The GOP’s Big Rookie-Doo

In which Democrats continue to play Charlie Brown to the Republican Party’s Lucy

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My first “real job” was as a salesman at a mom-and-pop enterprise that was a forerunner to today’s telemarketing call centers. Not only was I one of the few Black employees, I was one of only a handful of employees who had attended college. My presence was such an anomaly, that for the first several months of my employment I was referred to simply as “college boy,” my failure to earn a degree notwithstanding.

That is not to say my coworkers were ignorant. Indeed, most were quite the opposite. That said, their homespun manner consisted primarily of countrified witticisms and off-color jokes, which was a new experience for me. Ironically, the job turned out to be an excellent foundation for my subsequent career in financial services.

Like my call center job, my financial services coworkers were the quintessential “good ole boys,” and as such, required me to decipher the unique vernacular of Southern white men. One trader in particular exemplified the importance of developing this skill set.

An affable fellow with a tenuous combover, he spent almost as much of his time on the trading desk carving duck calls as he did executing bond trades. He also was a source of a brand of jargon I’d never encountered. One of his favorite expressions was the term “rookie-doo,” which he usually deployed to describe an unlucky broker who found themselves on the wrong side of a trade: “That ole boy done got hisself rookie-dooed!”

While the term doesn’t appear in Merriam Webster’s dictionary (trust me, I’ve looked), on rare occasions media outlets, such as The Times-Picayune, have used the decidedly Southern colloquialism to describe a situation in which someone was hoodwinked or deceived:

“Little-Known Legislator Pulled 'Rookie-doo' on State House”

If my former colleague from Little Rock is still around, I suspect he’ll have ample opportunity to make use of this country-come-to-town turn of phrase. All he need do is keep his eyes on the Democratic Party.

The vortex of false equivalence

Following the November election, I had a telephone conversation with one my former Wall Street colleagues. After exchanging our holiday pleasantries, the conversation shifted to politics. At one point, my friend said something to the effect of, “Democrats need to be careful they don’t go too far to the left.”

When I asked him to explain what he meant, he responded by connecting shoplifting in San Francisco to Democratic policy. He went on to say that Democrats were too focused on transgender rights. Knowing this individual’s political views are similar to mine, I was surprised. His comment reminded me more of my neighbor who flys a “Let’s Go Brandon” flag than the Democrat that I know him to be.

So I asked him to explain the Democratic Party’s transgender or crime-related policies. As I suspected, he didn’t have much of an answer.

Then I asked him to name the Democratic equivalents of Marjorie Taylor Green or Lauren Bobert, both far-right Republicans. Was it New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Vermont senator Bernie Sanders? He was unable to name even one.

The a reason my friend had such difficulty coming up with Democratic equivalents for the Republican Party’s MAGA extremism is because there aren’t any.

There is no left-wing version of Lauren Bobert, nor does MTG have a leftist twin. Moreover, believing in science, Medicare for all, or that full-time workers deserve a living wage isn’t remotely similar to saying lasers from outer space start wildfires, or that the January 6th insurrection was a “1776 moment.”

But my friend’s regurgitation of right-wing talking points, however unintended, is understandable. After all, the Democratic Party establishment isn’t much better.

Let one Republican accuse a Democrat of being a Soros-backed radical leftist, a Marxist, a Communist, a Socialist, or some other made-up pejorative, and watch how quickly they bent over backwards trying to prove to Republicans that isn’t the case.

Democrats are on the verge of losing their base

Rather than vigorously promote their agenda, Democrats repeatedly seek Republican approval, instead of responding to their attacks with haymakers of their own. The GOP has the Democrat’s number to such an extent, the Party is perilously close to losing its base. Ask the average democrat, and you’ll likely to find a voter who is less disappointed over having lost the presidential election than by how Democrats have chosen to respond to it.

The Party’s leadership is stuck in a doom loop of “Republican Lite” ideology, a political hangover from a time when being branded a “liberal” could cost an election. They are consumed by the misguided notion that because there is a far-right, there must be a far-left equivalent; and their mission is to protect the rest of us from it. They are oblivious to the fact that while that brand of politics may have been fashionable decades ago (its disastrous policies notwithstanding), a large swath of the country has had its fill of it.

One would think a Democratic after-action review may have included a recognition of factors such as global anti-incumbent sentiment or an acknowledgment of the misogyny and racism directed at Vice President Kamala Harris in assessing causes of her loss. Or perhaps Democrats might’ve acknowledged the elephant in the room: Had Joe Biden had been the transitional president he promised he’d be, maybe a Democrat would be sitting in the Oval Office today.

But rather than acknowledge the Party’s failings and adjusting its strategy accordingly, they have reacted by pointing a finger at progressives. They would have us believe the real problem was that the Party became too woke, too wedded to DEI and transgender rights, and not hard enough on undocumented immigrants. If only Harris had moved more to the right (as if campaigning with Liz Cheney wasn’t enough), things would have turned out differently. Republicans couldn’t have framed this nonsensical theory better themselves.

Ironically, one of the best examinations of why Democrats failed and what they should be doing has come, not from a member of the Democratic Party, but from The Bullwark’s Sarah Longwell who is—wouldn’t you know it—a Republican. In a December interview on “Deadline White House,” (hosted by Nicolle Wallace, a former Republican) Longwell had this to say (emphasis added):

Institutions don't defend themselves. I think that there were a lot of people during Joe Biden's four years that thought, “Well, look, if you just get things back to normal, the American people will see that they want it.” But Republicans were on offense. They were on communications offense the whole time, they were filling people's heads with lies, and they did stick. And now we do live in a very different environment. I think the only thing that can really be done is that you learn the lesson. Democrats have to learn the lesson that just putting out a report isn't going to be enough, that just passing legislation that's bipartisan and thinking that voters are just going to discover you did a good job without a concerted communication strategy that is deeply penetrating and goes into this new bifurcated media environment that we live in and where you are, you know, constantly hitting the same themes over and over and over again. This is a thing Donald Trump, frankly, does well, and Democrats are going to have to not, not ever adopt the playbook of cynicism, gas lighting and lying, but they do have to figure out how to communicate their messages directly to the American people in a way where they are on offense. And I think that my hope is that they learn this lesson, that they are able to reach voters at the time where Donald Trump and these Republicans are demonstrating that they do not know how to govern…Democrats are going to need to get in there aggressively and say, “This is what happens when you elect these people.” [T]hey can't just sit back and they go, “Well, everyone will learn this lesson by watching it.” No, they won't. You're going to have to deliver that message over and over again, hard. You have to elect good communicators, you have people on TV all the time, you got to go into uncomfortable spaces like Fox News, and you're going to have to get aggressive about it and that's what I felt like was needed, I felt like somebody's got to push back on these guys and Democrats have got to learn that lesson.

Even now, as Republicans gear up to make receiving a college scholarship a taxable event and strip away the mortgage interest deduction, not to mention blow up Social Security, Medicare, and the Department of Education, Democrats are still searching for a middle ground that no longer exists, when what they should be doing is flipping over tables and raising holy hell.

During a recent episode of Jon Stewart’s “The Weekly Show” he interviewed Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, whose message to her Democratic colleagues was that instead of adhering to the tea and crumpets-style decorum, they become what she described as “the party of brawlers for the working class.” But as it stands now, Democrats are operating according to Roberts Rules of Order, while Republicans are engaged in no-holds-barred mixed martial arts.

And that’s a sure-fire way for Democrats to get themselves rookie-dooed.