I'm Charlie Sykes.

Welcome to the To the Contrary podcast.

We're going to step back from the Daily News and talk about a report that came out last week

that sounds some alarms for Democrats,

but also has some very, very practical advice.

In fact, this report deciding to win from the Welcome Party,

opens with a quote from Nancy Pelosi.

Winning an election is a decision.

You make a decision to win,

and then you make every decision in favor of winning. There's a lot of controversy about this,

of course, because there are a lot of people in the Democratic Party who would prefer to, I would

say, wallow went a little bit of denialism or scratch their ideological id, then to ask the tough questions,

like, why are these crazy people beating us in elections? And there are these moments when

political parties are open to all of this. I mean, I can remember back in the early 1990s,

after the Democrats had been shalacked by the Republicans in three consecutive

elections, blown out in 1980 by Ronald Reagan, blown out even bigger in 1984, and then losing

in a landslide to George H.W. Bush, and there were Democrats who said, you know, maybe we

ought to rethink some of our ideological approaches and the things we do.

And there was a group called the Democratic Leadership Council, I believe, headed up by

Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton.

He said, you know, we need to moderate some of our positions.

And sure enough, he went on to serve for eight years.

...