Obama's Not Going to Save Democrats, but This Might

New York Times

31-03-2025

The Opinion writer Michelle Cottle and the contributing Opinion writer Ben Rhodes discuss why the Democratic Party hasn't begun an effective opposition and whom they see as the future of the party.
Below is a lightly edited transcript of this episode of 'The Opinions.' We recommend listening to it in its original form for the full effect. You can do so using the player above or on the NYT Audio app, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.
Michelle Cottle: I'm Michelle Cottle, and I cover national politics for Times Opinion.
I've been watching the political scene for nearly three decades, and the question I'm getting these days more than any other is: What the heck are the Democrats doing? And related to that: What can the opposition do to fight back against the Trump administration to win back voters, to build a new movement?
These are great questions and here to help me answer them is Ben Rhodes.
Ben is probably best known for his work as a speechwriter and deputy national security adviser to President Obama. More recently, he and I have both been reporting and interviewing a host of Democrats, and we've written pieces to try to understand the current state of the party and what it needs to do to survive and maybe even thrive in these turbulent times.
Ben, thank you so much for joining me.
Ben Rhodes: Good to see you, Michelle.
Cottle: Before we really dig into the question of what Democrats should do, let me get your take on the mood here in D.C., particularly among Democratic leaders. What is it like? What are you seeing?
Rhodes: I don't really think I've ever seen anything quite like it, to tell you the truth, in terms of the mixture of despair and gloom and even desperation, really.
You felt a little bit like this as a Democrat after the 2004 election, to roll the clock way back. But after the 2004 election, there wasn't the world's richest man coming in and trying to dismantle huge swaths of the U.S. government, you know?
I think that the combination for Democrats that is so paralyzing is that sense of not just being despairing of what's happening but really kind of flailing about and not having any kind of coherent, agreed-upon approach for how to deal with this emergency that is taking place around us.
Cottle: Even going a bit further afield than the Democratic Party leaders, in my world, I've been talking to a bunch of people, including federal workers and academics, and many of these folks have never experienced anything like this instability in their professional lives.
When you think about it, what are the most stable professions that you think of? Academia. Nobody ever loses their job in academia. The federal government is supposed to be really steady, and this has taken people and left them speechless.
I think that both of us think that the Democrats should not just be sitting back in the middle of all this, hoping that Republicans drive themselves completely into a ditch. But at the same time, I'm really mindful of something that a veteran Democratic strategist once told me, which is that when your opponent is digging their own grave, you don't fight him for the shovel.
So how do we find a balance for the Democrats to go forward? What should they be doing to make progress while at the same time letting Republicans own what they're doing?
Rhodes: I think there are two problems that the Democrats have to confront. The first, which kind of counteracts the stand-back-and-let-them-destroy-themselves theory, which by the way, I think in normal political times would be absolutely right. Just do very little, they'll crash the economy, and we'll win some midterm elections in two years, and we'll be back in the game.
And I think Democrats underestimate just how profoundly loathed they are right now.
I say that as a Democrat. If you are under 30, the only national Democrats you've really known are Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden and then maybe a hundred days of Kamala Harris. [Cottle laughs.]
And I like those people, but they are definitely not tomorrow, and they kind of represent Washington and they represent certain ways of doing things that people think have failed. And I think Democrats would make a big mistake if they assume: Oh, we came pretty close in this election, and therefore it's not as profound a rebuke of us as it might be.
The rebuke to Democrats is that Donald Trump is more popular today than he was eight years ago, and I do not think that's because he is some singular — I mean, he is a singular figure — but I don't think he has that degree of depth of appeal in the country. I think part of it is the loathing of Democrats.
And then on the other side, I think that you make a mistake in thinking that these people are going to kind of go quietly into the night. You know, if there's a recession, they'll just take their electoral beating and go home. People like this don't give up power voluntarily. They really don't. And whatever that looks like, whether that's Trump trying to run for another term or whether it's just a kind of total governmental capture, it could be too late for Democrats in four years.
So I think they need to show people just what they care about. They need generational change in terms of who the faces of this party are, and they need to get back out in the country where people are actually experiencing the things that the Trump administration is doing.
They need to reinvent themselves not as this kind of party of governing in Washington, but, once again, as kind of a movement party on behalf of primarily working people, but anybody frankly, that is being harmed by Trump, which is going to be a lot of people.
