What do the Democrats need? More bread-and-butter issues, less Oprah, say some
More bread and butter and less Oprah.
That’s what some strategists suggest is needed to fix a demoralized Democratic Party recovering from its electoral thumping on Tuesday night.
The finger pointing, recriminations and soul searching has begun in earnest in the wake of the U.S. election, which saw former Republican president Donald Trump soundly defeat current Democratic Vice-President Kamala Harris. Some Democrats are now calling for a reckoning within the party to determine what went wrong and what needs to change if they want to win future elections.
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“This was wholescale repudiation of the Democratic Party at every level,” said Democratic strategist Chris Kofinis in a phone interview with CBC News, noting the party saw a drop in support in every city, county and state. “We lost Democratic support across the board.
“We act like our product is great, why didn’t everybody buy it?” he said. “That product sucks — and that’s why people didn’t buy it.”
Some direct blame at Harris
With votes still being counted, Trump was on track to capture between 301 and 314 electoral college votes and become the first Republican candidate in two decades to win the popular vote.
He also made significant inroads with Black and Hispanic voters as exit polls suggested many voters were dissatisfied with both the country’s direction and its economy.
The Democrats also lost control of the Senate, but the House, which is currently controlled by the Republicans, is still up for grabs as ballots continue to be counted.
Some blame for Democrat losses has fallen on Harris, who was criticized that she was unable to define herself. Some Democratic strategists have suggested she spent too much time, especially in the final weeks of the campaign, emphasizing the potential dangers Trump might pose, which overshadowed her policies relating to everyday issues.
There’s also blame being placed on U.S. President Joe Biden for not stepping down earlier, leaving Harris with a compressed timetable to campaign.
But some pundits and party officials say the most significant problems lay within the party itself.
According to Kofinis and other political strategists and observers, the Democratic Party has either dismissed, minimized or stopped listening to issues that are most important to the average voter.
“The only issues that matter to voters are the economic bread-and-butter issues. That’s on top of the pyramid. And then you go down,” Kofinis said.
Defeated Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris said in her concession speech Wednesday that although many people may feel the U.S. is entering into a dark time, they should be encouraged to keep working in the face of setbacks.
Kofinis says the party spent way too much time talking about issues like democracy and gender identity and was too obsessed with Trump’s legal woes and investigations into his actions.
“If you’re spending more time talking about social and cultural issues than you do about economic issues, you’re going to lose,” he said.
Better messaging needed for blue collar voters
It’s a similar argument made by Independent Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders who, in a statement following the election, said that a party that has abandoned the working class shouldn’t be surprised that the “working class have abandoned them.”
Adrian Fontes, Arizona’s secretary of state and the highest-ranking Latino elected official in the state, said it’s a “hard political pill for Democrats to swallow” when their messaging runs counter to what the working class wants.
“Why are we losing these people? Why are we losing firefighters? Why are we losing cops? Why are we losing blue collar working men,” he said in an interview with Politico. “Because we’re very consistent in our messaging away from them — away from their traditional family values, away from their personal economic concerns and their family’s economic concerns.”
U.S. President Joe Biden, speaking after Donald Trump’s win, says he hopes Americans can see each other ‘not as adversaries but as fellow Americans,’ and praised election workers for their efforts.
To that end, Faiz Shakir, an adviser to Sanders and the founder of More Perfect Union, a progressive news media organization, told Politico that to rebuild its connection to America’s working class, the party needs to “recruit working-class candidates who reflect the pain and the understanding of people who live paycheque-to-paycheque.”
Jim Kessler, the founder of the centre-left think-tank Third Way, suggested Democrats should spend less time on issues like the potential threat Trump poses to democracy, because it’s more abstract than other concerns people may have.
“Democrats often make the mistake of focusing on long-term problems at a time when voters have immediate concerns,” he told ABC News. “And democracy seems like a long-term issue, and it’s not quite tangible.
“But gas prices, grocery prices, border crossings, a sense that crime is rising? Those you feel every day.”
‘Never hang out with celebrity elites’
The accusation that the party has lost touch with the average voter also ties into the criticism by some that it has become a party of elites.
