Over the next few days, as Democrats gather in Chicago, Opinion will be publishing scorecards and columns, videos and blog posts, and a range of guest essays wrestling with what Democrats have to do to win consistently, govern effectively and level some of the inequalities that have taken root at the heart of this country. I could go on about these pieces — why we chose them, how much they've challenged me to see the world in new ways — but let me tell you about just two we've been working on for months. Both get beyond the horse race and the nightly coverage, and confront some of the bigger debates simmering beneath the surface of this convention. Timothy Shenk, a professor at George Washington University, emailed me last fall with an idea about Mark Penn and Doug Schoen — two political strategists who had masterminded Bill Clinton's 1996 campaign. People on the left, as Tim is, often see Penn and Schoen as the villains of the past 30 years of American politics, responsible for pushing the Democrats toward a more moderate, market-friendly platform. But Tim had come to believe that the left had something to learn from these operators, and he wanted to write about it. We published his piece on Friday. Around the same time, I'd been talking to the writer James Pogue (who has been doing some incredible reporting on the new right) about Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut. They'd struck up a friendship about two years ago, when Murphy emailed James out of the blue asking to chat. James's piece, which we published today, is partly a profile of Murphy, but it's also so much more than that: a searing look at how the version of liberalism Democrats adopted — defined by its emphasis on free markets, globalization and consumer choice — has begun to feel to many Americans like a dead end. Murphy has some surprising ideas about what Democrats can do about it. Both pieces offer strong lessons for Kamala Harris as she looks ahead to the next two months and strategizes about how to "deal a hammer blow against Trumpism," as Tim put it. They also take us on a journey through the past few decades of American political history and help us understand how we reached our current political stalemate — and what it would take to break us out. I'll let you read them for yourselves. But I'll leave you with a line from Tim's piece, when a young Doug Schoen comes to realize that "Elections aren't a battle for hearts and minds. They're a fight to give voters what they already want." The question for Democrats now is what voters want and how the party can give it to them, setting themselves up not just to beat Trump in the fall, but also to rebuild a coalition powerful enough to dominate American politics for a generation or more. Those are the answers I'll be looking for during this convention. Read the guest essays: Here's what we're focusing on today:
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Monday, August 19, 2024
Opinion Today: The Democratic convention begins today. Understanding it requires a longer view.
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