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      'Defund the police' slogan risks turning voters away, says Obama – video

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      Former US president Barack Obama has criticised Democratic political candidates for using ‘snappy’ slogans such as ‘defund the police’, arguing they could turn voters away and defeat the original objective. In an interview with Good Luck America, a political show on social media platform Snapchat, Obama said the slogans can isolate potential voters. ‘You lost a big audience the minute you say it, which makes it a lot less likely that you’re actually going to get the changes you want done,’ he said. ‘The key is deciding, do you want to actually get something done, or do you want to feel good among the people you already agree with?’
      Barack Obama criticizes ‘Defund the Police’ slogan but faces backlash More

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      Barack Obama criticizes 'Defund the Police' slogan but faces backlash

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      [embedded content]
      Barack Obama chastised Democratic political candidates for using “snappy” slogans like “defund the police” that he argued could turn voters away, in an interview released this week.
      “You lost a big audience the minute you say it, which makes it a lot less likely that you’re actually going to get the changes you want done,” the former president told show host Peter Hamby in an interview with Good Luck America, a Snapchat political show.
      “The key is deciding, do you want to actually get something done, or do you want to feel good among the people you already agree with?” Obama added.
      However, Obama also defended the place of young progressives as important “new blood” in the Democratic party, singling out Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – who has spoken out strongly on the phrase and the essence of defunding police departments to boost social spending.
      Former Obama campaign operative Ben LaBolt shared part of the president’s interview with Hamby online on Tuesday before the full interview went live on Snapchat on Wednesday.

      Ben LaBolt
      (@BenLaBolt)
      President Obama, about the best message architect there is, suggests a thoughtful alternative to “Defund.” Via @PeterHamby. https://t.co/ai64FDPgTI pic.twitter.com/UABXL5yLmr

      December 2, 2020

      The remarks drew immediate backlash from notable, Black progressive Democrats – including the Minnesota congresswoman Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, who stressed “defund the police” was not about mere words but a “demand for equitable investments and budgets for communities across the country”.

      Ilhan Omar
      (@IlhanMN)
      We lose people in the hands of police. It’s not a slogan but a policy demand. And centering the demand for equitable investments and budgets for communities across the country gets us progress and safety. https://t.co/Vu6inw4ms7

      December 2, 2020

      “We didn’t lose Breonna because of a ‘slogan’,” said Kentucky state representative Charles Booker, referencing Breonna Taylor, the Black, Louisville woman who was shot dead in her own apartment by police in March during a botched raid.
      Booker broke barriers in 2018 when he became the youngest Black lawmaker elected to the Kentucky state legislature in nearly a century. And he ran a close contest for the Democratic nomination to challenge – ultimately unsuccessfully – the Republican Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell’s seat in the November election.

      Charles Booker
      (@Booker4KY)
      We didn’t lose Breonna because of a slogan. Instead of conceding this narrative, let’s shape our own. It’s time we listen to the people, organize and build coalitions around our own message, and cast a vision that inspires us all to lead for change at the ballot box and beyond. https://t.co/mBg7wanaR6

      December 2, 2020

      Cori Bush, who made history last month by becoming the first Black woman elected to represent Missouri in Congress shot back at Obama that “Defund the Police” was “not a slogan. It’s a mandate for keeping [Black] people alive.”
      “With all due respect, Mr President – let’s talk about losing people,” she said. “We lost Michael Brown Jr. We lost Breonna Taylor. We’re losing our loved ones to police violence.”
      The Black Lives Matter movement member’s rise in politics stemmed from her work as a community activist during protests against the shooting death of Mike Brown in Ferguson in 2014.
      Bush is also the only candidate to formally run on a platform of defunding the police – a point many analysts say make criticism of the movement unwarranted.
      Defund the Police has been a widely used phrase and policy initiative that gained traction over the summer as racial justice and anti-policing protests erupted in response to the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police in May.
      As a policy initiative, defunding police departments involves the reallocation of local and state resources away from law enforcement into public services, designed to address issues of poverty, inequality and mental health – factors that contribute to crime.
      The former president’s comments echoed other moderate Democrats who have taken issue and consider the phrase polarizing, prompting criticism of a progressive movement led by what some have called radical messaging.