Cottle: So you touched on something that I was talking about recently with Congressman Jason Crow, which is the way back for the party. He did speak to the idea that the Democratic Party has become this kind of kneejerk defender of institutions that a majority of the country doesn't see as working. You can't defend the federal government while also looking like a force of change or somebody who's even really in touch with what's going on.
It sounds like you think that they need to not necessarily keep the government defense at arms' lengths, but that they need to change their approach to that? Just like their entire shtick on government?
Rhodes: Well, yeah. To be very specific about this, in recent days you've seen Democrats protesting outside of U.S.A.I.D., when it was shuttered. That shouldn't happen — and I say that as someone who's profoundly concerned about shuttering those agencies.
They should protest at a Veterans Affairs center in somebody's congressional district out in the country. They should be protesting where the services that are being removed hit people's lives.
If people see a bunch of people in front of a government building in Washington, they don't even think about necessarily what's going on in there. But if people see the local V.A. is getting cut, that is something that's tangible to them.
And I think it's both the defending of the status quo and also the sense that Democrats are entirely the party of Washington. We used to laugh and scoff at Trump and rallies. I was watching that as someone involved in the Obama campaign and I was like, well, that kind of looked like our approach to politics — to get out with big crowds and do stuff.
I think that there's a mentality not just among Democratic electeds, but sometimes among your more engaged Democrats, shall we say, your online Democrats, that these people are going to emerge from a room in Washington with a formula, like a set of talking points.
That's not how it works. You have to get out in the country and actually do things.
Cottle: I do think there's a misconception about what the federal government is. I do think that it's not even just people who don't pay attention to government and politics. There's this sense that all of these people that Trump is firing are in Washington, that he's letting go of huge hordes just inside the Beltway, so to speak.
Whereas in reality, a huge percentage of federal workers are in Colorado, Alabama. And I think it speaks to your point that Democrats do need to be out in the country showing where the rubber meets the road on these things.
It's my sense that there's a lot of schadenfreude in certain parts of the nation about it finally being Washington workers' turn to feel the sting of the economic downturn. And that's just not really what the federal government is all about.
Rhodes: That's exactly right.
I was talking to a woman for this piece who's run a bunch of movements successfully in Europe, and she's like, just make it about an issue, too.
You have a movement around health care, and you're at V.A. facilities. Or you're at places that are being hit by the removal of Medicaid or something like that. You could do that around any number of issues. You could do it around protecting Social Security. You could do it around some of the cuts to food safety. Anything that people care about that hits them in their lives.
And the good thing about doing that is if you're trying to build momentum in places like that, you don't need to make sure that everybody who shows up at your rally or your protest or your town hall — you don't need to quiz them on the way in.
Chris Murphy, the senator from Connecticut, said to me: We ask people to agree with us on 12 things and if you only agree with 11, you're not invited here — particularly if that extra thing is a cultural issue or an identity politics issue.
If you're making this about issues that people care about in their lives, you don't need these across-the-board purity tests. There could be someone who thinks they hate Democrats but is really mad that their V.A. health care is being taken away. Invite that person in.
Cottle: So who do you think would be the good face of the opposition, who you think has what it takes?
Rhodes: Obviously you see Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez; she has that extra thing. People are just interested in what she is saying and doing, and she's drawing big crowds with Bernie Sanders.
Then I think if you look in Washington, you've got people like Chris Murphy, Brian Schatz and Andy Kim, who are in the Senate. Elissa Slotkin, who they obviously put out for the response to Trump's address to Congress. And I look in the House at a guy like Jason Crow who has a service record. A guy like Ro Khanna who's trying to stir things up a bit. Then you look at governors and you've got Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan. You've got ——
Cottle: Oh, I love me some governors.
Rhodes: Well, that's the thing. I don't think the next president is likely to be a Washington Democrat, you know? So then you look at ——
Cottle: I'm right there with you. I am very pro Team Governor.
Rhodes: It's just a different look for the party, and part of what I think distressed people about last time is if we'd had an open primary, Wes Moore of Maryland, Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, there are plenty of pretty capable people who would have been in ——
Cottle: Such fabulous choices.
Rhodes: Middle-aged people, at least.
And then the last thing I'd say is that they should be open to somebody else, too. Somebody who's not from politics. Let's see who finds some credibility and authenticity with the electorate in the next couple of years.
