DEMOCRATS ON THE HOOF:...Campaign Surge In Recent Weeks Brings Opportunity...Should They Go For More, For All Of It...History Shows Us The Party Rarely Goes For The Jugular In Presidential Politics... Perhaps This Time...

By DUARDO PAZ-MARTINEZ

McALLEN, Texas |...I'd been waiting for a few weeks, waiting for one of our commenters here to throw it out - we need a healthy two-party political system in this country. It came yesterday, allowing me to think that, yeah, there could be others out there of my frame of mind on this ever-ragged topic.

Republicans have traded in their past for a brawling, racist MAGA version now going on nine years old and, well, threatening to stick around for the immediate future.

It's not good for the country, no.

But what it also has done is given rival Democrats a chance to also blow out the stodgy old ways of campaigning and serving the loyalists. Democrats are playing at "moving day," as they say of Saturdays in four-day professional golf tournaments that wrap up on Sundays.

This is the time for the winning ideas to...win.  

Name-calling, racism and bigotry have been readily, gladly adopted by today's Republican Party. Their fight is seemingly existential, their goal to turn the nation upside down and the past be damned. It is a world we've never actually lived they seek, or, better yet, one that perhaps worked in the very early days of this country.

The "immigrant" experiment, I say, is too far down the road for anyone to wish mass deportations of anyone. We have lived and thrived with every wave of newcomers; that is fact. Fear and spite, however, dominates some far-right Republicans who actually wish to see an All-White America, or at the very least a very dominant White leadership in our state and federal governments.

So, should high-flying Democrats re-boot and power-up themselves?  

As a writer for The New Republic magazine put it this way, arguing that messaging is key: "...it means complaining about Democratic messaging: the weakness, the confusion, the inconsistency, the bajillions of opportunities missed when Republicans do something nuts, the backpedaling, the hem-hawing, the failure to state principles forthrightly - is that enough? Believe me, I could go on."

There's more to it, of course. But the starting line is at their feet and whatever gains Democrats have made since the nomination of Kamala Harris as party flag-bearer can only come by way of bold ideas and actions.

That's the promise of this election - analogous to the so-called bottom of the best cup of coffee you've ever had in the morning.

Swallow slowly, for the taste is rich, yet fleeting...

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