Here's the link to the transcript.
Democrats with Biden have done a lot. Unemployment relief, child tax credit. Millions of previous felons have had their voting rights restored.
While Republicans have devolved into a purely obstructionist anti-democratic cult.
Democrats need to use the human side of Biden's accomplishments to speak to the hearts of people rather than the wonky checklists. We need to stop selling the recipe and start selling the brownie.
And the Senate needs to be fixed. The filibuster needs to be changed such that it returns to being a tool to fostering negotiation rather than a weapon of obstruction.
O'Donnell:
Today in his column in "The Washington Post," Michael Gerson writes the GOP is a garbage scow of the corrupt, the seditious, and their enablers. This is unprecedented in American political history, but by now, we`ve grown used to it, that the most eloquent and lacerating and accurate descriptions of the Republican Party now come from the former leading lights of the Republican Party, intellectuals like George Will, speech writers like Michael Gerson and Bill Kristol, presidential campaign strategists like Stuart Stevens and Steve Schmidt, and the list goes on and on.
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Jennifer Rubin who writes: It is long past time that Democrats seize the high ground on values including fair play, honesty, respect, and nonviolence. In truth, a party that winks at violence and tries to undermine faith in elections is anti-American and anti-democratic. Hold Republicans accountable when they rationalize violence and denigrate the importance of elections. Take them to task as anti-work and anti-family for opposing necessities such as subsidized child care for working parents or paid family leave to take care of parents.
That`s how Democrats can achieve consensus, if not unity, cast themselves as defenders of American values and put Republicans on defense.
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Jennifer Rubin, a conservative opinion writer at "The Washington Post," and author of "Resistance: How Women Saved Democracy from Donald Trump":
we who have been on the Republican side once upon a time do have a little perspective. And you`re right, they on the Republican side use values to hit the Democrats over the head with you`re anti-family, you`re not patriotic, you`re anti-police. All of this, of course, is nonsense, and is now directly applicable to them.
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[Biden] really has to set a much higher bar and talk about his package as one that is pro-family, that is pro-democratic, that is pro-national unity and begin to talk in the language of values pointing out that Democrats are the repository of those values now.
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I would point him in the direction of my dear friend Matt Dowd who is running for lieutenant governor of Texas of all things.
You watch his ads, he`s talking about common sense, common purpose for the common good. That`s language that we need to hear on a national level from Democrats.
Eddie Glaude, chair of the African- American studies department at Princeton University
it falls upon the shoulders of an unsuspecting generation to save American democracy, and that`s where we are. And that`s what the Democratic Party has to understand its task as, so as we articulate these values, we have to articulate within a framework that the republic is in crisis, that it`s in danger, and that we must in some way stand behind or stand for those values if we`re going to salvage this fragile experiment it seems to me.
Rubin:
The issue of our time is whether we`re going to have a democracy, whether the American ideal, equal justice under the law, a Constitution that restrains those in power is going to survive or not.
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go out and tell the American people what you are for, that you are there to not only protect their interests but to embody and save American democracy. And really take it to the next level.
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[Presidencies] are built on this emotional connection in which voters see in that leader someone who cares about them, someone who embodies their values, and someone who makes them feel like America is a place for them. And if Democrats can`t do that, we are in deep, deep trouble.
O'Donnell:
The August payment of the child tax credit lifted 3.5 million children out of poverty. New polling shows many Americans don`t know that Democrats and the Biden administration provided that relief and that every single Republican in Congress opposed that relief. The latest "Politico"/Morning Consult poll finds 61 percent of respondents say they received the expanded child tax credit of up to $300 for every child each month, but only 47 percent of those respondents credited Democrats for passing the legislation, and only 38 percent credited President Biden.
ANAT SHENKER-OSORIO, FOUNDER, ASO COMMUNICATIONS:
So, a message is like a baton that has to be passed from person to person to person. If it gets dropped anywhere along the way, by definition, it isn`t heard, and even someone with arguably the largest pulpit,
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it is the media, hate to tell you, that determine what it is people hear about these programs. The child care tax credit, for example, was dropped right around the same time as what happened in Afghanistan. That swamped the coverage, and to me, it is very, very sad that the numbers that you report are there are certainly not what we`re seeing in our nightly focus groups very much reaffirming that and in the polling we`ve done privately, but it`s also utterly unsurprising.
If the media isn`t telling folks about these things, then how is it they`re supposed to get this message, even if the president is reporting on it.
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something very interesting is happening in the polls. Republican voters with children tend to be more favorably disposed to Biden than Republican voters without children. That could be correlation or causation, but the people I talk to say that shows there is some resonance.
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motivated cognition is a hell of a drug. And what I mean by that is that the more the descriptor of the human cognitive processing system would be I`ll see it when I believe it, not the other way around.
What we find in experiment after experiment is that when people have already cemented a world view, they in essence have a frame around what is occurring, then facts are simply impervious to it. They bounce off of it, right?
In lay terms if you`ve ever had the experience of trying to tell one of your friends that the guy that she`s dating is a complete and total jerk and you provide her fact after fact after fact and they are just going ping, ping, ping, that`s what I`m talking about. But spread across massive issues of social justice and economic well-being.
And so people are incredibly adept at discounting factual information that`s simply weeding it out, not paying attention to it, ignoring it that doesn`t fit their pre-existing frame.
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We could recognize that we have to speak as your previous guests were saying in the language of values. And more than that, as I often like to tell people, don`t take your policy out in public. It`s unseemly.
Messaging about policy is always less effective than what that policy delivers. So when we ask people, how do you feel about paid family leave? They`re into it. When we say instead you`re there the first time your newborn smiles, they`re way more into it.
When we say raising wages very popular. When we say instead everyone makes enough to care for their family, way more popular.
What Democrats need to do when they do have the mic is stop selling the recipe and start selling the brownie. Stop talking about the names of your policies and instead speak to voters in imageable terms about what it would feel like to have that as the reality in their life.
And so it`s not a child care tax credit, which is the name of a policy. It`s you go off to work and you feel great about what your kid is and you know that they`re safe, loved, and cared for and that you can afford it.
NORM ORNSTEIN, CONGRESSIONAL HISTORIAN:
And the Senate`s going to get worse. I mean we have to consider that, Lawrence, that before long it`s become -- going to become even less representative of the country as a whole. But right now we are in a moment where we need triage. And the fact is if we don`t fix the Senate, we can kiss our democracy good-bye.
Certainly the debt ceiling fiasco is a part of it. I think and hope that Mitch McConnell, not for good purposes, but his own malign ones, has given us an opportunity, a little bit of breathing room to take that reconciliation bill and make it work so we have a big accomplishment, one that will include an enormous set of things for the American public, especially for working class and middle class and poorer people.
And then we have to fix that debt ceiling blackmail once and for all. It`s Tom Hannah (ph) and I, when we wrote more than ten years ago about what was then an insurgent outlier purpose, now an obstructionist cult, saw that this was being used for horrible purposes. And there are ways to do that in reconciliation.
And third and most important, we discussed it before, we have to discuss it many times. We need to find a way to restore the filibuster where the burden is on the minority so we can get the things done starting primarily with democracy reform but moving on to many, many other things that are just going to be blocked because every single Republican will filibuster and keep them from happening.
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