The Many Faces of Rick Wilson

One of the irrefutable facts to emerge from the 2020 election is that the Lincoln Project's actual electoral track record during that election cycle was spectacularly bad, especially when contrasted against all of their swaggering, public declarations of their own unique and unparalleled political genius.  

However, another irrefutable fact that emerged from the 2020 election is that the Lincoln Lads do excel at relentless self-promotion, especially when aided and abetted by their many friends and fellow travelers in the media.   By doing what Republicans do best -- hunkering down and blustering their way past all the evidence that contradicts their imperviously high opinions of themselves -- they have managed to weather both their complete failure to deliver on any of the grandiose electoral promises they made in 2020 and back-to-back sex and money and coverup scandals that should have buried them.

And now they're back, raising money by preaching exactly the same sermon they were preaching from the day they conjured themselves into existence in 2019:  That Democrats are feckless idiots who are incapable of winning elections against Republicans and therefore they, the Lincoln Lads, are American democracy's last hope of salvation.

Of course, to keep riding that hobbyhorse and keep the money from credulous Liberals coming in the door, the Lincoln Lads have had to say a lot stuff that isn't strictly true, but having spent their adult lives as Republican campaign button-men, this obviously isn't a problem.    Which is where we join the Lincoln Lad's Reed Galen and Rick Wilson: mid-conversation, explaining why Democrats are hapless children who cannot hope to succeed without the Lincoln Lad's special brand of magic.  

Wilson: There is a degree to which the Democratic Party believes they can shame people into good behavior.  And I do think shame is an important function in society...

driftglass:  Rick means that shame is important for other people.  Because if you try to get Rick himself to own up to all the heinous shit he has said and done, well, you know how that ends...

Wilson: ...but too often it comes across as this sort of lecture to working class people.   Y'know, "Fuck you, you don't understand the world.  We do.  We're the experts." And they rub their nose in it.  

driftglass:  Tell me Rick, because I'm dying to know,  where exactly are these "working class people" hearing "the Democratic Party" lecturing them in this way?  Because if they're all getting it off of my blog, my traffic stats definitely do not reflect it.

Wilson:  Where the old Southernism of "You catch more flies with honey than vinegar" is truth.  

driftglass:  Here we find Mr. Rick Wilson in a since-scrubbed Tweet practicing those active and sympathetic catching-flies-with-honey techniques which he preaches so hard in language much saltier that that which got me banned from Twitter forever.

driftglass:  And here he is again, haulin' down so many flies with that sweet, sweet honey.

@markos "Do you agree or disagree that touching the hem of Barack Obama's robe will cure all known diseases?"

— Rick Wilson (@TheRickWilson) February 3, 2010

driftglass:  And here we find Mr. Wilson a full decade after his remarks about us stoopid "Nutroots/bitches" Libtards.  That's a full decade of Mr. Wilson steeping in the balm his own wisdom about the importance of not being condescending or insulting.

Did you work hard to be this much of a moron, or are you the product of a combination of enthusiastic inbreeding and a mother who spent her pregnancy huffing paint thinner while servicing her other clients in a truckstop bathroom? https://t.co/sVUubocn9m

— Rick Wilson (@TheRickWilson) January 8, 2020

 

driftglass:  And here we find Mr. Wilson on CNN sharing his open-hearted concerns for plight of Republican base voters with Don Lemon and humbly urging them to leave the GOP for their own good.

Rick Wilson continues

Wilson: If you say to them, "You're voting against your personal and economic health and interests and we want to help you, and here's what we're proposing" that's one thing.  If it's "Shut up, white boy, your privilege is so intense...", y'know, you're telling someone from the Florida panhandle who gets in a pickup truck every morning and goes and works construction, if you're telling them that their privilege is an overbearing burden and they need to shut up, you are begging the Republican Party to pick them up.  

OK, once again I am moved to ask, name for me please exactly which Democrats are saying "Shut up, white boy" because that sure as hell sound like some of that barely-coded racist bullshit that Rick was flinging at Barack Obama back before Rick became every credulous Liberal's BFF.  And in what venue are these imaginary Democrats telling white boys to shut up often enough and loud enough for Rick's fictional  Florida man "who gets in a pickup truck every morning and goes and works construction" to not only hear it frequently enough to make a lasting impression, but an impression so deep that he goes ahead and votes to set fire to American democracy and cut this own economic throat by electing members of the American Fascist Party?

