What Democrat Candidates Need to Do

I have been trying to figure out how the Democratic candidates almost uniformly across the entire range of office running lost their economic message.  Today David Brooks wrote a wonderful column that points the way.  I will provide the link later.

I have recognized that Democrat's did not offer an economic message to anyone other than those involved in the global economy, but their platform and basic instincts certainly pointed at realistic solutions involving training, better education and access to both education and healthcare that would help those in rural areas.  Combine that with some sensible tax reform, some rethink of regulation (not wholesale like Trump wants to do, I mean who wants coal waste in streams), and you would have an economic platform to run on.

But the really distressing part of this past election was that King Donald had a snappy saying, Make America Great Again, that conveyed an upbeat economic message that the Democrats could not counter running their negative campaign against Dangerous Donald.  While the Democratic message worked on the Coasts, it did not work in rural dominated states who were looking for a positive message.

What Brooks highlighted is something I have felt but couldn't find the words for.

America was founded and has endured through the two centuries on the unifying myth that America is a country that "embraces strangers and seizes possibilities".  "That the physical stuff in front of us is also a manifestation of something eternal".

That myth has been battered in rural America and the Democrats had no answer for them. So they gravitated to an alternative myth promised by Donald Trump that the world is a zero sum game:  if someone else wins, we lose and if they lose, we win.  It's a very Russian view that a country is "bound by its nostalgia, not its common future and the pure folk, who live in the heartland embody the pure soul of the country and are threatened by the cosmopolitan elites."

So before your read Brook's more evolved summation of this, I propose that Democratic candidates need to jump shift their rhetoric, combined with some rational policies to encourage job creation in rural areas.  I believe the GOP's policies will just encourage job creation in urban areas and thus rural voters are bound to be open to new ideas by the Democrats.  The rhetoric has to be focused on an upbeat revival of our unifying myth with a focus on including those rural people in the vision and having policies that will bring concrete evidence to them that the myth is reality.  People want to have hope.

Link to David Brooks "A Return to National Greatness"