Dems Search for Identity (Psst! Sherrod Brown is Right HERE!)

Come on, come on who? (Who are you? Who, who, who, who?) Ah, who the fuck are you? (Who are you? Who, who, who, who?). Who are you? (Who are you? Who, who, who, who?) - The Who, "Who Are You"

Democratic Party Identity Part I (of IV): Be Sherrod Brown

Since the 2024 election mishegas, polls have increasingly shown the Democratic brand to be on par with hantavirus.

This even as the opposition’s led by a cankled cream puff who wines like a railroad engine and possesses the personal taste of a Saddam-Hussein palace dry humping Liberace. A gauche, diapered ignoramus who’s crashing the economy and increasingly has gravy thickener for brains.

And we’re not talking about Cornaby’s E-Z Gel here, but the generic shit.

Now there are many reasons for Democrats’ foibles, some of which we’ll talk about in the other parts of this series.

They include Democrats’ lack of a messaging machine anywhere close to the leviathan Republicans have built. The lack of cojones that would instruct Dems not to just do the right thing, even when it enables fascism.

And a basic unwillingness to dump traditions older than Chuck Grassley’s liver spots that appear nowhere in the Constitution—see debt ceiling, filibuster, blue slips—yet are readily abused and/or ignored by Republicans.

But there is something else just as important—and that is the candidate. You’ve likely heard the saying the medium is the message. In politics, also, the messenger is the message.

If you ever wondered how Roy Cooper’s won so solidly in North Carolina, Laura Kelly is Governor of Kansas and Andy Beshear rules the roost in Kentucky, to name a few, it’s because candidates really do matter.

And that’s where one of the best I’ve ever seen, and the one who can show Democrats the way, comes in: Sherrod Brown.

As Democrats search for identity, culture and the key policies that reinforce the values those communicate to voters, they must lean into a roadmap Sherrod provided for years to win handily in Ohio. Even as most Democrats lost the ability to appeal to many of Ohio’s voters outside of the 3 Cs (Cincinnati, Columbus, Cleveland).

Look, even ignoring the dingos of the right-wing echoes-phere and corporate media click bait ladies of the night, isn’t to say there’s not a problem here. Because there is, it’s a major one and it’s one some of us have been screaming about for years.

From the days of FDR, Democrats were the party of the working class. That came to include not just the white guys with a hard hat and a hammer corporate media equates with that term, but the Black, Hispanic and Asian working class too.

Yet, we not only further hemorrhaged white working class and middle class voters this last election to a freakish, self-loathing, diarrhea-of-the-mouth dingus. But our problem became multi-racial.

We lost many working-class-minority men to a human oil spot who began his campaign by calling Mexicans rapists, referred to nations in Africa as “shithole countries” and called COVID the “Kung-Flu.”

Scranton, we have a problem.

And the solution is Sherrod Brown.

Brown is exactly the kind of scrappy, salt-of-the-Earth Democrat we need out front speaking for the party right now. Is he a little older than you might want? In a perfect world, yes. But we live in this particular very-non-perfect world.

And in this one, Sherrod is the goods.

He’s always been ahead of the curve, even back when Ohio swung back and forth almost equally. In other words, before greedy, democracy-hating, perpetually papyrus-brained Republicans turned my home state into MAGA LEGOLAND. Sherrod’s always been a populist, workers-first kinda Democrat.

Probably why I feel so comfortable calling him Sherrod, even though we’ve only met a few times.

And the thing is, Sherrod isn’t just populist—every single quality of his screams it.

From a gravelly voice that makes you picture a guy who chain-smoked a pack of Marlboro Reds while simultaneously chugging black coffees by the dozen, to the oft unkempt curls in his hair and regular dude look he has on the campaign trail.

From the union halls he still packs to the little yellow canary pin he wears and speaks about often—it was given to him by a miner and reminds him for whom he fights and to whom his gives his true allegiance.

Sherrod was talking about the unfair trade deals screwing workers while Donald Trump was still screwing porn stars. Brown was calling for Democrats to fight for stronger unions. He even talked tariffs—not the “wake up on the wrong side of the un-man cave and slap tariffs on everything in sight” dill-holery of Trump.

But targeted, strategic, narrow ones aimed right at countries unfairly dumping products here to harm American workers. That’s Sherrod—smart populism, not dumb as a doorknob policies.

This doesn’t mean that Sherrod doesn’t support, and fight for, a woman’s right to control her body. He does. Or our freedom to send our kids to school and not have them massacred by some hallucinating, MAGA jackwad who hates the world.

But he always—always—leads with worker pay, healthcare for all, family & medical leave, the right to organize, safety on the job and more. He talks about the “dignity of work” constantly.

These aren’t just themes he trots out when he is speaking to workers, they are themes of who he is. His moral center.

He lives and breathes these values.

This is what makes him alway seem like an outsider, because he doesn’t talk in the shallow sentences of Washington. Sadly, neither does Trump, which is what has made him popular with some of these same crowds.

It’s just that Trump is a serial liar that is cruel, corrupt and incompetent in reality.