“Will the big money interests and well-paid consultants who control the Democratic Party learn any real lessons from this disastrous campaign?” Sanders said in his statement.
And Kofinis says his biggest piece of advice for the Democrats would be to abandon their famous pals.
While Trump himself may be one of the most recognized names on the planet, Kofinis says a series of celebrity endorsements and the appearance of megastars like Oprah Winfrey and Beyoncé at Harris campaign rallies could signify a broader fundamental problem for the Democrats: it gives voters the impression the party has lost touch with the average person.
“If the Democratic Party continues to be the party of celebrity elites, we will continue to be a losing party.”
Published at Fri, 01 Nov 2024 08:11:21 +0000
Israel has deliberately made northern Gaza unlivable, say Palestinians. What comes next?
Israeli attacks have created deplorable conditions across Gaza, but humanitarian groups say the month-long siege of towns in the north have essentially rendered the area unlivable.
And they accuse Israel’s military of inflicting starvation and destruction to ensure hundreds of thousands of Palestinians can never return to their homes.
In the Yarmouk sports stadium in Gaza City, which has been converted into a sprawling sea of tents for those who’ve fled from the besieged northern areas, every person a videographer working for CBC News spoke to described inhumane conditions.
“It’s not just the war that is exhausting us. It’s the hunger that hurts us the most,” said Hashem Yehia el Laham, a 63-year-old father of seven.
“Today, people are dying of hunger. There is no food, no water, no clothes and no home,” he said. “This is a genocide.”
On Oct. 5, Israel Defense Forces surrounded the northern town of Jabalia, alleging Hamas militants had regrouped and were using the town as a base, and that it was necessary for the IDF to move in to dismantle them.
In the days that followed, the IDF told residents to leave and move south, as it worked to destroy most of the roads leading out of the area. Night after night, the IDF subjected communities there to attacks from the air.
The extent of civilian casualties during the ongoing operation is unclear. But last week, in two days alone, UNICEF said Israeli bombing in Jabalia killed 50 Palestinian children.
Damaged infrastructure
Dr. Abu Mughaiseb, a deputy medical co-ordinator for Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) in the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis, told CBC News he receives daily reports from his staff about patients fleeing towns such as Jabalia.
“When you see that infrastructure is destroyed on purpose…. I mean, the [attacks on] infrastructure, the water pipelines, are not Hamas, sorry to say this. The sewage system is not Hamas, the hospitals are not Hamas … Everything is destroyed. It means that you don’t want the population to be able to live,” said Mughaiseb.
In a statement, MSF said that for the first three weeks of October, Israel only facilitated six per cent of co-ordinated aid movements from the south — where much of the limited aid enters — to northern Gaza.
The group said the trickle of life-supporting goods makes it impossible to provide humanitarian support, even as the situation deteriorates.
Recent photos posted on X by the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) show hundreds of displaced civilians lined up together, holding their meagre belongings and filing out of the Jabalia refugee camp, under IDF instruction.
Hear from two people who spoke to a CBC News freelance journalist in Gaza about what it was like to be forced out.
Israeli human rights groups were the first to raise the alarm that the IDF appeared to be implementing provisions of the “Generals’ Plan.”
Submitted to the Israeli Knesset in September by a group of retired IDF generals and officers, the plan proposed a series of extreme measures to pressure Hamas into releasing Israeli hostages captured on Oct. 7, 2023. An estimated 100 hostages remain in Gaza.
The plan, claim the human rights groups, calls for a complete blockade of northern areas of Gaza, including stopping aid deliveries, along with the forcible depopulation and potential starvation of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians.
IDF insists it ‘minimizes’ harm
In a statement emailed to CBC News, that it is “taking numerous measures to minimize harm to civilians, including warning the population and removing non-involved people from combat zones.” The statement insisted that preventing Palestinians from returning to their homes “does not reflect the IDF’s objectives” and that it will allow humanitarian aid into the north.
Aid groups attempting to operate in the area, however, offer a much more damning depiction of Israel’s actions.
