Former Democratic National Committee (DNC) Chairman Terry McAuliffe told NewsNation host Chris Cuomo on a Tuesday podcast that the Democratic Party has “lost” its “common sense” brand to President Donald Trump.
Trump has championed widely supported agendas, including barring biological males from competing in female sports, deporting illegal immigrants, reducing government waste and lowering costs of prescription drugs, while Democrats have often taken positions at odds with public sentiment on these issues. McAuliffe, on “The Chris Cuomo Project,” argued that former President Bill Clinton governed with “common sense,” but said the current Democratic Party is not practical in comparison to Trump.
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“Listen, he’s a great salesman. You and I — I’ve known the guy for 30 years. He is a great salesman, and he talks common sense, and he says the stuff that, you know, people like to hear. I think sometimes Democrats get a little squeamish … we make things so complicated. I mean, just lay it out. But listen — yeah, the prescription drug [executive order] I think was very smart,” McAuliffe told Cuomo. “We got the American-Israeli hostage out. That’s, you know, great. He’s talking about a trillion dollars of investments on this Middle East deal. I don’t know if any of it’s ever going to come to fruition, but the public likes to hear that. And we’ve got to do that. We got to be big and bold. We need politicians in our party who are actually fun, Chris. We have so many lemon suckers that people just tune us out.”
Trump signed a May 12 executive order that he said will cut drug prices by approximately 59% or more and end global freeloading off of American investments in pharmaceutical research and development. The Trump administration on May 12 also got Hamas to release its last American hostage Edan Alexander.
“And, you know, they like folks who [are] going to just sort of lay it out, have some fun doing it and common sense. Common sense used to be who our party was, and we’ve sort of lost it. We got caught up with all of these other issues that mattered to so few people and we’ve lost our broad array. And I go back to the great Clinton years,” the former DNC chair continued. “You know, when Bill Clinton came in office and we had four balanced budgets and we had two years of surpluses. He reduced the government — the number of employees — by 400,000, Chris. He did it through attrition. He did it through early government payoffs. He got where everybody wanted this government to be. And he did it in a way that lifted people up, wasn’t cruel to anybody and had a booming economy. But talked common sense. Talked like the Arkansas guy he was.”
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Former Clinton pollster Mark Penn argued May 7 that Democratic Party’s “problem” is that Americans view them as hyper-partisan and extreme on certain policies.
“They’re seen as purely partisan, but off the deep end on some policy issues, not trying to be constructive, not listening to the will of the people to try to get things done together with the president,” he said.
Political analyst Mark Halperin told Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk on Wednesday that he thinks the media makes a huge error by repeatedly framing Trump’s policies “as red meat for the extreme MAGA base.”
“I think that this is arguably the biggest mistake the media makes about covering Donald Trump, because they’re constantly characterizing the things he’s for as red meat for the extreme MAGA base,” Halperin told Kirk. “He’s generally for popular things, and there’s nothing wrong with that.”
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First published by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