I think there's a great opportunity for the party, I really do, to regenerate. If some of the older generation steps aside, there's going to be some energy building. You've already got some pretty talented people in these different places, and let's just look like a different party in two or three years.
Cottle: So you touched on the authenticity word, which I heard about when talking to Jason Crow and when I was talking to A.O.C. about where to go with the party.
Audio clip of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: I think sometimes people fret over the words that we're using and it's so much more than words. This is about not just talking about it, it's about being about it. And, um, people can just smell from a mile away if you're one of them.
Cottle: So with the Democrats, my sense is that yes, you talk about issues, yes, you make clear what your core values are. But a lot of it comes down to the fact that they don't know how to talk to normal people and not sound like they're running some kind of freshman seminar at some pointy-headed college.
How much of this is a style question that needs to be addressed?
Rhodes: It's a style question that goes deeper. As someone who was a speechwriter, if you do not sound like a human, you're not going to be effective as a messenger.
There's this saying that Biden, and then Harris, both repeated — I don't blame this on them — this is the kind of consultant brain that the Democratic Party gets. How many times do we hear them talk about 'building a middle class from the bottom up and the middle out?'
What the hell does that mean? You know?
So the first thing is there's this kind of consultant language that just needs to go away. That was always annoying to people. But when your opponent, Donald Trump, is clearly not on any consultant-speak, it just makes it more glaring that you seem like the typical politicians.
And then there's a second piece of this, which is, Democrats have these public debates that astound me where it's like, 'Maybe we need to go on TikTok' or 'We need to go on that manosphere podcast.' If you can do that, if you can make a cool TikTok video and whatever your thing is that allows you to do that, that's great. If you can't, then please don't. Please don't go there.
If you can go on 'Joe Rogan' because you are up to speed on the conspiracy theories or you have a background in standup comedy or you know something about ultimate fighting, that's great. But don't go on 'Joe Rogan' to talk about building an economy from the bottom up to the middle out. That will make his audience hate Democrats more.
And so I think what Democrats miss about authenticity — it's not like what platform I'm on. The point is that authenticity is about being yourself. It's not about being what you think this demographic wants a politician to be.
Cottle: That suggests that they just need to also expand their stable to include people who can do these different things. So, like Crow, Pete Buttigieg, Carville — these guys go on conservative shows and they do a really good job.
Rhodes: Yeah.
Cottle: So if you also find people who want to talk to Joe Rogan about Ultimate Fighting or all of the manosphere podcasters, that's who you send out. You don't send out your policy wonks to talk about that.
Rhodes: Yeah. And look, Obama was one of the first politicians that did this kind of stuff. But you know what he did? He went on ESPN to talk about basketball because he knew something about basketball. So he would look super authentic if he was having that conversation.
It's a very simple point, but it's really one that is missed. To Crow's point, he's right; if you're not reaching certain audiences, well then go find some people that have an authentic connection to those audiences.
Cottle: How much of a problem is it that the party doesn't have obvious leaders, obvious faces for this? It's always a problem when you're out of power because you can't compete with the presidency. I mean, every time Trump belches or forgets somebody's name, it's saturation coverage.
And at this point, Chuck Schumer's not really the face of the future of the party. To what degree is it just a question of, how do you elevate people above the white noise?
Rhodes: I hear you and I get asked every day: 'Where's Obama? Why isn't he out there?' And I always say to people, like, 'OK, maybe Obama could go out and do some big rally, but he's not going to run in two or four years.' Like we should want other people and we're this party ——
Cottle: To be clear, I don't want them looking backward. They need to be looking forward.
Rhodes: I think the problem for this party is our nominees. Our leaders tend to be the people who've been around forever, and people are sick of people that have been around forever right now.
A catastrophic mistake was putting Gerry Connolly in charge of the Oversight Committee for the Democrats in the House instead of A.O.C. Not because the Oversight Committee's the most important thing in the world, but just because of the message it sent. This is the only Democrat in Washington who people — people who don't follow politics closely — are kind of interested in what she has to say, if they're under 35 and have a pulse.
We are on a sinking ship here, people. So what needs to happen is, the party, through its resources, through whatever platform it has, just needs to be elevating the next generation of people and having them come forward. So I think we have to be open to anything and then everybody in this kind of emergency that we're in.
