Respect.
No preaching;
No claims of victory for achieving something we would have achieved even without the shutdown;
No treating people who disagree with you like they are politically naïve;
A simple and honest question;
An absolute joy to read.
What would I have done differently?
First, unless we intended to fight to the death, we should have never tied DACA to the CR. Immigrants from Central and South America and the citizen descendants of those who immigrated from there since the end of WWII are the single most important demographic group to the future of the Democratic Party. They may not vote Democratic with the consistency of people in my community, but their numbers are so much greater than ours that they hold our party's future in their hands. Many in that community were already suspicious of the party because the only immigrants our party seems to publicly embrace are the 800,000 or so high-achieving "Dreamers" (in other words, the kind of immigrants white folks like) and not the 9 million other immigrants who have come to this country to feed their families, to work hard, to escape the violence and oppression in the nations of their birth, and, yes, to drink and drive, to commit crimes, and all the other things that any other community does. Nonetheless, they clung to DACA as a symbol of good faith, particularly after Obama went out on a political and constitutional limb to enforce it through executive order. To them it wasn't a bargaining chip. Their mothers, their fathers, their children weren't bargaining chips. If that is all they were to the party leadership, the leadership should have found another chip.
Second, once we did tie DACA to the CR, we needed to aggressively push the message that the CR could be passed with ONLY Republican votes. Before a single vote was cast last Friday, our leadership should have been on every news show talking about how the GOP has been willing to cast aside the 60-vote requirement over and over for things they really want and the fact that they hadn't done it for the CR shows that either they really didn't care about keeping the government open OR that they were keeping it in place SOLELY to humiliate Democrats by forcing them to join Trump in order to keep the Government running. Our message should have been, "The Republicans are shutting down the government for no other reason than to force Democrats to join Trump in his childish and destructive crusade to destroy every one of Obama's signature achievements." Instead, we stuck with the failed triangulation politics of the post-1992 party and tried to split off Republican females by focusing on "the children" (both CHIP and DACA) and, not surprisingly, failed again.
Third, after our triangulation scheme failed, we should have dropped all demands, said "It's your CR, pass it" and publicly stated that we had released our caucus to vote their conscience. Doug, Claire, Heidi, Joe and the others who don't think they can win without Trumpsters - and maybe can't - (aside, Claire is going to get beat like a drum unless she goes crawling to the black community she abandoned after Ferguson, but that is a different subject entirely) could give them enough votes to get them close enough to 60 that the GOP's own caucus could put them over the top. That way, if the CR didn't pass, the blame would either fall on Rand Paul et al. OR on the House GOP for sending over such an unprincipled and cruel CR in the first place AND our blue dogs would be able to run to the GOP's right on this issue in the next election (two for the price of one).
Fourth, and I know this happened after your post, but we need to put a gag on the centrist Democrats who are going from talk show to talk show (e.g. Chris Coons on MSNBC this morning) attacking Democrats who voted against this surrender as politically naïve and more interested in their own political futures than making the country work AND other self-proclaimed "loyal Democrats" who are doing the same to anyone who dares condemn what Schumer did in chat rooms and on message boards. Right now (and it will be even worse in three weeks when we "compromise" on some "DACA-light" with no path to citizenship and streamlined deportations for the 9 million other immigrants, if we can get even that past the House and/or cave on the CR again) we will get garbage turnouts from the citizen descendants of our Central and South American brothers and sisters - just like we got miserable turnout from my community after our party went silent on the blue on black murder and criminal justice reform to undue the 1994 Violent Crime Act after the convention - and it will cost us ANOTHER election. Demeaning the concerns, political awareness, and intelligence of those groups, who already feel abandoned, and the handful of politicians standing up from them is beyond arrogance. It is political suicide.
Once again, thank you for offering to listen. Sometimes I am amazed at how great the admins can be here.
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