Because I strongly suspect that Mr. Wilson's imaginary white construction person ain't listening to Thom Hartmann when he's out hanging drywall, or unwinding in the evenings with a six-pack and Chris Hayes.   I strongly suspect that Mr. Wilson's imaginary white construction person has spent so many years letting Limbaugh and Hannity and O'Reilly take a shit in his skull day after day after day that he has become exactly the sort of reprogrammable meatbag voter that the GOP has working so hard for so long to engineer.

So, y'know, fuck that guy.  He's a pestilence, and I'm entirely uninterested in Rick Wilson's strategy for catching him with honey or vinegar.  

Wilson:  On the one hand, I'm not very forgiving of some of the shenanigans they get up to.  I'm not a guy who says, oh, y'know, their economic anxiety means it's OK for them to burn a torch at Charlottesville and talk about getting rid of the Jews.  I can't excuse that...

Are you sure you can't excuse that, Rick?  Because you spent most of your adult life making sure these very same people were all spun up and ready to pull the level for whichever Republican you were being paid to get elected, so it sure looks you excused this shit.  A lot.  

Wilson:  But that's not to say that...that a person in Appalachia is not economically and socially and educationally and culturally in a position that many Americans would consider disadvantaged.  And we have to be aware of that, and that is a pool from which authoritarians throughout history have frequently drawn a meaningful fraction of their support.  So those guys that are out screaming "Fuck you!  I love Trump!" they're not going to be easy to get on a policy argument.  They may be better to get on an ideological argument where you can convince them, "Hey, you're being played". 

Rick would really, really like you to believe that a) the assholes out there  'screaming "Fuck you!  I love Trump!"' are getable but, b) only the special genius of the Lincoln Lads can get them which is why you need to keep sending those checks and Venmos coming.  

No...and no.  Fuck those guys.  

Reed Galen:  But let me... let me be a nerd here and insert a little bit of policy back into this.  Which is, as the Democrats and president Biden are fighting to get an infrastructure bill done, why aren't they appealing to working class Americans who say "This is going to insure you work for the next 'X' months or 'X' years as we repair thousands of bridges, hundreds of thousands of roads."? 

Hey Reed, the bill is literally called the American JOBS Plan. 

During President Biden's first address to a joint session of congress he used the word "jobs" 43 times.  If you don't believe me, here's a big slab of that speech:

These are the investments we make together, as one country, and that only government can make. Time and again, they propel us into the future. That’s why I proposed The American Jobs Plan — a once-in-a-generation investment in America itself. The largest jobs plan since World War II.

It creates jobs to upgrade our transportation infrastructure. Jobs modernizing roads, bridges and highways. Jobs building ports and airports, rail corridors and transit lines. It’s clean water.

Today, up to 10 million homes and more than 400,000 schools and child care centers have pipes with lead in them, including for drinking water. A clear and present danger to our children’s health.

The American Jobs Plan creates jobs replacing 100% of the nation’s lead pipes and service lines so every American, so every child – can turn on the faucet and be certain to drink clean water. It creates jobs connecting every American with high-speed internet, including 35% of rural Americans who still don’t have it. This will help our kids and businesses succeed in a 21st Century economy. And I am asking the Vice President to help lead this effort.

It creates jobs by building a modern power grid. Our grids are vulnerable to storms, hacks, and catastrophic failures – with tragic results as we saw in Texas and elsewhere during winter storms.

The American Jobs Plan will create jobs to lay thousands of miles of transmission lines needed to build a resilient and fully clean grid. The American Jobs Plan will help millions of people get back to their jobs and their careers.

2 million women have dropped out of the workforce during this pandemic, too often because they couldn’t get the care they need for their family, their children. 800,000 families are on a Medicaid waiting list right now to get homecare for their aging parent or loved one with a disability. This plan will help these families and create jobs for our caregivers with better wages and better benefits.

For too long, we have failed to use the most important word when it comes to meeting the climate crisis. Jobs. Jobs. For me, when I think about climate change, I think jobs.

The American Jobs Plan will put engineers and construction workers to work building more energy efficient buildings and homes. Electrical workers installing 500,000 charging stations along our highways. Farmers planting cover crops, so they can reduce carbon dioxide in the air and get paid for doing it.

There’s no reason the blades for wind turbines can’t be built in Pittsburgh instead of Beijing. No reason why American workers can’t lead the world in the production of electric vehicles and batteries.

The American Jobs Plan will create millions of good paying jobs – jobs Americans can raise their families on. And all the investments in the American Jobs Plan will be guided by one principle: “Buy American.” American tax dollars are going to be used to buy American products made in America that create American jobs. The way it should be.

Now – I know some of you at home are wondering whether these jobs are for you. You feel left behind and forgotten in an economy that’s rapidly changing. Let me speak directly to you.

