In 2028, the candidate who admits the system has failed everyone will win |
In 2028, the candidate who admits the system has failed everyone will win
I spent 20 years telling candidates what not to say: Don’t say the party failed working people or that the system is rigged. Don’t say out loud what voters already know in their bones. Stay on message. Protect the coalition. Trust the consultants.
I was wrong, and the proof is in your gas tank.
We are approaching two months into a war nobody voted for. Gas is over $4 a gallon nationally. In Los Angeles, it’s pushing $6. The Strait of Hormuz is under a Trump-imposed blockade. Trump spent Easter Sunday posting profanity threatening to bomb Iranian power plants. Congress is just returning from recess. And every 2028 candidate is somewhere in a donor’s living room calculating how much of this they have to acknowledge before pivoting.
Stop calculating. The candidate who wins in 2028 is the one who stands up and says the system failed everyone. Not their voter, not their coalition — everyone. That’s not a messaging strategy. That’s the only honest thing left to say.
The Iran war didn’t start because of one bad decision. It started because of a decade of shared cowardice. It is the fault of Democrats who knew the foreign policy consensus was broken and stayed quiet, and of Republicans who understood Trump’s instability but endorsed him anyway. A media that covered every threat as theater until the jets were in the air. We drove this car into the wall together. The country watching gas prices tick up every morning already knows it.
There’s something Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote and said that never leaves me. That the enslaved did not ask to be enslaved, but the system built around slavery asked........