Center Squares
Remember: Better Things are NOT possible!
[The same bleak hotel conference room — conference table, rolling chairs, overhead lights, Starbucks cups and Dasani bottles, MacBooksPro — and the same youngish consultants from the Kitchen Table Institute as in “Less is MOR” — fancy-fashy HAGGIS, business-cute MARCY, Obamanation PARIS, almost-edgy POPPY — led by bearded MART BASIN of that sketch and “Middle March.” There are posters on the wall of Josh Shapiro, James Carville, and Joe Lieberman. All the consultants wear lapel buttons bearing the image of a difference being split.]
MART: Alright alright! Code Red, people, and I do mean red!
HAGGIS: Word! What is it with New Yorkers?
POPPY: And Seattlites!
PARIS: And DC!
HAGGIS: And L.A.!
MARCY: And Michiganders!
PARIS: Hey, Michiganders are upstate! Salt of the earth. Don’t blame them!
MART: And that’s just the official DSA candidates, we’re not taking into account the knock-on radical tendency that has so many of our younger candidates going totally the wrong way on so many issues like —
EVERYBODY: ISRAEL!
MART: Exactly!
MARCY: It’s a pogrom!
MART: Marcy! I didn’t know you were Jewish.
MARCY: Well, I’m more of a Judeo-Christian. I go to temple with Olivia Reingold.
PARIS: And Medicare for All.
POPPY: Oh Gawd. All that Bernie shit. Speaking of antisemitic!
HAGGIS: Yeah, Paris, what’s the deal, I thought Bernie’s people were all white racists and Islamicists. What’s with all these black people pushing it?
PARIS: Well, you know, some of these sisters go off to Ivy League schools and get their minds messed up.
MARCY: Didn’t you go to Harvard?
PARIS: [Rolls his eyes, points to his groin] Different, obvs.
MARCY: What?
MART: Marcy, don’t take it personally, Paris is leading our Incel Outreach and he just really gets into it sometimes. Speaking of which, that’s a good angle! Black socialists are weird! Women black socialists double weird! I mean were any of the civil rights leaders socialist?
PARIS: Stokely Carmichael.
HAGGIS: I read about him. Whatever happened to him?
PARIS: He became Kwame Ture.
MART: Well, there you go! Kwame Ture, Rashida Tlaib, Assata Shakur — try getting the average, moderate, centrist American to relate to that. Alright! Ideas, people — be bold but not radical!
HAGGIS: I was thinking we could push the idea that the L.A. primary was rigged.
MART: Interesting! But why?
HAGGIS: Figure if it gains traction it’ll scare Bass back to the center. You didn’t see Spencer Pratt blaming her!
POPPY: Does anyone care what Pratt thinks?
HAGGIS: Are you kidding? He was the reasonable centrist choice! He’s a businessman! With his background you know he’d understand means-testing!
POPPY: What if Raman wins?
HAGGIS: Dunno. Storm City Hall, maybe?
MART: I like it! It’ll help us with MAGA voters. OK, one more before we adjourn, anyone?
MARCY: I have one but I’m kind of ashamed of it —
MART: First thought best thought! James Carville threatened to quit the party, time for drastic measures!
MARCY: Well, I thought we could push a story about Mamdani — that he was born in Kampala.
PARIS: He was born in Kampala.
MARCY: Yeah, but most people don’t know that.
MART: And they also don’t know that it’s not a big deal! Genius! It’ll shatter the DSA’s credibility with crucial racist swing voters!
POPPY: But that’s birtherism! Surely after Obama we shouldn’t be promoting birtherism!
HAGGIS: Like Mart said, It’s an emergency. Besides, Obama’s off the reservation —he’s hanging out with Bruce Springsteen. Gotta cut our losses.
MARCY: And I’m sure you mean “off the reservation” in a totally non-racist way.
HAGGIS: [Forcefully] It’s an emergency. We gotta go hunting where the ducks are.
MART: Exactly! Thanks to radical leftists and communists like Joe Biden and Kamala Harris we’re in the hole, and we’ve got to get these crucial swing centrist moderate conservative MAGA swing Republican voters who support the IDF, means testing, a little less funding for ICE, means testing, trans bans, the war on woke, and sweet, sweet creative destruction somewhat mitigated by consumer-driven benefits with work requirements and means testing that the Democratic Party is talking their language! Alright alright now — here we goooo now, starting looooow now:
[EVERYONE starts quietly chanting “KIT-chen TA-ble” and beating the table, then getting louder, faster, and more raucous; at the height of it, MART stands up and starts clapping, and so do the others.]
MART: And people say the Democrats don’t stand for anything!
EVERYONE: WINNING!
[They all grab their Dasani bottles and down their warm water like tequila shots.]
Ell. Oh. Ell.
Yeah the Dems should definitely go with "we'll help the average citizen out just a little bit, but we LOVE the billionaire business guys and AI too! Middle of the road! Nothing too scary and drastic! Everyone say it with us: Status Quo! Status Quo!"
In all seriousness, what's so depressing is the way forward to victory is staring them right in the face, people are screaming it -- meaningful help for the average joe, hatred of data centers, taxing of billionaires, stopping and if possible reversing the enshittification of almost everything -- but centrist Dems have their fingers in their ears chanting la-la-la.
It's been almost 20 years since I was doing political consulting, but I see some things never seem to change. And one of those things is that Democratic politicians despise Democratic voters. The refrain since 1990 or so has been "Vote for me because I'm not like those OTHER Democrats!" And far too many Democratic politicians spend way too much time searching for their own Sistah Soulja moment, for a chance to punch hippies and prove they're not going to advocate for things that benefit society.
I hated those politicians back then and still hate them today. If I could, I would mail Hakeem Jeffries a big bag of half-eaten salted dicks.