WHAT WE MUST DO NOW
When John Podesta formed the Center for American Progress, he said that Democrats had to come up with a few good ideas. I thought about writing to him then but now I'll say what I would have said. We do not need new good ideas. We already have them. They reside in The Declaration of Independence, The Bill of Rights and later Constitutional amendments, and the Gettysburg Address.
What we do need is a strategy. Until we develop an effective strategy our ideas will not matter and who our candidates are will remain unimportant. Smarter and more important people than I have been spending every minute of every day since November 2nd thinking about strategy. But so have I. And I have not seen anything out there yet that gets to the heart of the matter. I think that my ideas do and hope that presenting them will help to mobilize decision makers to begin to organize around a central strategy.
Destroy the Republican Attack Machine
The first thing we must do is destroy the Republican Attack Machine. If we do not, we will never again win another election. If you think that Karl Rove is done, you are living on another planet. The Republican Attack Machine will take out any candidate we put forth, no matter how credible. It does not matter if it is the lightning rod Hillary Clinton, or the mild Midwest centrist Evan Bayh or some yet unnamed bible thumping Christian zealot from the South. They will take out our candidate. It does not matter what our ideas are. It does not even matter if the vast majority of the electorate has become ever more economically, educationally and environmentally disadvantaged. The Republicans are about power and money. The Republican Attack Machine exists to serve power and money. And the power and money behind the Republicans and the Republican Attack Machine will do anything that needs to be done to stay in power and to accumulate more money. What we need to believe in, what we must believe in, is that we have the means to take down the Republican Attack Machine. We do have the means and here they are:
1. Voter fraud. We must track down every instance of voter fraud or voter suppression at the grass roots level, publicize it and prosecute whenever we can. EVERY INSTANCE! We must make the lives of anyone and everyone at the local, county or state level who engaged in election hanky-panky miserable beyond comprehension. If legal action cannot be taken, then we must take political action. If political action is not possible, we must embarrass them. We can throw a few election officials in jail. We can defeat many more of them at the polls. If we REALLY PUNISH some, maybe many of the rest of them will think twice about working again for the Republican Attack Machine. This will take much money and many years, but it's worth it. Forget about new voter laws. Remember who will be writing them. Taking control of the elections out of the hands of partisans? Nice idea, but it will never happen. And, of course, there will be the effort to insist on paper trails for voting machines. That's nice. I support the effort. However, I do not for a moment think that better machines will stop those determined to rig elections. The only thing that will stop them is fear.
2. FOX News and the rest of the propaganda arm of the Republican Attack Machine.
We have to target FOX News and Rupert Murdoch. The first thing everyone should do is see Outfoxed (just to get even more riled up). Then, we need to organize a boycott of the advertisers on FOX and its affiliates. I mean a BIG boycott as in the great United Farm Workers boycott of years ago. The same should be done for Sinclair Broadcasting.
2a. Re. both FOX and Sinclair, we should take anything and everything we can to the FCC. Any applications for new licenses should be fought on any grounds possible. Relicensing procedures should be monitored. All of this presupposes that we have forces in place to monitor the broadcasts and the advertising.
2b. Monitors should be ready to alert a coterie of e-mailers and letter-to-the-editor writers to move whenever we can call these propaganda machines on anything.
2c. Rush Limbaugh. Rush Limbaugh's drug addiction and legal problems should be kept in the media spotlight. Where is our attack machine?
2d. Bill O'Reilly. FOX must have paid many millions to pull the zipper up on this phone sex scandal. There is nothing going on out there about this. We need this story back on the scandal sheets at the very least. Don't we have any prurient investigative journalists?
Re. 2c and 2d: We must confront and disempower Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly. It's not personal. It's just strategy. Remember, until we have a strategy as ruthless as Karl Rove's, we will not win another election.
As an aside, I want to calm the fears of our more noble progressives who worry that we will become "just like them." When I say "ruthless", I mean ruthless in our attempts to destroy the Republican Attack Machine, not ruthless in our manipulation of the American people.
3. The mainstream media. The mainstream media are not liberal. The mainstream media have many liberal- leaning respectable journalists who are relatively able to be impartial but who are hamstrung by the corporate, profit- driven owners of media outlets. And, more and more of the emerging media on- air talent are anything but liberal. To stop or weaken the centralization of media control will be darn near impossible with this Republican administration in power. Nevertheless, we must do what we can to protect the Fourth Estate. Remember the Bill of Rights!
