A rose by any other name...

House Dems vow to improve messaging

House Democrats kicked off their annual retreat here with a vow to improve the flawed messaging that contributed to the loss of their majority last fall.

Yeah, that's the ticket. Messaging - that was the problem!

The down-sized Democratic Caucus is meeting for three days at the glitzy Hyatt Regency resort on the shores of the Chesapeake, with the goal of figuring out what went wrong in 2010 and how the party can position itself on policy and politics for the next two years.

...

Yet as with a series of closed-door meetings after the election, party leaders trumpeted their gains in the 111th Congress but acknowledged the need to examine how House Democrats managed to lose 63 seats in 2010.

“We never stopped to ... campaign about what we did,” Rep. Xavier Becerra (D-Calif.), the caucus vice chairman, told reporters in an opening press conference. [LB: That much is true - they ran from it as much as they possibly could. The voters knew about it anyway.] He said he told the former Speaker, Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), that in retrospect, the party needed to better promote its accomplishments after the passage of the contentious healthcare law last March.

“I said Madam Speaker, the problem with Democrats is we never give the public the chance to savor our victories,” Becerra said, as Rep. James Clyburn (D-S.C.), the assistant leader, nodded in agreement. [LB: But I'm going to take a minute to savor that comment. I don't like to call people idiots, so I'm not going to characterize Congressman Becerra. Or Congressman Clyburn.]“What we didn’t do was take the time to do tap-dances about what we had just done, but we did the work of the people.”

“Too bad we didn’t message it better,” he added.

I think that Congressional offices must come with magic mirrors, where this

looks in and sees this

 

 

Or maybe there's something in the water...