Since today is Labor Day, I thought it was time to point out something that seems incredibly obvious to me. If you listen to the inside-the-Beltway chatter, Democrats are currently seen as floundering around, searching for an agenda. This is less true than the cocktail-party-circuit crowd believes, but whatever. Simultaneously, Democrats are urged to try to win back the working-class vote, because Donald Trump supposedly seduced them all away with his empty promises. Again, the answer to this perceived problem is pretty obvious. The Democratic Party needs to rededicate itself to the Labor agenda -- thus giving it a solid agenda to fight for, and also a perfect way to woo back white working-class voters.

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Donald Trump began last week (as we measure time here, from Friday deadline to Friday deadline) by pardoning a racist sheriff who had been convicted (but not even sentenced yet) of ignoring the Constitution and defying the federal courts. Trump announced this just as Hurricane Harvey hit Texas, in the hopes that nobody but his base would notice. He also sent formal instructions to the Pentagon to begin turning away transgendered Americans who want to serve their country, also in the hopes that few would notice. In the midst of all this "news dump" frenzy, Steve Bannon's acolyte Sebastian Gorka was unceremoniously shown the door at the White House. That all happened late in the day last Friday, so for us it was a fairly jaw-dropping start to the week.

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Senator Kamala Harris is in the news today because she just announced at a town hall that she will be co-sponsoring the single-payer healthcare bill that Senator Bernie Sanders will soon unveil. Harris has previously been lukewarm towards single-payer (according to her critics on the left), so this was seen as a big political step for her to have taken. Read another way, though, it seemed more that Harris is moving with an abundance of caution rather than being in any way against the concept of single-payer healthcare.

Harris, her critics will point out, didn't take a stand on a recent single-payer bill in California. The Democratic leader of the state assembly is also getting grief for refusing to bring the single-payer bill the state senate passed to a vote. But in this case, the bill was (at best) only half a bill. It completely dodged the question of how to pay for the new system, meaning it wasn't a viable or complete plan. So Harris not taking a stand on it while expressing support for the overall goal of single-payer was probably the wisest course of action to take. It's hard to take a position when the basic question "How will it be paid for?" is not even answered in the bill, in other words -- since you'd be buying a pig in a poke.

Kamala Harris is getting such scrutiny because she is a rising Democratic star and many expect her to make a run for the presidency in 2020. And single-payer healthcare is becoming a litmus test for many in the Democratic rank and file. But as California's experience has shown, it's a lot easier to be for the concept of single-payer than it is to hammer out all of the incredibly complex details needed to put together a real plan to achieve it. Even defining exactly what "single-payer" means is tough to do. A British system? Or one more like the French? The Swiss model, or perhaps the Japanese? There are multiple ways of implementing single-payer, some with private health insurance as a partner and some without. And that's before you even address the question of implementation, or how we get from where we are to the new system.

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President Donald Trump gave a speech today in Missouri, on the subject of tax reform. True to form, it was light on details and contained almost no actual numbers. The entire speech was designed to repackage "trickle-down economics" one more time, and sell it as "populism" to the people who voted for Trump. It remains to be seen how effective this will be, but at least Trump is making the attempt to sell one of his agenda items directly to the populace -- something that was noticeably absent in the fight over repealing and replacing Obamacare. Maybe this time will be different, Team Trump seems to be calculating. Maybe Trump'll be able to sell the tired old GOP idea of: "Let's give your boss a big huge tax cut, and then maybe some shred of it will eventually trickle down to you" to his voters. Republicans seem to have an endless capacity for believing this (and an equally infinite capacity to ignore all the other times when it didn't work out as well for the middle class as promised), so perhaps Trump can get his voters excited about slashing corporate tax rates this time around, too.

Donald Trump campaigned quite differently, of course. Remember when he was promising to raise taxes on hedge fund managers? Yeah, those were the days. But because Trump has no real tax reform plan of his own, he seems more than willing to sign anything Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell put in front of him -- which will (of course) wind up being the standard GOP trickle-down flim-flam that has animated the party since the days of Ronald Reagan.

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President Donald Trump flew down to Texas today. In doing so, he is following a familiar script: "President tours disaster area, personally gives comfort to the afflicted, promises federal aid." Presidents have done such things for a long time, but the tactical problems with arranging such a trip have created a Catch-22 type of situation. Complaints about the details of Trump's visit have already begun, but the interesting thing is that no matter what he had done there would still be something to complain about. Now, I'm generally not one to feel sorry for Donald Trump (see: everything I've written over the past two years), but in this particular case it really seems that Trump -- or any president in a similar situation, really -- is damned if he does, and damned if he doesn't.

