The combination of losing the House, and then the Senate, and then the presidency (to Donald Trump, of all people), while losing over 900 other legislative and executive branch seats in states throughout the land, has apparently led Tom Perez, the Democratic Party's new chairman, to believe that the party must curse its way back into power to properly motivate the faithful. Knowing that such a strategy would be poison if widely known, the establishment press failed to report audible and visible evidence of this strategy for over two weeks.
Perez has sustained his descent into routine profanity since late March, demonstrating that it's a calculated, supposedly base-motivating move.
On April 1, The Blaze reported on one of the earliest, if not the earliest, such instances:
Tom Perez becomes unhinged, goes on profanity-laced anti-Trump rant
Newly elected chairman of the Democratic National Committee Tom Perez became unhinged during an event in New Jersey on Friday, where he claimed that President Donald Trump “didn’t win” last year’s presidential election.
... Perez made an unbelievable claim.
“Republicans don’t give a sh*t about people,” he said when talking about the GOP health care plan. “That’s what it’s about.”
Perez’s comment incited a thunderous applause and cheers from the crowd.
Karen Yi's coverage of the event at NJ.com, the Garden State establishment press's de facto house organ, didn't mention either of Perez's unhinged comments, nor did any of the captions at the 25 photos which accompanied her coverage. But she did reveal something which deeply undercut the relevance of the enthusiasm she reported: "More than 100 people packed the ballroom, holding signs and chanting 'resist.'" The photos reveal that the crowd wasn't a whole lot more than the 100 she reported. With all due respect, "more than 100" is hardly a groundswell of "resistance."
The Associated Press also failed to report either of Perez's key controversial comments at that New Jersey event.
Perez hasn't let up with the profanity since then. The press consistently failed to report it for over two weeks as it continued.
Then on April 18, the Washington Post's David Weigel, in a "PowerPost" blog post which more than likely did not make it into the paper's print edition, caught up with Perez and got this explanation for what is obviously a conscious strategy:
DNC Chairman Tom Perez explains why he uses four-letter words on the stump
... Pressed on whether this contradicted Democrats’ 2016 campaign messaging — much of which attacked Trump for being crude — Perez scoffed.
“To compare what Donald Trump was doing to saying the word ‘s—‘ is unfair to the word ‘s—,'” he said. “I mean, with all due respect, I don’t see the comparison there. The personal attacks, the collusion with the Russian government — to suggest that that’s somehow on par with using the word ‘s—‘?”
Asked about the Clinton campaign’s general theme, of “they go low, we go high,” Perez returned to a theme of his own. Democrats, he said, simply needed to be as ruthless in their politics as Republicans had been during Barack Obama’s presidency.
“They consistently went low, and you know what? It’s a great aspiration to want to turn the other cheek,” Perez said. “But my first goal is to make sure we’re standing up for our values. And in today’s toxic politics, it was clear from Day One that [Senate Majority Leader] Mitch McConnell’s one goal was making Barack Obama a one-term president. We have to fight with a similar relentlessness."
I don't recall McConnell and the Republicans attempting to make a merchandise-related killing on making Obama a one-term president like Perez is doing now with his scatological obsession, as seen below:
If Republicans had pulled a stunt like this with the idea making Obama a one-term president — which would have been a perfectly legitimate and defensible move — the press would have almost instantly reported it with howls of outrage. (To be clear, others did produce such related merchandise; the Republican Party did not.)
Perez was at it again with his profane rants at least four more times during the past week.
There may not be a cause-and-effect relationship, but shortly after Weigel's report appeared, some signs of press, uh, resistance to Perez's message delivery method finally appeared. At the Wall Street Journal, former Politico reporter Reid Epstein observed in a tweet the irony that "Six months after Clinton ran ads saying Trump wasn't safe for children, new DNC chairman cursing as regular stump speech applause line."
Finally, on Thursday, a panel discussion at CNN's Inside Politics broke the ice, with the network's John King leading the way (HT Fox News Insider):
Transcript (panel discussion only, excluding Perez's videotaped speech remarks; full transcript here):
JOHN KING, CNN... at the moment he (Perez) should be the inside voice because as parent and as someone who doesn't think profanity actually wins you all that much in politics. I know people are going to say "Trump won, Trump won," but this is Tom Perez on the trail.
(CNN plays two of Perez's profane clips)
... KING: I think that's unnecessary though.
MARY KATHARINE HAM: And I think that Bernie Sanders sort of alludes to that a bit in saying, look, this message that Democrats give an expletive about people, I think that's a message that sort of led to Trump because many felt elbowed out of this coalition. They felt like, oh you're the only good people and we are the bad people. We are the "deplorables" and therefore we're going to go a different direction. So I think repairing that messaging is actually part of this. And as we know, the children are listening.
KING: I think he can do it with manners. I really do. Passion's good. Manners (are) good also.
Given where he works, it's not unreasonable to believe that John King and perhaps his producers decided that he had to call out Perez's profanity because it is not helping his network's preferred party, and that continuing to ignore it threatened to make the press's preference for leftists and Democrats brazenly obvious even to relatively disengaged voters.
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
