(H/T: Instapundit) There are several amusing things about this article from the Washington Examiner on the topic of what the Left hopes to do towards state legislatures in the upcoming election cycle:
“We’re working with David Brock and Media Matters and American Bridge who have trackers that we can send out to monitor the debate on some bills that you all might be running,” Nick Rathod, executive director of SiX [a liberal group trying to get state legislatures back], said. “I think in many legislatures my understanding is that a lot of legislatures stream their floor debates but don’t necessarily transcribe it or capture it in any kind of way. And so we want to start capturing them on that. I think we know, someone’s going to say something about black people. Someone’s going to say something about women. Someone is going to say something.”
In no particular order:
- First and foremost, congratulations to anyone reading this who works on the state level: the above paragraph represents an admission by the Left that state legislatures actually do matter, after all. Admittedly, there’s something to be said for keeping said Leftists fat, dumb, and as happy as they can manage – but it’s still satisfying to watch your enemy concede that their worldview is flawed, and requires adjustment.
- I suppose that the people at SiX (I’m not exactly sure whether the acronym is supposed to mean anything) could have also been talking about how to calibrate a positive progressive message to better appeal to voters*. Being a partisan Republican hack, I officially kind of doubt it – and I’m justified in that, honestly. If you’re planning ‘gotcha’ as your primary (oh, I slay me) strategy, well, there are only so many hours in the day to do anything else.
- …Media trackers. Yeah, that’s new. Spoiler warning: it is not actually new. Don’t get me wrong; media tracking can work. But it doesn’t work in a vacuum. If you’re in a favorable-to-you media environment, you can use to take down a Bob Etheridge. If you’re in an unfavorable-to-you media environment, you can apparently film somebody threatening to maim a reporter and still win re-election**. That doesn’t make media tracking useless, but it does define its basic limits.
- I should also like to note that I am grateful for the Left’s apparent desire to make sure that all Republican legislators are strong, like bear! Nothing like a little applied Darwinism now to grow the strong candidates for federal office that we’ll need later.
- Lastly, American Bridge and Media Matters for America are not so much the people that you go to to solve your image problem as they are the people that you ruthlessly purge from your larger network on your way to solving the problem. Organizations take on a certain psychic… odor to them, after a time: and those two groups currently stink of failure and malice. The former may be more important in this context, but the latter shouldn’t be all that welcome to Democrats, either.
None of this should imply that Republican state lawmakers need not worry about saying stupid things, of course. Don’t say stupid things – whether public or private, because a) it’s ethically wrong to say stupid things in private and b) there actually is no more ‘private’ anymore. I’m just merely amazed that SiX and its ilk are apparently dedicated not towards elevating their own side’s legislators to a higher plane. Instead, they’re planning to try to bring our legislators down to their legislators’ level. While I appreciate this fumbling attempt to honor the concept of ‘leveling the playing field’… this isn’t really what we mean when we use the phrase, sorry.
(Image via Shutterstock)
Moe Lane (crosspost)
*The odds of them addressing their basic problem – which is to say, people don’t like most of the things that progressives actually like – are effectively nil.
**I still haven’t been able to process that one. That’s what SiX needs to worry about, frankly: the dysfunctional state of their own state parties. Not that they’ll listen to me, thank the Maker.