SHOULD DEMOCRATS MOVE TO THE CENTER? MARK PENN OP-ED INSPIRES FURIOUS DEBATE
Mark Penn knows about losing elections—and about winning them. Now, the longtime pollster for Bill and Hillary Clinton is offering his advice to Democrats despondent after the 2016 election of Donald J. Trump to the presidency and, more recently, defeat for their party’s candidates in several special elections that many hoped would serve as the advance guard of a Democratic takeover of Capitol Hill next year.
The pollster’s much-disputed wisdom, which has generated immense vitriol and some rational debate online, comes in the form of “Back to the Center, Democrats,” a New York Times op-ed (co-authored by a former Manhattan borough president, Andrew Stein). As the title suggests, the thesis is that the Democrats’ message has been hijacked by the so-called Elizabeth Warren wing of the party and must shift right if it is to recapture the House of Representatives, not to mention the White House.
Penn and Stein write:
Central to the Democrats’ diminishment has been their loss of support among working-class voters, who feel abandoned by the party’s shift away from moderate positions on trade and immigration, from backing police and tough anti-crime measures, from trying to restore manufacturing jobs. They saw the party being mired too often in political correctness, transgender bathroom issues and policies offering more help to undocumented immigrants than to the heartland.
Others have made similar arguments since Hillary Clinton’s loss, but Penn has a credibility that comes with having engineered Bill Clinton’s re-election campaign in 1996. He was also a close adviser on Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign, if not exactly a well-liked one. As John Heilemann and Mark Halperin reported in Game Change, their popular book about that year’s presidential campaign, others in the Clinton camp found him “arrogant and amoral, a detrimental force whose perniciousness was amplified by his inexplicably tight bond with the Clintons.”
http://www.newsweek.com/move-center-democrats-mark-penn-op-ed-inspires-furios-debate-633046
= new reply since forum marked as read
Why is it always the Dems who have to surrender their principles? Does he not care what his proposed strategies mean for Americans?
Bernie Sanders has been saying since the election: "Central to the Democrats’ diminishment has been their loss of support among working-class voters, who feel abandoned by the party’s shift away from . . . positions on trade and immigration, . . . from trying to restore manufacturing jobs. They saw the party being mired too often in political correctness" (i.e., "identity politics"
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I could swear I've heard that before. (except the immigration part, but that's a little bit implicit).
Where, exactly is that? 
has me scratching my head. 
Maybe an attempt at sarcasm?
.....plan to become a little more like them....
That didn't work out to well as history taught us....at least those of us who paid attention to the lessons of the past of human history.
So, hell no....If the Center means moving over to what the current Trump fanatics and GOP call themselves, then there is no way moving anywhere near that is up for debate.
