1. SO MUCH more than that. What Barr & the GOP pulled off w the release of the Mueller Report was demonstrated mastery of the American media & the news cycle.

They manipulated both brilliantly.

The reason reporters are conditioned to report a stalled bill as "Congress failing

1. What @WillieGeist is trying to get across to @NikemaWilliams on @Morning_Joe is that the GOP is nationalizing their message & making their message high stakes, tapping into voters anger at Trump's loss to get them to vote in a Jan. run-off & that Ds NEED TO DO THE SAME. Its

2. about giving Trump power- its about giving low-info voters, who are the bulk of the electorate motivation to cast ballots in the run-off. This is WHY turnout plummets in these things on the D side- the GOP keeps their messaging on stakes (control of the senate to fend off

3. socialism) while Ds go off into policy. That is a losing strategy. It just lost them nearly a dozen House seats & the chance to cut into partisan gerrymandering by flipping 4 state houses. They can't make that mistake here bc control of senate is everything here. If Ds have it

4. Biden can get some policy done- if Ds don't, the GOP will block everything. Biden will be a lame duck from day 1. So the message should be "hey voter, did you know you have a super vote? That's right, with your one vote, you can elect 2 senators that will give Ds control of

5. senate & with it REAL police reform. With it, Dreamers not getting deported to countries they've even been to- potentially to die from lack of insulin. With it, the power to save the pre-existing conditions coverage for millions of Americans, including Nicu babies who'd in

1. Yes, @FareedZakaria's new book, Ten lessons From a Post-Pandemic World argues we don't need a big or small gov- we need a GOOD one.

We don't have that now & that is bc for decades now, the GOP has intentionally hallowed it out. Stripping it of funding under the auspice that

2. the only goal should be small. And as it turns out- that was stupid. And now we have a dysfunctional, as @maddow says, "big, bad" gov. Something that has been "wasted, and rotted and ruined." And its been intentional. Its been murdered, with no thought for how people would

3. suffer for it. COVID just put that suffering in a streamlined spotlight. But as @FareedZakaria points out- its the cherry on top of a 40 year plan that Bannon termed the final "deconstruction of the administrative state." As with the decimation of the economic tools that had

4. allowed the world's 1st middle class to emerge & flourish before The Great Lie ushered in the greatest wealth transfer in history. Not only were Americans bamboozled into voting away their wage increases, their pensions, & their health care (at least till 2010)- they were also

5. tricked into pissing away their country's superiority- its claim to fame, its ability to puff its chest out & say "look over here, we have the best _____. " I had no idea when I was a kid that we were not, in fact, the greatest country on Earth- at least not if you care about

1. The hot take that "D's need to learn to talk to the other side of the electorate" is absolutely the WRONG take.

I mean my god. Biden, Lincoln, the outside groups: they threw the best persuasion messaging in the history of persuasion campaigns at them.

What Ds need to do is