If I sound frustrated with you in this response, I’m not- it’s frustration with the assumptions behind what you said-assumptions you did not invent.

If we took the argument that he couldn’t give those speeches because he was “the first Black POTUS”, doesn’t that mean we’d end up having to accept the argument that the first woman POTUS, the first Latino POTUS, the first LGTBQ POTUS, the first Jewish POTUS, the first Muslim POTUS, and the first Indigenous POTUS will ALL have to be timid centrist placeholders? That we can’t actually have a progressive president who stands up to the Right with anything close to actual conviction, who even tries to win the argument on policy and the country’s national direction, until 2064 or so, until there’s been someone of every conceiveable identity spending four to eight years in the Oval Office? At some point, don’t we HAVE to get somebody in there who is actually accepted as having the right to be angry, the right to speak without diffidence, the right to NOT endlessly be the presidential equivalent of Sidney Poitier in GUESS WHO’S COMING TO DINNER?

Nothing persona for you for them here, but at what point do we ever GET to have a Democratic president who doesn’t feel obligated to endlessly have to pull punches and defer to the forces of reaction on the issues of the day?

When does the answer ever get to be “Not Yet”?

And do not the 2016 results prove, decisively, that you don’t defeat reactionaries by conceding control of the discussion to them and agreeing to operate, always, solely within their terms of debate, their rules of political engagemente?

Why is it assumed, by so many, that it is simply impossible for the Democrats to be anything beyond “The Party Of Somewhat Less Reprehensibility”? It’s not as though every progressive idea is overwhelmingly unpopular in the polls and all we can ever aspire to is “four more years of things not getting worse” as the Steve Earle song once put it?

Can we never campaign FOR, instead of just AGAINST?