Earlier this week, 15 United Nations and humanitarian organizations characterized the situation in Gaza’s north as “apocalyptic.” They accused Israel’s government of denying or withholding “basic aid” and “life-saving supplies” to Palestinians who either won’t leave or can’t leave the area.
The entire population of the north is at “imminent risk of dying, from disease, famine and violence,” said their statement.
Jan Egeland, secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council, just returned from an extensive trip to Gaza and told BBC Radio the situation in the north is akin to a “besiegement within a besiegement.”
“This is not self-defence,” he said. “This is the systematic destruction of Gaza.”
Questions about Gaza resettlement
Two weeks ago, U.S. officials reportedly pressed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to confirm his forces were not laying siege to the north — reassurances Netanyahu has thus far refused to give in public.
The left-leaning Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz spelled out the probable situation in an editorial titled, “If It Looks Like Ethnic Cleansing, It Probably Is.”
The UN regards ethnic cleaning as a possible component of a crime against humanity, which could potentially fall within the scope of the Genocide Convention.
The Israeli NGO Peace Now also said this week that the evidence it has seen has convinced its members that “horrific war crimes are being committed in Gaza.”
Peace Now says it believes the ultimate aim is to drive the Palestinian population out and establish Jewish settlements in the territory — something that would be illegal under international law.
For humanitarian advocates, Israel’s conduct in northern Gaza represents another example of how the Netanyahu government is allowed to escape accountability.
“All we see is a lot of hand-wringing on the part of member states of the United Nations,” said Diana Buttu, a Palestinian Canadian human rights lawyer based in Haifa, Israel, told CBC News. “But we don’t actually see any international action to stop Israel.”
‘We can see that Netanyahu has a plan’
Many members of far-right Jewish settlers groups and political parties have openly advocated stripping Palestinians in Gaza and the occupied West Bank of their land as punishment for Hamas’s attacks on Israel on Oct. 7, which killed an estimated 1,200 people.
Last month, prominent settler groups, which included dozens of Knesset members from Netanyahu’s governing party as well as several powerful cabinet members, held a second conference to discuss taking over parts of Gaza to create Israeli settlements. They articulated a vision of Jewish settlements along the length and breadth of Gaza, with the current Palestinian population removed.
A kitchen running on donations and external funding from international organizations distributed food Sunday to hundreds of Palestinians waiting with pots and buckets in hand, in the area of Al-Mawasi, west of Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip.
“We can see that Netanyahu has a plan,” said Buttu. “[The government is] talking about re-establishing settlements in the north. They’ve already announced that they’ve divided Gaza into two, and I fully expect that they’re going to re-build settlements.”
Before 2005, Israeli settlers had created more than 20 settlements in Gaza, but Israel unilaterally dismantled them and relocated the Jewish population.
Eran Etzion, a former senior Israeli security official, said that while Netanyahu has publicly rejected the prospect of resettling Gaza, he has done little to dissuade members of his party from pushing their own agenda, most notably Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir.
“After the elimination of the [Hamas] terrorists and the evacuation of the civilians will be the reinstatement of settlements, according to Smotrich and Ben-Gvir,” Etzion told CBC News.
Muted reaction in Israel
He says Netanyahu requires the support of those far-right ministers to stay in power, but also needs military support from the U.S., which has publicly stated it is opposed to Jewish settlements in Gaza.
“What is Netanyahu’s real plan regarding northern Gaza? It’s hard to say. [His] real plan is to perpetuate the war in order to perpetuate his rule,” said Etzion.
Aside from the human rights groups who raised alarm over the IDF’s actions in northern Gaza, inside Israel reaction to the ethnic cleansing accusations has been muted.
“There’s simply no [media] coverage and therefore there is no understanding of what is actually going on. That’s number one,” said Etzion.
“Number two, there is a very deep sense [that the military action] is justified … [The thinking is,] we must defend ourselves and in order to defend ourselves, we need to take military actions.… and there will be innocent civilians that can get hurt in the process.”
Published at Fri, 08 Nov 2024 19:05:22 +0000
