From the In Case You Missed It file: last week, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman advised the Democrats to embrace some of Donald Trump's beliefs, because "Some things are true even if Donald Trump believes them!" If they hope to attract Trump voters in the midterms they will have to make some moves toward the president.
First, Friedman had to dismiss that Trump ever does anything constructive with his beliefs: "Trump connects with these gut issues and takes them in a destructive direction. It’s vital for Democrats to connect with them and take them in a constructive direction." This was his list:
• We can’t take in every immigrant who wants to come here; we need, metaphorically speaking, a high wall that assures Americans we can control our border with a big gate that lets as many people in legally as we can effectively absorb as citizens.
• The Muslim world does have a problem with pluralism — gender pluralism, religious pluralism and intellectual pluralism — and suggesting that terrorism has nothing to do with that fact is naïve; countering violent extremism means constructively engaging with Muslim leaders on this issue.
• Americans want a president focused on growing the economic pie, not just redistributing it. We do have a trade problem with China, which has reformed and closed instead of reformed and opened. We have an even bigger problem with automation wiping out middle-skilled work and we need to generate more blue-collar jobs to anchor communities.
• Political correctness on college campuses has run ridiculously riot. Americans want leaders to be comfortable expressing patriotism and love of country when globalization is erasing national identities. America is not perfect, but it is, more often than not, a force for good in the world.
Friedman concluded, "Voters don’t listen through their ears. They listen through their stomachs. And when you connect with voters in their guts, they feel respected, and when they feel respected, they will listen to anything — including big issues that are true even if Democrats believe them. Such as the fact that a majority of Americans like Obamacare and want to see it built to last, and a majority of Americans do not like the way Trump is despoiling the environment and bringing back coal."
Now, as an intellectual exercise, ask yourself: On which of these issues have the network news people acknowledged Friedman's list? Have the networks covered political correctness on college campuses? Not really. Have the liberal media underlined the Muslim world's problem with pluralism? No, they're too busy obsessing over Trump's problem with Muslims. Have the networks acknowledged that we can't take in every immigrant? Please.
Tom Friedman ought to be challenging his own media colleagues to see if they can be less ideological and more objective than the Democratic Party hardliners. Because right now, they sound exactly like Democratic Party hardliners.
And from last week's evidence, they're probably not going to interview Friedman and talk about this column.