      Jamaal Bowman
      (@JamaalBowmanNY)
      Damn, Mr. President.Didn’t you say “Trayvon could’ve been my son?” In 2014, #BlackLivesMatter was too much.In 2016, Kaepernick was too much.Today, discussing police budgets is too much.The problem is America’s comfort with Black death — not discomfort with slogans. https://t.co/DJUSZebgW5

      December 2, 2020

      In South Carolina, where the Democratic base is largely composed of Black Americans who skew older and moderate, the Democratic incumbent Joe Cunningham lost his House seat to Republican Nancy Mace in the November election.
      In the days following, the South Carolina congressman and House minority whip James Clyburn, who was regarded as instrumental in turning around Joe Biden’s flagging campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination when the moderate was behind leftist champion Bernie Sanders, told NBC News the slogan hurt some Democratic candidates.
      “If you instead say ‘Let’s reform the police department so that everybody’s being treated fairly,’” Clyburn offered alternatively. “Not just in policing, but in sentencing, how can we divert young people from getting into crime?’”
      While Obama took issue with progressive slogans, he also criticized moderate leadership for failing to recognize the increasingly powerful influence of young, progressives such as Ocasio-Cortez.
      The former president chastised the Democratic National Committee for only briefly featuring such democratic socialists in their opening montage during their national convention in Milwaukee in August.
      “She speaks to a broad section of young people who are interested in what she has to say, even if they don’t agree with everything she says. You give her a platform,” he said, adding that across political ideologies “new blood is always good” for the party. More

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      Here's what interviewing voters taught me about the slogan 'defund the police' | Danny Barefoot

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      Joe Biden won the electoral college, leads the popular vote by millions, and will be sworn in as the 46th president of the United States. Taking down an incumbent president is no easy feat and Biden deserves credit for his disciplined and effective campaign.
      But there is no question Biden underperformed vis-à-vis the consensus of pollsters and pundits. In Congress the underperformance was even more stark. Democrats expected to make gains in the House of Representatives. Instead, they are poised to return to Washington with an unexpectedly pared-down majority. In the Senate, Democrats were considered favorites to retake the chamber and deliver their party unified control of the federal government. Instead, they made only modest gains. This isn’t where the party wanted to be.
      I run a Democratic political consulting firm and wanted to immediately get to work to understand why this underperformance happened. While there are certainly multiple answers to that question and various dynamics at play, we decided to start our inquiry with voters who leaned towards voting for Joe Biden in the last weeks of the election, but ultimately voted to re-elect Donald Trump. We put together a focus group to discuss the election with these voters and explore what changed their minds.
      It will be easy for some to dismiss these participants as Trump voters (and they are!) but 70% of them told us they have a negative view of Donald Trump and at some point they supported Joe Biden before ultimately casting their vote for Trump. These aren’t Maga hat-wearing folks.
      One of the major takeaways from my discussion with these voters was their distaste for the slogan “defund the police”. While 80% agreed racism exists in the criminal justice system and 60% had a favorable view of Black Lives Matter, only one participant agreed we should “defund the police”. Another participant was exasperated, “That is crazier than anything Trump has ever said.”
      We tried to explain the actual policies behind the slogan “defund the police”. We noted that many activists who use this phrase simply want to reduce police funding and reallocate some of it to social services. One woman interrupted us to say “that is not what defund the police means, I’m sorry. It means they want to defund the police.” “I didn’t like being lied to about this over and over again,” added another woman. “Don’t try and tell me words don’t mean what they say,” she continued. The rest of the group nodded their heads in agreement.
      Ultimately 50% of people in our focus group said they thought Biden was privately sympathetic to defunding the police. While Biden and many Democrats rejected this framing, it is clear the calls from some on the left were louder than those denials.
      We followed up by asking if participants supported reducing police funding and reallocating it to social services and other agencies to reduce police presence in community conflict. Seventy per cent said they would support that proposal.
      It is almost beyond parody that progressive activists would build popular consensus on police reform only to slap on a slogan that is deeply unpopular with voters and doesn’t accurately communicate our policy goals. We don’t want to abolish the police. We don’t want to zero out funding for law enforcement. So we should forcefully reject slogans that imply we do. We should instead run on the broadly popular policies behind the slogan. It’s policy that changes lives. Unpopular framing that makes reform harder does favors to no one but those who want to protect the status quo.
      Representative James Clyburn, the Democratic whip and an activist in the civil rights movement, was blunt regarding his opinion of “defund the police” saying he believes it cost Democrats seats. “Stop sloganeering. Sloganeering kills people. Sloganeering destroys movements,” said Clyburn.
      My party won this election. We’ve now won the most votes in seven of the last eight presidential elections. But we live in a political system that would allow Republicans to block all reform and rule through the courts if we merely repeat this year’s performance in perpetuity. Some people’s response to that is to argue we need to abolish the electoral college or some other version of structural reform. I agree. But we need unified power to even begin that discussion.
      So the conversations happening about the direction of the Democratic party aren’t about “how do we win a majority every election” (we have mostly figured that out!) they have to be “how do we win by enough to make real change in a system that is rigged against us”.
      Some have noted that Republicans would never have this debate after they won an election. That’s probably correct. But Republicans can govern through minority rule. A majority is icing on the cake for them. They don’t need to have this debate to get what they want. Democrats do.
      The first thing we should do is forcefully reject slogans, branding and messaging that is deeply unpopular with voters.
      Danny Barefoot is the managing partner at Anvil Strategies, a Democratic consulting firm and advertising agency. Danny has a juris doctorate from Georgetown University Law Center More