Independent experts estimate the American Jobs Plan will add millions of jobs and trillions of dollars in economic growth for years to come. These are good-paying jobs that can’t be outsourced. Nearly 90% of the infrastructure jobs created in the American Jobs Plan do not require a college degree. 75% do not require an associate’s degree.

The American Jobs Plan is a blue-collar blueprint to build America.

Even as a lethal pandemic still haunts us and as the Biden administration's full-court press to get Americans vaccinated -- even asshole Florida construction "Fuck you!  I voted for Trump!" guy --  continues to dominate their public messaging,  I'll wager everything that arrives in my tip jars during an average month against everything that arrives your tip jar during an average month that if you word-cloud everything Joe Biden has said over the past six months, the word "Jobs" would loom nearly as large as both "Vaccinated" and "Malarkey".  

He and members of his cabinet have been barnstorming the country talking about good jobs for working class Americans so relentlessly -- 

“Amtrak Joe” Celebrates Train Service’s 50th Anniversary & Pushes Infrastructure Plan

The President told stories about how Amtrak became his “family” and how his infrastructure plan will improve the next generation of his beloved rail service.

-- that, legend has it, that if you look into the mirror and repeat the phrase "American Jobs Plan" three times. Pete Butteguieg will appear behind you and talk about good jobs for working class Americans for an hour. 

See, what Reed Galen is doing is deliberately mixing up what Democrats are actually saying in every venue that it open to them, and what asshole Florida construction "Fuck you!  I voted for Trump!" guy is hearing because asshole Florida construction "Fuck you!  I voted for Trump!" guy is listening to Conservative Hate Radio during the day and watching Fox News or Newsmax at night.  And those Conservative propaganda puke-funnels are never, ever, ever going to breathe a word of anything good that Democrats are doing. 

What the Biden administration is facing his is very much the same issue -- an impenetrable wall of mainstream media active disinterest and Conservatives media lies -- that I wrote about during the Obama administration:

So believe me when I tell that even though I was involuntarily retired from the field of battle, my antennae is still highly attuned to items in the news about the struggles of the Rust Belt economy: outsourcing, manufacturing, skills training, the need to retool high schools and community colleges and the various federal, state and local policies and initiatives designed to get at these large and complex problems.

(Also every time the subject pops up within earshot, my darling wife pipes up with "Honey, they're talking about your stuff again!")

This is why I can tell you that this idea that "better messaging" to the white working class is somehow the royal road back to political majorities for the Democratic party is nonsense.  Sure, Democrats always need to work on speaking like mortal human beings and progressives in general suffer from an inexplicable inability to kill the fucking bunny even with all the claws and fangs at their disposal:

But messaging itself is not the problem.  The media is the problem.  And since, as the man said, the medium is the message, until we start taking on the media as Public Enemy #1, we're going to go right on losing.

This is shaping up to be a long post because sometimes I feel the need to drive a point home using a great big hammer, so if you want to scroll on down, be my guest.  But before you move along, my premise is fairly easy to summarize:

1. For a variety if reasons, white working class Americans have been taking a pounding since the late 1970s.  And for a different variety of reasons, a disturbingly high number number of white working class Americans keep voting for the people that fuck them over.




1. Judging by policy statements made, resources allocated, attention paid and political capitol spent, it's quite likely that history will judge the Obama Administration to have been the most consistently pro-manufacturing administration since Eisenhower.  In fact, outside of health care (and turkey pardons), I would wager a penny and a fiddle of gold that in the last eight years the Obama administration put more effort into promoting American manufacturing than into any other domestic policy priority.




1. If you are a member of the general public, unless you made an extra special effort to inform yourself, you are blissfully unaware of any of this.




1. If you are blissfully unaware of any of this, it is not because the Obama Administration failed to talk it up at every single opportunity, but because over the last eight years the American political media collectively decided that instead of boring-ass stories about what the Democratic party has been trying to do to improve the lives and futures of the working class Americans, what you needed to hear were lively fairy tales about Birth Certificates and Death Panels.  Email servers and Benghaaaazi.  A Republican rebranding scam called the "Tea Party".  Instead of stories about the Caucus Room Conspiracy and Republican sabotage and sedition, you needed to hear endlessly, plaintive cries from all the usual Beltway hacks about how Barack Obama was refusing to lead!

So, as the late, great Al Smith used to say, let's take a look at the record...

I have spent a couple of days going over hundreds of White House press releases, public statements, sections of each of President Obama's State of the Union addresses, etc. all on the subject of American manufacturing.  This is a small, representative sample from that gargantuan pile, with emphasis added by me as the spirit moves me...

