Not Either/Or

Another Beltway professional elite who completely misunderstands the election results and the Democrats' problems.

This time it is the Post's Charles Lane who posits this Hobbesian choice - " The Democrats' dilemma, then, is this: They can make only limited political gains with an economic pitch to the white working class, unless they adjust on immigration and other issues of identity too, probably. Yet this would require compromising on what the party defined as matters of basic justice and tolerance, and turn off voters from their racially and ethnically diverse "coalition of the ascendant."

I don't for an instance think that economic pitch to working class voters has to be at odds with the Dems' identity politics. The problem is that Dems have made no economic pitch to anybody, of any color. It's not an either or situation. The reality is that Democrats have ceded the populist economic arguments to the Republicans (ironically enough). 

But here's the harsher reality that Lane fails to acknowledge. The current Democratic strategy on identity politics isn't working. Sure it may have worked for President Obama, but it simply has been a failed strategy for everyone else: John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, congressional Democrats, Democratic gubernatorial candidates, and Democratic state legislators.