In the more medium term, at some point, I would like the Democratic Party to be attractive enough to have those people not be embarrassed to put 'Democrat' next to their name.
I mean, not to sound like the old guy, but like in 2008, people wanted to be a Democrat, and it was like that at the time in the '90s with Clinton. You get a sense now like 'Democrat' is not something people are that excited about. And you have to change that by changing who you are.
And I say this in the piece, Michelle, like I hate what Trump's done, but he destroyed his party and rebuilt it. This can be done. And part of Trump's credibility with the electorate is that he broke his own party.
And what voters know is that if Trump will fight his own party, he'll fight anybody. When Democrats look afraid to even fight, tell Joe Biden he's too old or tell Chuck Schumer he shouldn't capitulate, it just makes it seem like: These guys are weak. They can't even stand up to each other. How are they going to stand up for me?
Cottle: Now, I wanted to take a step back and talk about the international scene, because I think one of the things that you touched on early is that this is not a normal political time.
I think, in part, the American electorate doesn't have any kind of context for what to do. You know, how would you even work on being the opposition in a situation like this? But you've taken this question global and you've talked to some folks who have been in countries where there was a slide toward autocracy.
What did you hear in those conversations?
Rhodes: I heard a lot of concern that Americans don't seem to understand what's happening here and just how bad it is. That is evident to people around the world in the absence of pushback, the absence of protests, the corporate total capitulation to Trump, the capitulation of different sectors. Now we're in academia, law firms, we've seen some capitulation from media — not the outlet we're currently speaking on.
The point of the authoritarian playbook that Trump is running, which has been run in many countries around the world, is initially to make the opposition feel so demoralized that they don't push back. But then by the time that they do push back, they can't, because there's been a sufficient capture and intimidation of civil society and of the private sector, and a capture of the instruments of government.
We're in the phase where people still could push back, but they're not, and capitulation is not a strategy. For every law firm and university that gives Trump a pound of flesh, he's going to come back for more. Not just from them, from others.
Cottle: Always. Always.
Rhodes: This is obvious, but it's somehow lost on people to some extent and also to see what this is setting up.
That was the main message, that you need to shake off the kind of self-censorship that takes hold in these circumstances and shake off the waiting for somebody else to charge up the hill and start coalition-building and doing things right away.
Cottle: I wanted to read a comment that somebody had sent in. It's from Jonathan and he notes: 'It's exceedingly frustrating to hear plans and strategies for the regaining of political power by the Democratic Party. Why? Because we're in the middle of a takeover of our government by a lawless and violent faction. Discussing ways in which this can be successfully opposed by a properly considered political strategy is simply fatuous. In fact, many supporters of that faction are muddying the waters by suggesting democratic political strategies. But these are distractions.'
So I think if I am reading Jonathan correctly, he feels like extraordinary measures are called for. We're in an extraordinary time and he wants to see something transformational. And what can the Democratic Party do to channel that kind of rage where it just feels like the moment is so dire?
Rhodes: So, I totally agree with Jonathan, and he can feel free to lump me in with the political strategists. But my point is essentially, Democrats love to, for instance, sit around and be like, 'What's the policy agenda that will win back America?'
I — nobody cares. There's great ideas out there — the abundance agenda and all the rest of it — but nobody is going to read that right now. That's a great idea for Democrats if they actually win back power or maybe if they're in power now.
But where Jonathan's right is, we're in quicksand and we're going underneath, and we're sitting here debating policy ideas for some hypothetical future when we're in charge or we're debating what podcasts to go on. To me, you just need to show energy, whether it's in moral outrage or determination. My point in the piece was don't wait for a Democrat to save Washington. People just need to get in the streets, or businesses need to start binding together. Institutions need to stop capitulating. I mean, the way you get out of things like that is you grab one another's hand.
And I think what the Democrats need to do is flood the zone out in the country; just start doing things. It's actually not a strategy. Well, it is a strategy in the sense of it's saying stop doing what you're currently doing in Washington and just go out and essentially collectively protest.
I don't think Bernie and A.O.C. checked with Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries about whether they could go do some rallies. They just went and did them because that's what they're good at and that's what people need to do more of.
Cottle: OK, skip the consultants and poll testing. Get up, get out there.
And with that call to the ramparts, Ben, thank you so much for joining me.
Rhodes: Always great talking to you, Michelle.