Presidential visits to disaster zones are a way to show the people affected that the president personally cares about the outcome, and also a way to show other unaffected Americans that their president has some empathy with the suffering. Some presidents have been better at this sort of thing than others. But while the drop-in visit garners a lot of press attention, presidents are ultimately judged on the long-term outcome instead of the short-term photo-op. If the outcome is seen as good, then the presidential visit will likely reflect that feeling. If the outcome is bad, then no matter what the president does there will be criticism.

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On Friday, President Donald Trump attempted a trick many previous U.S. presidents have used to good effect, and so far at least it seems to be working out for Trump quite well. The trick is to get sensitive news out late on a Friday, in the hopes that the American public (and the press) will be so distracted by the weekend that the story will have much less impact than it normally would have. Really bad news is usually released right before a three-day holiday weekend, so it'll have even less reach and an even-smaller impact. Trump took this to another level last Friday, by releasing some contentious news right in the midst of the biggest hurricane to hit the U.S. in over a decade.

So far, as I said, it appears to be working just fine for Trump. The media has been so consumed with reporting on the ongoing Harvey disaster that they have had little time or energy to focus on much of anything else. In the meantime, though, a lot has been going on.

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Donald Trump ping-ponged his way from being TelePrompTer Trump to being The Real Unfiltered Trump (and then back again) this week. It started off with a rather amazing flip-flop, as Trump essentially admitted that everything he's ever said or thought about Afghanistan was wrong. Not unlike Arthur Fonzarelli, Trump's mouth couldn't actually form the words "I was wrong," but the admission was still there for all to see.

Trump's new Afghanistan strategy is... well, he didn't want to tell us specifics. Even Bill O'Reilly responded to Trump's speech by tweeting: "The president's speech on Afghanistan was strong in tone but cloudy on specifics." But even so, it was pretty clear that Trump's Afghanistan strategy is pretty indistinguishable from Barack Obama's Afghanistan strategy or George W. Bush's Afghanistan strategy. In other words, throw up your hands and let the next president deal with it.

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Next month will be a busy one in Congress, with several crucial pieces of legislation (with looming deadlines) due. So, of course, President Donald Trump chose this particular moment to pick a meaningless fight with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. After all, what better time to antagonize the second-most powerful Republican in Washington?

Snarkiness aside, Congress certainly has a lot to accomplish in September, and so far it's looking like the Trump White House is going to be content to sit on the sidelines while occasionally lobbing mean tweets at fellow Republicans. This may all be to the good, in the end.

The two tasks Congress must accomplish before the end of September are to raise the debt ceiling and to pass some sort of budget. The budget must be in place before October dawns, or the government will shut down. The debt ceiling's deadline is a little more nebulous, but if we hit it then massive global financial disruption is likely the mildest of consequences. The debt ceiling should be the easiest for Congress to draft, as it essentially just picks a target number and that's the end of it. However, because it is must-pass legislation, the temptation to load it up with unrelated items will be strong (especially for the Tea Partiers). The big fight will likely become whether a "clean bill" should pass, or whether it should be used as a vehicle for legislative mischief.

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Maybe we all just misheard him. Maybe it was his outer-borough accent. Maybe what candidate Donald Trump really said was:

We're going to whine. We're going to whine so much. We're going to whine at trade, we're going to whine at the border. We're going to whine so much, you're going to be so sick and tired of whining, you're going to come to me and go: "Please, please, we can't whine anymore." You've heard this one. You'll say: "Please, Mr. President, we beg you, sir, we don't want to whine anymore. It's too much. It's not fair to everybody else." And I'm going to say: "I'm sorry, but we're going to keep whining, whining, whining."

It's certainly plausible. After all the debate surrounding whether Trump is saying "bigly" or "big league," the possibility that he really made a promise to whine so much we'd all get tired of it isn't so far-fetched. If true, it certainly has to be counted among the campaign promises that President Trump has kept. Because while listening to Trump's Arizona speech last night, I have to admit I was indeed tired of all the whining.

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Sorry, no column today. I was dealing with real-world stuff (automotive) all day, but was successful in the end, so at least it wasn't a day wasted.

Speaking of wasting time (during the political "silly season" month), rather than just a dry program note today (and because this is, after all, the internet), I'd like to share with everyone an image that truly answers the question of why there is life on Earth. Obviously, to provide an audience for cute cat images. So here you go, and rest assured that regular columns will resume tomorrow.

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant