Democrats Have Great Exciting New Idea: Being Democrats

 Photo by Tim Pierce 

Here's an idea that's so crazy, it just might work! After the thorough ass-kicking the Democratic Party suffered on Election Day, some Democrats are considering the possibility that maybe running "Democratic" candidates who are embarrassed to be Democrats is not the best way to appeal to the Democratic Party. Crazy, huh? With candidates refusing to support Obamacare, refusing to support Democratic policies, refusing to even say "Hell, yes, I voted for Barack Obama because I am a Democrat, DUH," the new minority is thinking maybe it's time to get back to being Democrats.

According to Faiz Shakir, a senior adviser to the soon-to-be-ex Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, the new plan for 2016 is to maybe --maybe-- run Democratic candidates on a Democratic platform.

If the ballot measure results are any indication, actual progressive policies remain popular with voters in red and blue states. I believe you’ll see a Senate Democratic caucus fight on behalf of those policies and provide the votes if and when Republicans are ready to act.

Ah, right, those progressive policies like legalizing weed, keeping abortion legal, raising the minimum wage, reducing sentencing for minor drug offenses in California ... those are all progressive policies, and they all prevailed on Tuesday. We are dazed and confused that while voters in Colorado voted against the state's latest attempt to enact a personhood amendment declaring every sperm is sacred, those same voters elected Republican Cory Gardner, big HUGE fan of personhood, to the Senate. Which means voters in Colorado are against the very policies their new senator supports, which does not make any kind of sense, but hey, maybe all that legal recreational weed affected their rational thinking? Or maybe Democrats did a piss poor job of defending progressive policies they supposedly support? Or maybe Americans are just plain dumb and don't even know what they want? Or maybe all of the above?

Given that the Democrats' electoral strategy for 2014 was something like, "Uh, please let us keep our jobs, which we have not been very good at doing, but come on, please?" and that didn't work very well at all, it's probably a good idea to try something else next time around. Like running Democrats who are proud to be Democrats and proud of Democratic accomplishments. (Cough, health care reform, cough cough wheeze cough ebola.) After all, some of the most popular members of the party, like Sen. Elizabeth Badass Warren, are also some of the leading voices for actual progressive policies, and for some strange reason that cannot possibly be understood by any form of Earth logic, people seem to like that.

So go for it, Dems. Try being Democrats for a change. Now that you've lost pretty much every office in the land, it certainly couldn't make things worse.

[ HuffPo ]