Democrats’ new direction? “There has to be a dream. We have to stand for a thing,” messaging consultant Anat Shenker Osorio tells students. That seems to have filtered up to top Democrats more accustomed to “being too reactive and too defensive when confronting Republican attacks,” writes Christian Paz at Vox. If President Joe Biden is, as he appears, already campaigning for a second term, it “is likely to be less oppositional and more optimistic, with less focus on highlighting how bad the other side is, and more attention on imagining how much more Democrats can accomplish with four more years in power,” Paz writes (although the White House declined comment). Negativity is out of fashion: That’s not necessarily how Democrats have run their campaigns in the Trump era and even into Biden’s presidency. Since the 2016 election, much of Democrats’ political strategy has been to run vocally and clearly anti-Trump, anti-MAGA Republican campaigns. This approach fueled much of the closing message of Hillary Clinton’s campaign, and boosted the 2018 blue wave and 2020 Biden victory, when Biden cast the election as a battle between him and Trump’s “season of darkness in America.” That kind of message also helped Democrats defy the odds during the 2022 midterms. But 2024 offers Biden a different opportunity, as an incumbent, to make a proactive case for the government’s role as a force for good, and a hopeful vision for improving the middle and working classes. “In the [2022] midterms, there was a split in thinking about how…