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      'People got involved': how Los Angeles progressives swept the election

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      [embedded content]
      Voters in Los Angeles have approved new limits to police power, elected a prosecutor who promised to reopen police shooting cases and mandated that 10% of the local budget be spent on prevention programs rather than incarceration.
      The slate of progressive victories in Los Angeles, which counts 10m residents and is home to the largest jail system in the United States, show the potential impact of local wins for criminal justice reform, as well as the growing electoral influence of Black Lives Matter.
      “So many people got involved and wanted to vote,” said Leah Garcia, an East Los Angeles resident whose 18-year-old son Paul Rea was shot to death by a Los Angeles sheriff’s deputy in 2019. “A lot of the families I talk to – we’re tired of living in fear.”
      Los Angeles elected a new district attorney, George Gascón, who has pledged not to keep people in prison when they are up for parole, not transfer teens to adult court, not pursue the death penalty and won’t use “gang enhancements”, which have long been used in racially discriminatory ways.
      Though Gascón faced protests in his former job as San Francisco district attorney for refusing to prosecute officers in several high-profile police killing cases, he vowed during the campaign in LA to reopen some police shooting cases, and has said that incarcerating people for low-level offenses during the coronavirus pandemic is “unconscionable”.
      Law enforcement unions had contributed millions of dollars in political spending to backing Gascón’s opponent, the incumbent prosecutor Jackie Lacey.
      For the past three years, Lacey had refused to meet with Black Lives Matter activists protesting against what they say are more than 600 police killings and in-custody deaths of prisoners since she took office in 2013 and Lacey’s refusal to prosecute the officers responsible. More

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      A win for Joe Biden would only scratch the surface of America’s afflictions | John Mulholland

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      On 18 September, the first day of early voting in the US, Jason Miller, a house painter from Minneapolis, became, according to the Washington Post, one of the first people in the country to vote. He cast his vote for Joe Biden, saying: “I’ve always said that I wanted to be the first person to vote against Donald Trump. For four years, I have waited to do this.” Close to 90 million people have already voted in the US and it is on track to record the highest turnout since 1908.We can thank Donald Trump for that, a man who attracts fierce loyalty from his supporters but who energises his opponents in equal measure. The country has been fixated by the White House occupant for the past four years. But there is a danger that progressives and liberals invest too much faith in Trump’s departure and too little in what will be needed to fix America. Getting rid of Trump might be one thing, fixing America is another.If the president loses, there will be much talk of a new normality and the need for a democratic reset. Hopes will be voiced for a return to constitutional norms. There will be calls for a return of civility in public discourse and a healing of the partisan divide that scars America. All of that is as it should be. But it ought to come with a recognition that America was broken long before it elected Trump and his departure would be no guarantee that the country will be mended. Many of the systemic issues that afflict the US predate Trump.His ugly and dysfunctional presidency has distracted from many of the fundamentals that have beset America for decades, even centuries. But they remain stubbornly in place. If he does lose, America will no longer have Trump to blame. Two two-term Democratic presidents over the past 30 years have not significantly affected the structural issues that corrode US democracy and society, and race is always at their heart. The past few months have drawn further attention to the systemic racism and brutality that characterise much policing. But racism in the States is not confined to the police. In fact, it is not confined at all. More

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      How Black Lives Matter reshaped the race for Los Angeles’ top prosecutor

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      The race for top prosecutor in Los Angeles has become one of the most important criminal justice elections in the US this year, with Black Lives Matter activists pushing the contest to the forefront of national debates on racist policing and incarceration.Jackie Lacey, the first woman and first African American to serve as LA district attorney, is facing a tough challenge from George Gascón, a former San Francisco district attorney who has positioned himself as a progressive candidate dedicated to police accountability and reducing the prison population. More