Dear Friends,

This week’s conversation starts in Green Bay and ends in Glasgow. LISTEN TO THE PODCAST HERE, and thanks again to the livestream listeners who weighed in with their opinions.

“Aaron Rodgers 2011-1” by elviskennedy is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

What exactly do Aaron Rodgers, the survival of the Democratic Party, and COP26 have in common? Let’s start with the hot water Rodgers landed himself in recently over his COVID vaccination status.

Basically, Rodgers committed the two sins that every public figure in history, except Buddha and Jesus, has committed: (1) He said dumb things, and (2) He lied.

By way of an apology, Rodgers said, “I made some comments that people might have felt were misleading. To anybody who felt misled by those comments, I take full responsibility.”

Yeah, technically not an apology. (To one of my callers, Carlos, I’ll grant you that.) Rodgers should have known that saying, “I’m immunized” would mean, to most people, that he’d been vaccinated. That was deceptive.

Regardless of the quality of Rodgers’ apology, at that point we should have moved on.

But no. National pundits of the partisan Left continue to eviscerate Rodgers. This week, a column in Deadspin called him a galaxy-brained dope, an idiot, a bedwetter, and a purveyor of tinfoil hat’d truthism — just in the first two paragraphs!

My Facebook feed, which not surprisingly leans Left, featured comments like these:

“Sixty-one years and out as a Packers and Rodgers fan.”

“Can’t love a careless moron. He should get the boot permanently.”

“The Packers should have to forfeit the rest of their games.”

 “Rodgers has degenerated into megalomania.”

Let me wrap up this quote-fest with one more from Rodgers: “I realize I’m in the crosshairs of the woke mob right now. So, before my final nail gets put in my cancel culture casket, I believe strongly in bodily autonomy and ability to make choices for your body. Health is not a one-size-fits-all for everybody.”

(That’s some great alliteration — cancel culture casket. Love that!) You may disagree with what Rodgers said, but his messaging is excellent. Taking on the woke mob. Standing up for choice. That’s solid populist rhetoric.

What’s the political message here? In a sane world, there wouldn’t be any. COVID should never have been politicized. Partisans on both sides of the aisle did it, continue to do it — and it’s helping Republicans!

Whether one is “woke” on COVID or anything else, do Democrats really think they can win elections by pushing wokeness? A poll this summer found that only a third of American voters consider themselves woke.

The problem is, wokeness is perceived as another form of elitism, and elitism is the Democratic Party’s biggest problem. Democrats have yet to recover from Hillary Clinton calling half of Donald Trump’s supporters “deplorables” in 2016. The reek of that elitist remark persists.

What else? A call to defund the police might not seem elitist, but to rank-and-file voter across the racial and cultural spectrum, it comes across as totally out of touch with reality. There are so many better ways to talk about addressing racism within law enforcement than abolishing local police departments.

Granted, Republicans are great at lying. They’ve got AM radio, Fox News, OAN, News Max to keep the lies going. They also have gerrymandering — and after redistricting, Republicans have pretty much assured they’ll take back the US House in 2022.

But do Democrats really have to give Republicans additional fodder? More than any hot-button issue, the Left’s obsession with policing people on COVID will fuel the next massive tidal wave of Republican domination.

Want a sneak preview into 2022? Look at recent school board elections. Voters unhappy about mask mandates and vaccination shaming turned out in droves to elect conservatives to school boards.

At the federal level, look at President Biden’s approval rating. It dropped by 15 points since June. According to an article in Politico, “It’s the pandemic that looms over it all.”

But there is a way out for Democrats. A recent survey of working-class voters by Jacobin provides the answer: “Campaign messaging that avoids woke rhetoric is popular among many working-class voters. Given a choice between five different styles of political rhetoric, the progressive populist soundbite —which pitted ‘people who work for a living’ against ‘the superrich’ — was at least as, if not more popular than, the four other options (woke progressive, woke moderate, mainstream moderate, and Republican).”

Why doesn’t the Democratic Party and its candidates get this? Go woke on voters — or for that matter, emphasize any hot-button social issue — and lose. Focus on a progressive, populist message that calls out the privileged rich and corporate elites and Democrats can carve a path back to relevance.

Which brings me to COP26 and the climate emergency. 

The bottom line is this: Post COP26, we still have an emergency. The Glasgow Climate Pact is a start, sure, but in terms of the urgency of the moment, it’s embarrassingly weak, though at least participant nations agreed we must move to a fossil-fuel-free future and coal has to go. But the Pact still doesn’t come close to keeping us below 1.5°C target we’ve gotta stay below to have any kind of viable future.

“But Ed, what does Glasgow have to do with Aaron Rodgers?”

I’m glad you asked. If Democrats focus on a Green-New-Deal approach to the climate crisis, we’re going nowhere fast. Great idea, but when you try to roll free college tuition, universal health care, and more into a climate bill, politically, you’ve blown it.

Democrats’ climate conversation needs to be about survival, sure, because it is, and it would be disingenuous not to admit it. But emphasize a cleaner environment. Most conservative voters I talk with — and I talk with a lot — can get behind that. Make it about new, good-paying jobs. Make it about the fight between working-class voters and the corporate elite who want to keep the status quo going so they can further enrich themselves — and eventually move to Mars or a luxury doomsday bunker in South Dakota.

So there. That’s my take on Aaron Rodgers. Go Pack, as in Green Bay. Go Pact, as in Glasgow.

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