ARE DEMS STARTING TO UNDERSTAND? – AT 9:51 A.M. ET:  I doubt it.  "Understand" is not normally a word in their vocabulary.  But maybe a few brave Democrats are starting to realize why they lose and lose and lose.  From Howard Kurtz Fox: 

Chris Murphy, a Democratic senator from Connecticut, made some candid comments that caught my eye yesterday.

When he’s back home, Murphy said, he sometimes chats people up on a commuter bus, and “they are never talking about issues like Russia. They are not talking, frankly, what’s on cable news at night.”

And then, in the “Morning Joe” interview, he took a whack at his own party: “The fact that we have spent so much time talking about Russia has been a distraction from what should be the clear contrast between Democrats and the Trump agenda, which is on economics.”

Bingo. Running mainly against Donald Trump didn’t work for the Dems in 2016, and it’s not working now.

The news peg for these recriminations, of course, is the Democrats losing Tuesday’s special election for a House seat in Georgia. I never spent much time on that race because I never believed that Jon Ossoff, despite raising $25 million, was going to win in a heavily Republican district that he didn’t even live in.

But since the media collectively declared it a referendum on Trump—and would have gone haywire if Ossoff had won—there is a reckoning about what the Democratic Party stands for.

Ohio Democratic congressman Tim Ryan told the New York Times that his party is “toxic” in large swaths of the country: “Our brand is worse than Trump. We can’t just run against Trump.”

COMMENT:  In the immortal words of Ed McMahon, "You are correct, sir."  Yes, your party's brand is worse than Trump's.  It is seen as snobbish, elitist, out of touch, and catering only to what special group is popular on the left this year.  Not the party of Roosevelt, Truman, and Kennedy.  More the party of George McGovern, Jimmy Carter, and Barack Obama.

June 22,  2017