PHOENIX — As the candidates for chairman of the Democratic National Committee gathered here for a forum on Saturday, they wrestled with a vexing question: how to confront the asymmetrical political warfare of President-elect Donald J. Trump.
Be strategic, the candidates advised, and do not take him up on every feud.
“If you try to go tweet-to-tweet with him, more often than not you’re not going to succeed,” said Thomas E. Perez, the secretary of labor, warning about going to “a knife fight with a spoon.”
Sally Boynton Brown, the executive director of the Idaho Democratic Party, invoked what she called “Psychology 101” for narcissists. Every response to Mr. Trump’s provocations, she warned, risks helping him “grow more powerful.”
And Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Ind., said simply, “We’re going to need to be smarter than just talking about how bad he is.”
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Yet just as the would-be leaders of the committee, who were assembled for the first of four officially sanctioned candidate forums, preached prudence and calculation in the Trump era, others in the party were responding with fury to the president-elect’s latest Twitter outburst.
Mr. Trump’s ridicule of Representative John Lewis of Georgia as being “all talk” set off outrage among Democrats, with many defending their colleague, some vowing to join him in boycotting the presidential inauguration, and most determined to make Mr. Trump pay a price for taking on a giant of the civil rights movement. Mr. Lewis had said a day before that Mr. Trump was not a “legitimate president.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/14/us/politics/democrats-donald-trump.html