You need the cred Sherrod brings to beat the MAGA movement. Joe Biden definitely embodied some of this in 2020 with his faith out front, his stories, gaffes and constant talk about Scranton and being a regular guy. He also lived it. But Sherrod is on a whole different level.

And we’re in the age of the non-politician, politician. People want conversations, not dictation. They want authenticity. They want real.

Trump is real. A real piece of shit, but real.

Sherrod is the right kind of real. The kind that met my family, including our then two-year old, and sent us a letter a week later addressed to him. It was about how much he enjoyed meeting him and how smart my young son was to bring his parents with him to the event.

It’s this that for the better part of 50 years in electoral politics in Ohio allowed him not just survive, but thrive. He’s as comfortable at a trucker hall in Toledo as he is at a big-check fundraiser. He’s one of the only Democrats who can walk into both rooms and sound like the same damn guy!

No double-speak, no “different script for different audiences” bullshit. Just Sherrod.

Yes, as you’re going to say, he lost his race in 2024. But did you know he only lost by 3%—over-performed the top of the Democratic ticket by 8%?

And that was when Trump was on the ballot, semi-popular—i.e. not hated by many of his own voters as he is now—and Brown’s opponent, Bernie Moreno, also came off like an outsider. Being a gauche, newly-rich, loudmouth-of-a car salesman who sounded just enough like an asshole—because he is one—to be Trump, will do that for you. Also, he hadn’t held public office.

This time Sherrod is running against Jon Husted. LOL. An insider’s insider. A guy who looks like he was born in khakis and docksiders and his parents registed him as a lobbyist as a fetus.

And Sherrod’s template is one that other authentic candidates can adopt.

Hallie Shofner, running for Senate in Arkansas, a 6th generation farmer who lost her farm to Trump’s Tuberville-esque tariffs and is now taking on Tom Cotton, showed exactly this kind of politics. She attacked the Democratic Establishment in DC for abandoning Arkansas, right before launching into a tirade about how Cotton had betrayed Arkansans like her, voting against the Farm Bill TWICE.

A real farmer, like another authentic Senator who way over-performed the top of the ticket in 2024—by 12% actually—former Senator Jon Tester in Montana. Had that race been somewhat closer at the top, he could’ve won too.

To get back to Sherrod, as I said, he is the model. Liberal on social issues but doesn’t lead with them (and at this point can easily frame them as freedom against the peeping Tom, pedo-enablers).

He leads with the issues that have the broadest appeal to our emerging coalition and which formed the basis of Democratic dominance for half the 20th Century. Sherrod leads with work. With dignity. With the core idea that no matter who you are, you deserve a fair shot.

That’s why he can bring back working-class Latinos, Black voters, Asian voters, younger voters and yes, win more men in general. While continuing to win big with women in the suburbs and other minority voters, and pull in chunks of MAGA-lite working-class whites who went for Trump.

That’s the coalition we need to rebuild the Democratic Party into something like FDR’s New Deal coalition.

The messaging isn’t hard and it’s already in Sherrod’s toolbox and should be repeated constantly by all Democrats.

As even wealthy-by-all-standards Republicans and Independents are left to look at crazy interest rates, inflation and a declining standard of living where they can’t afford college or childcare and worry their healthcare won’t cover an important operation.

They now wonder why if they’re making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, they feel like they’re barely treading water. Sherrod—and the rest of us—can tell them. The message is literally sitting right there—and it’s the truth!

They’re like the working class, at least in terms of how Trump, Musk and Thiel—The 3 Stool-ges—see them.

Yes, you can make a few hundred grand, but if you’re paying for a creepy, socially-Gary-Busey’d, robo-spawning-loser like Elon Musk to slurp up government contracts and mold monopolies that raise all prices, cut your benefits, squeeze you out of housing with their private equity acquisitions, etc—it doesn’t much matter that you’ve done well by most standards.

You’re not an oligarch. And unfortunately for you, person who’d normally be rich, we’re living in an oligarchy.

Sherrod speaks to all of the above. To the idea that you should be able to work hard and still afford a good life, in fact a better life than your parents—which was once considered the American Dream.

Murdered by the South African tech bros and a gold-fondling, Queens colostomy bag. Who when you say “let’s get down to business,” immediately bankrupts the nearest animate object.

Sure, Republicans may shoot their puppies in the face, protect the files of a dead, international super-predator—RELEASE THE EPSTEIN FILES, NO WE HAVEN’T FORGOTTEN, DONNY—and take off on a first class jaunts every time their constituents are freezing or flooded to death.

But they’ll still call Democrats elitists and much of the corporate media will let them get away with it.

Right Jake Tapper?!?

That’s why Sherrod Brown is the guy Democrats need to look to for messaging and cultural identity right now. An authentic populist who knows how to unite the left and center, who knows the stakes and never forgot for whom he fights.

If Democrats want to build a coalition that lasts another 50 years, they should stop looking to poll-tested consultants and listening to cable-media pundit slop, and look to Sherrod Brown.

Because if anyone can realign the party with real people, the vast majority of people in America, it’s Sherrod.

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