Bill Cotterell: Democrats need brutally honest self-examination

One reason Alcoholics Anonymous is successful is that it won’t permit comforting little euphemisms in group sessions. If you say, “I was really smashed” or “I was feeling no pain,” someone in the circle will politely interrupt with, “The word is ‘drunk.’ You were drunk.”
To cure its electoral hangover, the Democratic Party should take a tactic from AA. Nobody solves a problem without admitting it and facing it honestly.
Ford Motor Co. didn’t try to convince car buyers we had misunderstood the Edsel. It just quit making that car. Coca-Cola dumped “New Coke” and brought back the old formula.
Democrats need to do like big business. First, admit what hasn’t worked and stop doing it. Then, figure out what the American people want and try delivering it. 
Recovery begins with the wisdom of the Pogo comic strip, “We have met the enemy and he is us.” Or, as the late Democratic U.S. Sen. Ernest Hollings of South Carolina used to say, “There is no education in the second kick of a mule.” 
Hollings saw his party get kicked a lot in more than a half-century as a governor and senator, but Democrats kept peddling variations on the same condescending message — no matter how often those poor, benighted voters rejected it.
This year, Donald Trump promised tax exemptions for tips, overtime and Social Security. Asked on “The View” how she differed from President Joe Biden, Kamala Harris couldn’t think of anything.
When 77% of voters say the country is headed in the wrong direction, that’s not a real confidence-building answer. Republicans used video from “The View” in an attack advertisement. 
But the hardest kick was an ad titled “They/Them” that included a 2019 comment from Harris defending her belief that transgender prison inmates — including those in the country illegally — are entitled to gender-transition treatment at taxpayer expense.
Gay and trans politics weren’t big issues like the economy, immigration and crime. But Republicans found a handy cudgel to whack Harris, as she and her party self-isolated themselves on the far fringe of the liberal spectrum.
In a post-election interview, U.S. Rep. Seth Moulton, D-Mass., told The New York Times, “Democrats spend way too much time trying not to offend anyone, rather than being brutally honest about the challenges many Americans face. I have two little girls. I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male, or formerly male, athlete — but as a Democrat, I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.”
As if to prove the point, a top aide in Moulton’s office resigned, and the Massachusetts Democratic leadership demanded Moulton apologize.
Democrats didn’t actively cause many of the social trends that contribute to a climate someone like Trump can use against them. But cumulatively, the trends give the party a bad image.
It’s not that so many Democrats scorned the U.S. Supreme Court ruling against race-based admissions at Harvard and the University of North Carolina last year. It’s that so many in Congress, the White House and academia still depict affirmative action as a virtuous way to equalize opportunity.
When an NPR reporter covering an abortion story blithely referred to “pregnant people,” lots of listeners nodded and thought, “Uh-huh, those are ‘women.’” When some university presidents testified before Congress that violence against Jews on campus is a complex and multi-faceted concept needing ponderous consideration, millions of viewers thought, “No, it’s not.”
Having a big “Trans Awareness” celebration at the White House on Easter Sunday was dumb. Being surprised that so many people were offended showed how out of touch the Biden folks really are.
The Harris loss wasn’t the only consequence of the leftward Democratic drift. Liberal Mayor London Breed in San Francisco and District Attorney George Gascon in Los Angeles were both defeated, and California voters easily passed Prop 36, a law-and-order initiative.
Trump carried all seven “swing” states, and the GOP won control of the U.S. Senate and kept control of the U.S. House. 
“The party must also take a hard look at why it lost,” wrote The New York Times in a morning-after editorial. “It took too long to recognize that large swaths of Democrats’ progressive agenda were alienating voters, including some of the most loyal supporters of their party.”
Comedian Bill Maher was less cerebral in his “Real Time” monologue: “The country has had enough of the anti-common sense ‘woke’ bulls—t.”
Bill Cotterell is a retired Capitol reporter for United Press International and the Tallahassee Democrat. He can be reached at [email protected].
JOIN THE CONVERSATION
Send letters to the editor (up to 200 words) or Your Turn columns (about 500 words) to [email protected]. Please include your address for verification purposes only, and if you send a Your Turn, also include a photo and 1-2 line bio of yourself. You can also submit anonymous Zing!s at Tallahassee.com/Zing. Submissions are published on a space-available basis. All submissions may be edited for content, clarity and length, and may also be published by any part of the USA TODAY NETWORK.