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#donaldtrump
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#immigration
Why Dems lose.
by
Robert Drake
Community
(This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)
Wednesday, Jul. 07, 2004
Wednesday, Jul. 07, 2004
at
10:39:41pm PDT
Ralph Nader might be a hubristic fool, most of the people who vote for him are not. John Kerry could make Nader an irrelevancy tomorrow if he remembered the first rule of politics: horse trade. You've got to give a little to get a little. The only thing the Dems give to the left is the finger. Screaming at Naderites is certain only to piss them off and fuel their anger. Promise them legislative priorities, and fight like hell to pass them. Higher fuel efficiency for all automobiles for instance. It's good policy, and good politics. They can't have everything, and most of them realize that, but Dems can give them a lot more then they've been getting. Republicans never forget, always take care of your base.
Dems have forgotten trench warfare politics. Observe Tom DeLay in action, he's an enforcer. He keeps the troops in line, and punishes members of the caucus that decide they want to screw the party on crucial votes. This is not heavyhanded, this is pragmatism, and Democrats don't know how to do it anymore. The Republicans have simply adopted lessons they learned from FDR, Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, et al. Lyndon Johnson intimidated and threatened troublemakers. Jeb Bush put the fix in for his brother in 2000, and he'll probably try it in 2004, but this is no different then what Dems used to do. Kennedy bought votes in West Virginia with hard currency, Kennedy's people were involved in all sorts of shenigans in Illinois. Now I'm not imploring the Dems to violate the law, but we need to get past our revulsion with GOP techniques and start responding in kind. One dirty trick deserves another.
Dems should stop respecting the limits placed on them by their opposition. There is no natural law that says someone that espouses progressive viewpoints cannot win a Senate seat in South Carolina. The default position is that the Dem must be more conservative than not. Republicans don't buy this stuff. They run and win with candidates that do not compromise, and do not hide their ideologies. If the conventional wisdom held true, candidates like Gordon Smith, Slade Gorton, Rick Santorum, Rod Grams, and Spencer Abraham would have never won Senate seats in states that are far more liberal politically then they were. John Kerry is a very liberal man, so he needs to start talking about some of his liberal positions, and accentuate why his liberalism is superior to Bush's conservatism. They're scared of being labeled, and are completely ineffective at combating it. Stop accepting the "Washington insider" consensus which says that liberals can't win. Ronald Reagan and George Bush were reactionary radicals, it didn't stop them. If you can't be a liberal and win after George Bush has mucked everything up, then when could you ever be a liberal and win?
Seek changes that level the playing field for Democrats and Republicans. Today the GOP has a huge built-in advantage over any Democrat via the hostile media. The worst thing the Dems ever did was embrace the 1996 Telecom Act that removed barriers to media consolidation. Not only was it bad economics, and bad media policy, it unleashed a Frankenstein monster on the electoral chances of Democrats. Most elements of Telecom 1996 need to be repealed. McCain-Feingold was a good start on the money front, but more needs to be done to eliminate the Republican money advantage. Something also must be done about states like Florida having the power to purge voter roles. There needs to be comprehensive election reform. Where are the Dems on this issue? It should be front and center, it should be the single most important issue for them, it impacts whether or not Dems can get fairly elected.
Dems need to move toward some coherent policy agenda that can be described as more than just "opposed to Republicans." The Dems need to have a "movement" sort of agenda that can be clearly distinguished from the opposition's policies. The agenda must be a core set of values that cannot be compromised. Ideological imitation in politics is not the sincerest form of flattery, but an invitation to political irrelevance. The GOP in the forties began to slide toward Democrat-lite policies, and by the time the Goldwater movement erupted, at least a quarter of the GOP had been completely co-opted by the Dems, they were de facto liberals in the Wellstone sense.
Once the Dems find an agenda. Sell the agenda. It might take years of disciplined salesmanship, but for the sake of the country somebody better do the selling. Most GOP positions are anathema to the majority of voters, and the Republicans know this. But they settled on a message and a way to deliver it, and over a period of decades they've stayed on message. They've convinced Americans that social security privatization is good for them, they've sold selfishness as a virtue, they've successfully mocked environmental safeguards, they've packaged authoritarianism as law and order, if it's bad policy, the Republicans at least get a hearing in the court of public opinion. Good policy is easier to sell then bad policy, if Dems would stick to a message, it might work.