Given the current state of affairs, the best way to impact the mainstream media is to hit the owners where it hurts - the bottom line. If viewers and advertisers and, consequently, profits are taken away by better alternatives, the media moguls just might pay attention. Air America has done something for talk radio. We need a liberal TV outlet as well. We need to make it really good (I'm not sure about impartial) and suck away those viewers and those advertisers.
4. The "Christian" Churches. Constitutionally, there still is a separation between church and state. Practically, it no longer exists. I believe that forces must be brought to bear here quickly, before the judicial system becomes non-responsive to constitutional violations. Some, perhaps many, churches need to lose their tax- exempt status. Again, money is the root of it all. There have to be many churches that crossed over the line this year with illegal lobbying activity or downright endorsements. We need to identify them and bring major pressure on the IRS to take action. If lawsuits can be filed, they should be.
This is such a crucial area. While I respect the right of religious people to believe what they believe, the absolute reality is that many of them have been brainwashed.
Do we need to confront the seminaries? Do we need to infiltrate some churches - both the small community types and the centralized ones? (Need I say Catholic?)
- Tom Delay. We cannot let Tom Delay slip away. We can take him down for what he did in the Texas redistricting scandal. He is the most powerful man in the House. His hateful, right wing agenda can be slowed if he can be stopped. The material is there to do it. We first need to support those few brave souls in the House who must risk whatever is necessary to take him down. Remember, he is the man who insisted on Bill Clinton's impeachment over - nothing! Then we need to find even braver people in Texas who will follow the legal path wherever it can take them.
- Karl Rove. If we could destroy Karl Rove, the Republican Attack Machine would be seriously wounded, perhaps mortally so. There is so much suspicion that he is behind the outing of CIA agent, Valerie Plume. He probably is. It sounds like one of his dirty tricks. Do we not have access to skilled covert investigators who could come up with evidence? If he did it, it has to be there. This action was a felony. If he were to be charged with it, he would be gone.
- Any scandal. We must go after any whiff of scandal in any of the camps of the Republican Attack Machine with all the fire and brimstone of a Ken Starr after Bill Clinton.
- Slander. In recent years, many of our candidates have been slandered and nobody has done anything about it. When negative campaigning crosses over to slander, it is time to go to court. Perhaps John Kerry and company, instead of working to remain viable for 2008, should put all of their energies into taking down the Swift Boat people in the court of law. If he has any chance at all for 2008, these people must be completely discredited. Doesn't anybody see this?
Reclaim Democratic Principles
We must remember the great ideas we stand for, those in the Bill of Rights and The Declaration of Independence. We must not try to become who we are not. We need not pander to the middle or try to become like the Right. Our ideas are great and grand ideas. We do not need to sell them. We just need to destroy the Republican Attack Machine so that the good people of America, who really do think like we do, can come to their senses.
Organize in the Swing (and Some Non-Swing) States
There are all kinds of ways to organize in the swing states. I think we have and are doing a good job here. We need to keep it up. The grassroots organizing set up for 2004 needs to continue to grow for the next four years. Every local election will count. Remember, the radical evangelical movement started by running people for school board. We need to run progressive candidates in a targeted fashion and we need to really fund those campaigns. We need to keep getting out the vote of our under-represented constituencies and we (see above) need to see that it is counted.
We need to target a Southern state and organize there, precinct by precinct. We need to find every single Kerry supporter in that state and turn that person into an activist. We need to figure out how to create impartial churches in that state and impartial media as well. It would be like infiltrating a foreign country. We must do this if we ever want to win another election.
However, we need to do much more. This is radical! We need to choose several states and take them over by moving there. Simple enough. I really mean this. The Electoral College situation is not pretty! If 150,000 stealth left-wingers moved to Ohio or 500,000 of us relocated to North Carolina, we could change those states from red to blue.
I do not see this as a pie in the sky idea. Consider retirees, perhaps hundreds of thousands of retirees relocate every year. A campaign to move the progressives among them to North Carolina or New Mexico is not unthinkable. A major reason my husband and I do not consider relocating to a warm climate on retirement is that there is no Southern state where we would want to go.
There are many wealthy capitalists and political activists among us. Can they move some operations to Ohio or set up new branches or subsidiaries there? And then relocate identified Democrats as workers?
It would need tremendous organization and great sacrifice on the part of many to win a swing or near swing state by repopulating it, but it is not impossible. I do not present this idea lightly. I suggest it because we either do something radical like this now or we hope that our children and our grandchildren can escape with their lives from our fascist country twenty years from now.