We return now to Rick Wilson in the here-and-now

Wilson:  It's a phenomenal question.  

Not, it's really, really not.  In fact it would be a phenomenally stupid question...if it were a question at all.  But it isn't.  It's a lead-in to a sales pitch for why poor, hapless Democrats need to keep the Lincoln Lads on the payroll.  

Wilson:  And it's one of those mysteries that, y'know, as we've had to now work with our former opponents and our current Democratic colleagues and friends -- as we've had to move into this space -- there are a lot of mysteries like that, that I'm constantly, like, "They don't get this do they?  Why don't they understand that?"  And I go back all the time -- I've written about this...I've written in my books, I've written this in articles -- Democrats tend to be holistically bad at politics.  

In the world of sleazy asshole dating -- a world in which I can only assume a troll like Wilson thrived for most of his life -- this is called "negging":

the act of insulting someone or something with a backhanded compliment or with qualified approval, especially as a ploy to lower the self-esteem of a person or cheapen an object before showing romantic interest or making an offer.

Rick Wilson continues...

Wilson:  And they have a[n] unbelievable degree of faith in that policy will allow them to arrive at some algorithmically designed message that balances out any of the cultural disconnects.  It's like, I have talked to many Democrats' who said, with a straight face, [Rick speaking in his Liberals-are-such-idiots voice] "Well we won 2018 because of Health Care". Ya didn't!...

And there's the pitch.

Because if Democrats did win in 2018 because Democrats --especially women and minorities -- organized, knocked on doors, phone-banked, ran on issues that were critical to their constituents like health care and flipped the House, then Democrats wouldn't require the services of the Lincoln Lads -- who holistically failed to make good on any of their 2020 election guarantees -- whose only claim to your money and your faith is their promise that they and they alone can penetrate the suffocating blanket of wingnut rage and racism they spent decades weaving together and extract therefrom enough votes and changes-of-heart to save American democracy.  

Which is why the Lincoln Lads really, really need you to willingly suspend your disbelief, deny the evidence of your senses and virtually all post-election analysis that showed that running on health care was decisive (here is a small sampling)

From Business Insider: 

The midterm elections cemented Obamacare's legacy and showed Democrats can actually win on healthcare

From The Atlantic: 

The One Issue That’s Really Driving the Midterm Elections

Ask voters what they care about, and they’re very clear.

Here’s an amazing political statistic: In 2016, the Affordable Care Act came up in just 10 percent of pro-Democrat campaign advertisements and 16 percent of pro-Republican ones. This year, it came up in more than half of Democratic ads and nearly a third of those for Republicans.

...Health care has become the single most important policy topic in the midterm elections—everywhere and nowhere, a strange kind of omnipresent sleeper issue. It’s not grabbing many national headlines, compared with the migrant caravan or the Supreme Court fight or violence directed against minority groups or the trade war, but it’s motivating voters in race after race after race. New polling from the Public Religion Research Institute shows that Americans point to the cost of health care more than any other issue when asked what is most important to them this election cycle. “It’s official: The 2018 midterms are about health care,” Wesleyan argued.

 

From The New York Times: 

Democrats Won a Mandate on Health Care. How Will They Use It?

-- and instead trust them that the real reason Democrats won in 2016 is some mysterious, ineffable force that only the Lincoln Lads can perceive.

And how do I know they're full of shit on this question?

Because one of the biggest, loudest quotes about the efficacy of heath care in the 2018 election comes from America's premiere political brain wizard himself, Rick Fucking Wilson, in 2017.  

From NY Mag:  

Democrats Won the House Because of Obamacare

Health care has registered as the highest voter priority in exit polls. It also featured more heavily in Democratic advertising than any other issue. As the Republican consultant Rick Wilson explained in early 2017, Republicans meeting with focus groups could not produce any argument that would bring the public around to their fundamental view, which called for repealing the law’s signature regulation of the insurance market. “We were prepping anti-Obamacare ads. In EVERY group and I mean EVERY group,” he recalled, “Democrats, indys, hard Rs, soft Rs, rich, poor, black, white, urban, suburban … there was one argument that nuked everything else … and that was coverage for preexisting conditions. It didn’t matter where you were coming from on the battle … it was the killer app.”

Now I'm off to look straight into the nearest mirror and get my weekly update on how the whole infrastructure thing is going straight from the Secretary of Transportation's mouth.

American Jobs Plan...

American Jobs Plan...

American Jobs Plan...

No Half Measures