Bob Lord

Democratic Senate candidate Deedra Abboud was asked what legislation she’d introduce if elected. Her response (I’m going by memory, so this may not be exact): “Children shall not be placed in cages in America.”

Campaigns are about messaging. Abboud’s message in her short response was loud and clear: The madness needs to stop, and her priority number one was stopping the madness.

Contrast that to Abboud’s primary opponent, Kyrsten Sinema. Sinema is running ads about her priorities. Priority number one for her is working across the aisle to improve veterans’ health care.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with improving veterans ‘ health care, right? Of course not. Just the opposite. We owe a debt of gratitude to our veterans, even if many of the wars in which our political leaders induced them to serve were for causes less than noble. Regardless, they made huge sacrifices for the good of all of us. We owe them.

The thing is, though, there’s also nothing inherently wrong with fiddling, either.

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This isn’t hard.

Trump categorically was lying when he said he misspoke in Helsinki.

According to Trump, he meant to say “wouldn’t” when he actually said “would” in the following passage.

I have President Putin. He just said it’s not Russia. I will say this. I don’t see any reason why it would be, but I really do want to see the server.

If you believe Trump, that simple change would convert the statement from expressing skepticism of Russian interference in the 2016 election, to not seeing any other possible culprits (you know, like China, or the 400 pound guy on his bed to whom Trump has referred, or whoever he had in his mind when he wrapped up his “clarification” Tuesday by saying “Could be other people also. There’s a lot of people out there.”).

The trouble with Trump’s reconciliation is that it’s flat-out irreconcilable with the remainder of his remarks. 

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A federal jobs and income guarantee could protect workers the way unions once did.

The Supreme Court’s decision in Janus vs. AFSCME dealt organized labor, already on its heels, a crushing blow. Public employees who choose not to join unions now cannot be required to pay so-called “fair share” fees to compensate unions for the cost of representing them in wage and benefit negotiations.

With only 6.5 percent of private sector workers unionized, teachers, firefighters, and other public employee unions have been the bulwark of organized labor in recent years. Over a third of government workers are unionized, but that will likely head south in the wake of Janus.

Absent a union, an individual employee negotiating against a large employer is powerless. If the employer and worker don’t agree to terms, the employer loses one worker out of many, while the employee’s children go hungry. Guess who wins?

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The Facebook fights are raging these days.

Democratic loyalists fall into two strategy camps: progressive and old school. The progressive camp believes in the power of unabashedly progressive candidates, fueled largely by small-dollar donations and shoe leather, to inspire thousands of new voters from the ranks of those demographics whose participation rates have lagged those of older white Americans. The old school camp, fueled largely by major donors and establishment political operations, believes in the Bill Clinton recipe of winning the votes of supposedly centrist white voters, including suburban pro-choice women and the “socially liberal but fiscally conservative” crowd.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with either strategy. Each has its own logic. Each has had its victories.

The dilemma is that the two strategies are nearly always competitive and almost never synergistic. Hillary Clinton whiffed badly with millennials, for example. But how would Bernie Sanders have done with the country club crowd?

Is it possible for the two strategies to work together?

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