’t just wave a magic wand and erase fifty years of precedent. You have to have a case that allows you to render such a decision. The court has done it before. Brown vs. Board of Education reversed Plessy vs. Ferguson.

If we take enough steps back we can even look on with interest. It should be noted that reversing Roe v. Wade doesn’t make abortion illegal necessarily. Essentially it kicks the matter back to the states. Each individual state can choose for itself whether a woman has a right to choose. I imagine the blue states will continue to allow abortions as they have while the red states will immediately put the kibosh on that.

Public opinion is a fickle thing and I’m not sure that the constitution should be interpreted with public opinion in mind. However, it should be noted that more people are in favor of the pro choice view point than those that are pro life. Right around the time of the 2008 election the two positions were nearly even. Since then the tide has slowly turned towards pro choice with 59 percent currently believing that abortion should be legal in most if not all cases.

Without getting into the religious ramifications of any decision, I find the decision itself to be a fascinating microcosm of what is currently going on in the country. We are seeing a growing gap in the numbers of people that support progressive ideas and progressive causes while seeing an increase in conservative ideas and conservative causes. For the life of me I’ve never figured out exactly what to call this gap, but it is significant and it is growing.

Part of the problem is that some Americans have failed to put A and B together. If you want A and A does not happen then it pays to be able to identify who is keeping A from happening. Instead, a large enough percentage get angry at election time and vote for the very people that are stopping progress because the party working for progress hasn’t delivered.

The other part of the problem is that the opposition is good at silencing the will of the people through gerrymandering, voter suppression, and filibustering bills to death. Combine those two elements and you get what we currently got. Meanwhile we brace for the rights of women to roll back five decades as if we were in some sort of perverse DeLorean.

There can be no greater separation between whatever we call progressives and whatever we call conservatives than the feelings about billion dollar corporations. Conservatives fought to give those corporations rights to free speech where progressives normally view those corporations with some level of skepticism or scorn. At the very least, there is a constant battle to get those corporations to pay their fair share in taxes.

This is why the battle over Disney is such a unique battle. No single quote has had a greater impact on the past forty years of politics than Ronald Reagan’s quote from his first inaugural address. “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” No other line quite captures the sentiment of conservatism. That quote gets magnified when we deal with corporations the size of Disney.

Disney has been given all kinds of perks and favors over the years. The idea is that Disney creates more for the economy and stimulates more growth than the government ever could. So, the best thing a government can do is take a back seat and let Disney do their thing. Naturally, we will ignore that while Disney is a fine place to visit (our family has been there three times in the past six years) and they have stimulated the economy in general, as an employer their spoils aren’t exactly distributed equitably.

Such is the nature of these things. A good progressive will take the Reagan quote and insert the word corporations for the word government. It’s not that we don’t want them to exist. It’s that we want them to be tempered and regulated so that their excesses can be reined in. We want workers treated fairly. We want consumers to be protected. We want the effects of the greed that happens naturally to be limited.

What gets lost for the current crop of conservatives is that corporations have no moral compass. They can’t. As much as Citizens United wants us to believe that they are people we know they are not. They are about pure profit motive. They want to sell my daughter a “pride donut” while also seemingly catering to “family values.” They want all of our money.

So, I’m not sure what Desantis and the other movement conservatives were thinking when they came out against LGTBQ+ individuals. When they passed the “Don’t Say Gay” bill what exactly did they think would happen? Did they think Disney would purposely cut off a sizable portion of it’s customer base? Disney has made its billions by being all things to all people. It can appear to be wholesome and family friendly and also friendly to people of all lifestyle choices. They’ve made their way through that mine field. They are incredibly successful because they have done this.

So, now conservatives are going against their core beliefs. They are punishing a corporation for taking a stand. It puts progressives into the uncomfortable position of supporting a corporation like Disney. In the end, corporations are the same. They are all things to all people. They are signs of the ultimate greed and avarice driving a wedge through our society and environment. They are welcoming to all people because all currency spends the same no matter who it comes from. Corporations can and will be both. They can because they can’t afford not to be. At least the successful ones like Disney can’t.

What becomes harder and harder these days is coming up with a list of things I want for Christmas. Most items are things no one would buy for me because either they are unhealthy or they don’t know exactly what I want. In other years, I just don’t want anything that badly. However, since this is the last piece I will write before Christmas I thought I would use that tact to address this particularly situation.

My first instinct is to assert that Joe Mancin and Kyrsten Synema are not really Democrats. The whole reason we are in the mess we are in is that far too many people treat political parties like a team or tribe and not as a generic way of telling people what you stand for. They are both Democrats in the sense that they support policies Democrats support more often than not. They just don’t support enough of them or as often as many of us would like.

So, as angry as one can get at the failure of the Build Back Better bill, it is hard to know exactly what Mancin is thinking. He represents West Virginia. Maybe this deal isn’t good for West Virginia in his eyes. Maybe he bent to the whims of his donors. Maybe he just wants to wield more power on his way out the door. Maybe he is really a Republican in sheep’s clothing. Maybe a lot of things are true.

Getting legislation passed is an uphill battle. Getting judges is an uphill battle. Getting ambassadors and political appointments is an uphill battle. Holding the insurrectionists accountable has been an uphill battle. Look around the country and you clearly see one party cares about democracy (small d) while the other cares about power. One party cares about preserving individual rights while the other cares about power.

Yet, we see Demotats fighting over infrastructure, economic relief, and saving the elderly and working families money. These things are all important. Yet, it cannot be more important than giving those people a fighting chance to get people that will represent their interest. It doesn’t matter which issue it is. Public opinion polls always show that an overwhelming number of people support what the Democrats want to do. Yet, they have a 50/50 split in the Senate.

While Democrats have focused on those important but transient issues, Republicans have managed to tip the scales. They’ve managed to rig statewide elections. They are working to stack the courts. That work is starting to produce fruit now and that fruit is something the majority does not want. What the majority wants doesn’t matter. Yet, here we are still pushing that proverbial rock up the mountain.

What I want for Christmas is for the Democrats in Congress to use whatever political capital they have left to ensure that the overall representation reflects the values of the people. That means that everyone that has the right to vote should be able to vote. That means more access. That means district lines that make sense and that are fair. That means no intimidation. That means no thumbs on the scale. That means no changing the outcome when the outcome is “wrong.” That means one person, one vote. That means that land doesn’t determine political power. People do. Once you get that then all the build back better and progressive planks come. They come whether Joe Mancin supports them or not.