all the recognizable left figures they could try to use for this are way too popular for it to work felt this when pundits were going on about how Dems should sister souljah chapo, but chapo doesn't have the mainstream recognition she did in that era of news. attacking chapo would get you 'who?'
centrist dems don't seem to realize this but to most conservatives (and even to many OTHER centrist dems in a kind of bus-throwing ouroboros) THEY are the obnoxious screeching woke mobs, not the actual left
partly because a lot of the most widely hated "woke" vocabulary and aesthetics are specifically centrist watering-downs of lefty ideas, but also i think partly because there's no recognizable figures on the left to point to and say "no it's THEM you hate not US"
anyway what this means is that attempting to distance themselves from "woke" vocab and aesthetics just has the opposite effect - it's just doing propaganda for republicans and telling people that dems in general are annoying far-left scolds
they want it to be Bernie or now Mamdani but oops too popular for that to work. gotta let a radical rise up if you wanna use a radical as a punching bag, fellas!
like you think of BLM - who was allowed to emerge as a nationally recognizable, on TV leader regularly, leader out of that? nobody, right? they succeed in suppressing movement voices... but it also means they have nobody they can use as a punching bag to prove their 'tough on the hippies' bonafides
ultimately, like so much of this for years now, all these ideas are less about even a bad set of strategies on how to win, and more just telling the people signing the checks what they want to hear
anyway as always whenever I think about third way I remember one of its cofounders is one of the guys behind the Dukakis tank stunt and instead of this costing him his job he kept rising up in plum positions and influence in the party. which explains a lot