ricecake

You don't want no financial incentive, or you end up with the only people in government being the independently wealthy. You just want a boring incentive that's large enough that the majority of people will be content to leave it be for their time in office.

Cool. We've entirely stopped talking about what I cared about, which was "man, this article sure has a misleading headline", so you can keep sharing your feelings about different Democrats if you want but I honestly don't really care.

I can definitively tell you that anyone I know who I could ask that question of would be able to say Richard, George or Luis with a random number afterwards, at least knows king George due to musical theater, and would be able to give a more detailed breakdown of the factors behind the revolution than the vaguely conceptual, although I'm not sure what level of granularity you need for it to be the "real" reasons. (You'd get taxation without representation, quartering troops, Boston massacre, and probably some that i can't recall and a "the rich white ruling class resented being governed and seized an opportunity for justifiable rebellion and the cause was just pretext")

My brother in law would be the most uncertain. He almost certainly doesn't know what an oligarch is, but he has enough 'murika to him to be resentful of royalty. From the kids most royalty he could name would be animated I think. Probably hand wave the essentials of the revolution without getting names right, and I have a sneaking suspicion he'd call the Boston tea party a cause.

There's a lot of variety in what you find in people.

that's what the lady in the article talked about the whole time.

No, that's what this article quoted her about for their entire article.
Clearly my first statement didn't land the way intended, since you missed me calling it "silly" immediately afterwards.
Criticizing you for failing to talk about policy in a conversation that isn't about that is silly. Much like I think it's silly to criticize someone for not talking about policy because in a particular context they're talking about something else.

Did she call it "the plan", or was that the article, which is an article about an article about an interview about an upcoming speech?
From the actual interview, she refers to a set of speeches directed at party volunteers and organizers as a "war plan", and indicated they will cover many topics, including messaging. Not quite the same as "the plan" being a change in messaging.

They're perceived as all talk because that's all most of them do

That's what politicians do. Most of the politicians you went on to say you liked just ... Talk. They talk until people do what they're talking about.

I feel like the thread of this conversation has been lost. I don't actually care to have a referendum on the Democrats or their strategy, and I'm relatively neutral towards slotkin.

I still disagree that saying Democrats have a perception problem they need to work on is being a "Republican lite", and think it's odd to criticize both for being passive and not doing anything, but also for saying they should stop being passive and do something.

It really feels like you're just looking for a reason to be angry, and it doesn't actually matter if it's here or not, since you already have a notion of what you're angry about.

Clearly you think it's a perception problem, since all you're doing is talking about perception. Why haven't you been talking about policy this entire time?

Isn't that a silly statement?

Making a statement about messaging isn't the same as saying the only thing that matters is messaging.
I think that there is a perception problem, but that doesn't mean I think that there's nothing else. And weirdly, I can talk about the one without denying the other exists.

For context, it was part of a speech to party volunteers , so it follows that it would be more "method" than "content". She also said that we should start picking the 2028 candidates and having that conversation now rather than waiting until 2027 since it will plainly be a very contested primary.
That part wasn't able to be construed in an unflattering way though, so it didn't make it into the headline or conversation.

Our country was also founded on saying fuck off to a king. It's part of the foundational mythology of the country. To a lot of people the word oligarchy means precisely nothing.
Rule by powerful elites isn't unamarican. It's actually kinda the opposite, given the caveats on our democratic system and it's history.
A king however is actually one of the few unambiguously unamerican things out there.

This is not to disagree with your point, but more to say that it's not without room for debate.

As for the "weak and woke" bit, I'm gonna disagree. That one read to me as a need to address public perception, not criticism from the right. Backing down from a bully is different from trying to change public perception. I didn't see it as a statement of needing to be less woke, but of needing to be perceived as being effective and concerned about things other than the most pejorative senses of the term woke.
That political parties need to be viewed in a positive light by the public to be effective is inescapable.

I'm not trying to frame it narrowly. The headline is misleading click bait. Everything you say could be 100% true and it wouldn't change that she didn't say what you're saying she said.

I really don't care if you want to make it about segments of the democratic party. You're going to be hard pressed to convince me that suggesting a different word for criticism inverts the criticism, even if they are already on an intelligence and terrorism committee (which I have no idea how that relevant to anything).

Argue she's awful if you want, I honestly don't care, but that doesn't make her statements in this case pro business, pro oligarchy, or anything particularly interesting.

And yes, I've looked at her voting records and donors. I don't like everything I see, but it's mostly fine, and definitively better than the other candidates.

You literally criticized her for saying the democratic party needs to work on being seen as weak, and then a paragraph later criticized them for being weak.
Do you disagree that the perception of the Democrats as weak hurts them? Do you think it's wrong to frame opposition to trump as supporting the country?

I don't think you're saying that only Republicans can say they care about the country, have an assertive plan, or be proactive and energetic.

I think letting the Republicans own national pride and define what a "real American" is has been a major loss, and finding a way to say to voters that you have a patriotic duty to resist fascists is correct.
That your response to someone saying we need to use "caring about the country" to try to get people to stop fascists from tearing it apart is "This shit is something you'd hear at a fucking Trump rally" is exactly the problem.

This is seriously just looking for a reason to be mad at the Democrats. You're clearly upset at them for their failures, but you're also seemingly upset at those amongst them saying they should work on their failings that helped create those failures?

Even if meaningful policy changes could be enacted anytime in the next decade, do you think it has a chance of happening if the people in front of it are seen as meek, deferential, and not caring about the country?

And yeah, it's a set of remarks pertaining to part of a speech, one of the topics of which is a change in messaging strategy. I don't think every set of remarks made by a politician needs to be entirely focused on policy. It's a speech that was given to party volunteers about the need to change strategy because what they've been doing hasn't been working.

I'm really not.

I get that you prefer the word oligarchy. That's fine. I'm not sure I feel strongly that we call them oligarchs or if we compare them to monarchs in our messaging how they're bad.

I'm just not seeing how a disagreement on verbiage without a difference in content makes someone as awful as people seem to be reacting.

So, I'm honestly asking: how is this republican lite? The headline conveys that she's saying to tone down attacks on the oligarchy, but then her words in the article make it clear she's advocating for a change of wording, not message.
Agree or disagree on the wording change, I don't see how "we need to stop trump and the oligarchs" is progressive, and "we need to stop trump and the wannabe kings" is milquetoast republican-lite.

As for the other parts, would your definition of the middle of the country striken with economic issues happen to include Michigan? The state that just elected her? Maybe when she's talking about things people in focus groups shared she might be talking about people from the state she represents?