Give Karine Jean-Pierre credit. The former Joe Biden press secretary has faced criticism in the past over her performance behind the White House podium for a variety of reasons. But in launching her new book this week, she revealed the reason Democrats are having a hard time getting men to vote for them.
The initial promotion for her book, made via a social media video, urged viewers to, “stop thinking in boxes and think outside of our boxes, and not be so partisan.” Employing a half-century-old business management cliche might appear trite but given its common usage, Jean-Pierre can be forgiven. Thinking outside the box sounds like a good thing.
For those wondering what to think if we’re thinking outside the box, Jean-Pierre provided helpful guidance saying, "If you are willing to stand side by side with me, regardless of ... how you identify politically, and as long as you respect the community that I belong to and vulnerable communities that I respect, I will be there with you.”
Jean-Pierre’s duplicity is glaring: ‘Think outside the box and don’t be so partisan, just think in my box instead and respect what I respect.’ It stands to reason that if you don’t think in her box, she will not be there with you. It sounds like she wants us to trade in one brand of partisanship for another - hers.
This is one of the reasons the Democratic Party is hemorrhaging white male voters, not to mention black, Latino, younger and women voters. The party’s underlying ideology requires falsehoods just to survive. This isn’t a new phenomenon. Some will recall a 2012 political ad targeting former House Speaker and GOP vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan for an earlier budget proposal. The ad depicted an elderly, wheelchair-bound woman being pushed over a cliff.
More recently, Senate Minority Leader Sen. Chuck Schumer renamed the current reconciliation bill as the, "We're All Going to Die Act.” Elsewhere, the leftist People’s World reports President Trump’s ‘Big, Beautiful Bill’ won’t kill all of us, just 51,000 people every year for the next decade.
Add to these recent pronouncements others that call Republicans Nazis, refer to law enforcement officers as the Gestapo, and Donald Trump as a fascist, and a trend emerges. The continuing rhetoric from Democrats, up and down the ranks of the party, is incendiary, slanderous and false. Perhaps it is this partisan box Karine Jean-Pierre wants people to get out of. We’ll see.
This sort of messaging isn’t limited to the current budget debate or contemporary political figures. People have heard the same sort of nonsense in regard to the climate, LGBTQ rights, immigration, mass transit, race relations - pick an issue, any issue - and the bombastic oratory is the same. It’s one big fib layered over another, and it’s not working anymore.
Voters across all demographics are no longer buying this because they’ve figured out that Democrats are, and have been, selling them a false bill of goods for decades and they’re tired of it. True, white men have been subject to more of this punishing treatment than most groups, so the loss of white male Democrat voters over time isn’t surprising. But the much vaunted $20 million study on how Democrats should speak to men is window dressing for a party desperately trying to spin their way out of the fact that their current agenda is losing popularity among voters.
This is what Jean-Pierre’s book launch showed us. When people are told to stop being partisan and just agree with her, people see through her deceit just as they’re seeing through the other deceits promoted by the party she presumably left. In her attempt to speak to people about her book, Jean-Pierre unveils yet another attempt to deceive them and they don’t believe it.
Democrats don’t need multi-million dollar focus groups to figure out how to speak with men, or anyone else for that matter. What they need is honesty and good ideas, both of which appear to be in short supply. Karine Jean-Pierre doesn’t seem to have much either, and her book launch shines a spotlight on the problems Democrats face in trying to rebuild their shattering party.