Final thought for the night. A couple of premises. You don’t have to accept my premises, but it’s useful for you to understand these things when I’m talking.
 
Politics is a process designed to craft policy. Politics that is not aimed towards crafting policy is a sideshow. Looking for that one special candidate that matches you perfectly in every way isn’t politics. It’s dating.
 
Further, the process of politics (designed to ultimately craft policy) is about coalition building. That’s the whole point of it; to put together a group of people who agree on most things to advance a common agenda, and to give and take on the margins where everyone doesn’t agree so that everyone gets most of what they want.
 
So, there’s this disaffected group of people who say they hate the Democratic party, want nothing to do with it or the Democratic party’s nominee, and are generally wanting to burn the whole thing down and replace it with….something. So this conversation keeps happening:
 
Democrats: “We’d like you to join the coalition. What do you want?”
Them: “There’s nothing you could say or do that would make me support you.”
And the Democrats say “Okay”, and start to talk to the next person down the line.
Them: “Hey! Why are you ignoring me??”
 
They’re ignoring you because you told them you were unreachable. The work right now is to reach as many people as possible and get them to join our coalition. If you don’t want to get on board, then you don’t have to, but you don’t then get to sit in the middle of the hall and complain about how you don’t like Democrats. We asked you to join, and you said you didn’t want to. That’s absolutely your right, and I will defend it to the death, as soon as I get done with all this work I’m doing electing all these Democrats. Check back in December.
 
If you want to be part of this conversation, roll your sleeves up and get back to work. There’s a lot to do, and we’ve got 430 House seats and 33 Senate seats to flip over, and state houses and state legislatures to work on and a million other things to do. And I know there’s a lot you’d like to push forward too. We could help you with that. A lot of us want the same thing you do. But you gotta join and put your shoulder to the wheel. Because that’s how things get done.
 
Politics isn’t about idealism. Politics is work. It’s tough and frustrating and sometimes it feels like we are absolutely nowhere. And some days it feels like if we gave just a little bit more, we could push things closer to what we want. But we’re not going to get better wages for workers and better access to education and healthcare and a million other things if you can’t at least sing along when it comes around on the guitar.
 
Break’s over. Time to get to work.
 
Goodnight. I love you all – even the ones that don’t see eye to eye yet.