Hank Sheinkopf

It's STILL the Economy, Stupid!

That was the T-shirt I wore last night to a meeting of my local Democratic club, the Independent Neighborhood Democrats (IND). It proved to be a very appropriate shirt.

Last night, IND had a guest speaker, Hank Sheinkopf, political consultant, formerly a member of President Clinton’s re-election media team, and panelist on a local TV station's roundtable discussion. Sheinkopf is the ultimate Democratic insider and he came to discuss the 2006 election victory with us.

Sheinkopf's initial message was that we did not win this year because of ourselves, but rather because the Republicans had crashed and burned. We won because the Republicans were so corrupt, had lied so much and had, in essence, lost the confidence of the voters. His warning was this: unless we return to the populist economic message that is the HEART of the Democratic Party, we will lose again.

Sheinkopf has his own agenda: he is pushing for Hillary Clinton for President. But, that and a few other disagreements aside, I agreed with him just about completely.

The core of his talk was that Democrats need to focus on just one message, and it was the message that ALWAYS works for Democrats since the 1920's: economic populism. Actually, I would use the term "progressivism" because that is how Theodore Roosevelt described it when it was Republicans who were the economic populists. But economic populism is a good term for it as well.