You're Fired

May 15, 2020
A Democratic strategist weighs in on the 2016 and 2020 presidential races, offering a compendium of do's and don'ts. In the rueful wake of 2016, Clinton adviser Begala confesses, he "forgot Bill Clinton's First Law of Politics...elections are about the lives of the voters, not the candidates' lives." Every time Donald Trump, who the author says possesses a "sewer-level character," committed some outrage--mocking a reporter's disability, dismissing John McCain's wartime service, bragging about not paying taxes--the Democrats made ads highlighting the faux pas, to no avail. The great overarching mistake was to have treated Trump as if he were a politician. "He's not," Begala's brother told him. "He's a reality TV star. So when he got caught lying, it wasn't because he's a lying politician; he's just a bullshit artist on TV." In 2016, argues the author, the Clinton team should have run ads from working Americans whom Trump stiffed, who lost their jobs when his casinos flopped, who were bilked by his so-called university. "We should have shown how Trump has hurt people like you," he writes. Digging deeper, he looks at ways to get under Trump's skin: Remind voters in these days of COVID-19 that Trump really did fire the pandemic response team and cut funding to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to the point that it had to abandon monitoring disease outbreaks on the ground in China; highlight that Trump has run up staggering deficits in good times, leaving little room to maneuver in bad, and that he's resisted oversight for stimulus spending during the pandemic. Begala counsels Democratic candidates to speak to emotions and the "American Dream" and remind voters that Trump is trying to cut Social Security and Medicare: "He wants a world of entitlement for the few; we want a nation of opportunity for all." Solid advice for anyone running for office, whether against the current occupant of the White House or not.

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June 1, 2020
Political pundit Begala (Third Term) delivers a digressive, quip-filled road map for defeating Donald Trump and congressional Republicans in the 2020 elections. Addressing hot-button topics including climate change, the coronavirus pandemic, health care, voter suppression, and the wealth gap, one-by-one, Begala first offers well-worn critiques of the Trump administration and its conservative supporters, then advises Democrats on how they can run on the issue at hand. Though he claims that the key lesson liberals should take from 2016 is to make the next election “about voters’ lives, not Trump’s character,” Begala routinely appears to ignore his own advice. He mocks everything from Trump’s middle name (“Jaundice,” “Jerkface,” “Jughead”) to Mitch McConnell’s legislative strategy (“The guy couldn’t pass gas in a men’s room in a taco bar”), and only sketches how Democratic policies would actually improve people’s lives. Though Begala identifies where previous campaigns went wrong—by trying to refute Trump’s attacks rather than ridicule and recontextualize them, for instance—his prediction that Democrats can win simply by vowing to protect Social Security and other entitlements will strike many progressives as naive, given Trump’s hold on the Republican base. This centrist polemic muddles its message.