MSNBC's "Morning Joe" co-host Joe Scarborough on Thursday told his panel that national Democrats are "clueless" and that they are disconnected from working-class Americans.
Scarborough drew rebuke from co-host Mika Brzezinski when he said that Democrats were "clueless." While he admitted that there were a few good ads from Democrats, he said that the national party was "clueless."
"They are just as disconnected from working-class Americans as they've ever been," Scarborough said. "I mean are they going to blow this advantage that Trump's been giving to them. Is there concerns among Democratic activists and Democratic donors that the Democratic leadership still doesn't get it?"
Steve Rattner, former head of the Obama administration's Auto Task Force and a New York Times contributor, acknowledged that there are many concerns among Democratic activists. He went on to say that there are many divisions in the party and that they all have different policies that they are fighting over.
"What you see in the so-called new Democratic platform that's come out in the last few days are kind of a bunch of fairly small-bore specific kinds of ideas that they could build a consensus around, but not a vision," Rattner said.
"But it's a better deal," Brzezinski joked.
"A better deal, but not a real vision of where they want to go. We'll get to this on immigration. Immigration is one of those issues," Rattner said.
Scarborough said the Democrats' "Better Deal" slogan sounded more like a "Hardee's ad."
"The Democratic Party has lost white working-class Americans because of immigration. That's an issue and there's such a blindspot that they don't understand," Scarborough said. "They really don't understand that for a lot of working-class Americans, a flood of immigrants into the United States means not only do they lose their jobs, but they are also smart enough to know it depresses their wages."
Lanhee Chen, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, agreed and said that the Democrats have "no coherence" to their political agenda right now.
"They have a policy challenge. They have a messaging challenge. They have a generational challenge in the Democratic Party," Chen said. "Where are the leaders in the Democratic Party? They're seen as being from a different generation. That is a problem, but they're not going to solve by the way by hiring an ad agency to tell them to rebrand a pizza commercial to define their agenda."
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.), Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.), and other Democratic leaders rolled out an economic message last week to rebrand the party going into the 2018 midterm election. Their new slogan is, "A Better Deal: Better Skills, Better Jobs, Better Wages."
House Speaker Paul Ryan's (R., Wis.) press secretary, AshLee Strong, mocked Democrats for taking seven months to come up with a slogan that is very similar to Republicans' "Better Way" slogan in 2016.
The slogan was even a major flop among several progressives and media figures who castigated it for sounding like the slogan of the pizza chain Papa John's, the Washington Free Beacon reported.