This is an excerpt from an email I recently sent to a friend:

I have lots of takeaways about the election. One can correctly blame Biden; Kamala's emphasis on joy while ignoring people's pain; paying Beyonce and Oprah $1m to endorse her; worry about the border (why?!); the Dems fascination with people's identities, from gender to race; along with the list you included above. 

I think it's every single one of those things.

Thing is, we Dems need a candidate who has many of the same goals as the absolute political genius lunkhead in the oval office right now - questioning everything about the way our government works and playing more hardball than many Ds are comfortable with.

What annoys me about the Ds right now is we are doing so much navel gazing, philosophizing, ruminating, discerning and threshing, but not coming up with specific plans instead of general ones, that speak the language of the guy at the end of the bar. Or maybe just the bartender. 

FCNL had a call the other night of actions we can take to fight back. I signed up for it but opted to get the transcript. It's 33 pages long. I've read, or at least breezed through, the first 16 pages and so far, the only thing they've said is to lobby moderate Republicans. Genius! The rest of it is thanking each other and explaining problems we all already knew about. I'm not going to read the rest, but if you do, let me know if it gets more constructive.

I am working on my own list of things that Dems should be pimping left and, especially, right - specifics, that speak the human language, with no references to ad hoc stopgap subcommittee bipartisan bilateral blue ribbon adjunct hardworking American roll up our sleeves best practice bread and butter existential inflection point game changer kitchen table common sense initiatives. (Did I forget anything?!)