So here I am, high userid, no mojo, posting my first diary.
I, like everyone here, am thrilled that Obama is president and that the horror of the Bush years is starting to fade. Right now, the good guys are riding high and we've got the bad guys on the ropes. Or do we?
Over the past month, there's been a lot of gloating on the front page. "Nobody wants to be a Republican" say the pollsters. "Michael Steele is a powerless stooge can't win an election to save his life," say the pundits. "Rush Limbaugh is the new leader of the the Republican party," say the wise wo/men. The consensus seems to be that we've got the bastards on the run.
Bullshit. In 1973, Nixon damned near destroyed the Republican Party with Watergate, and by 1980 the SoBs were back, stronger and meaner than ever. We all know how the "Permanent Democratic Majority" of 1976 turned out, don't we? The Republicans have been out of power for all of four months, so of course they're reeling. But they're not dead. Not by a long shot. As long as they have their media and fund-raising apparatus in place, they'll rise from the grave sure as Dracula.
Republicans excel at pushing terrible ideas with effective marketing - "Morning in America," "Willie Horton," "Contract With America," "Compassionate Conservatism." Hell, John Boehner even refers to the Republican Party as a "brand." Even if you find the whole concept of a political ideology being a "brand" - like some variety of dish soap or cat food - offensive, you still have to recognize the power of this sort of thinking. While Bush the Lesser did his level best to destroy the Republican "brand," marketing guys know how to handle a PR disaster, and scum like Frank Luntz and Karl Rove are masters of their trade.
In 1982, Tylenol was damned near killed as a brand when some evil asshat filled Tylenol capsules with cyanide, put them into bottles of Tylenol on store shelves, and killed a bunch of people. All those tamper-proof seals on consumer products are a direct result of the Tyenol tampering episode.
In 1996, Odwallah Apple Juice almost died as a brand, and as a company, when a toxic strain of e. Coli from cattle grazing in their orchards got into their apple juice, killed a child and sickened 60 other people. Mandatory pasteurization of fruit juice is a direct result of that tragedy.
But, neither Odwalla nor Tylenol died as brands. They pulled their product from the shelves, let the scandal die down, fired the right people, settled the lawsuits with minimal fuss, made the appropriate changes to their products and spent a lot of money regaining the public's trust. Now both Tylenol and Odwallah are back on the store shelves, strong as ever, and most people have forgotten that there was ever a problem.
Republicans are master marketers, so they know this. While Michael Steele has faltered in his initial attempts at "rebranding" - that's exactly what he's trying to do, and by 2010, you can be sure that the Republican marketers will be back to their old tricks. Even now the Republican message-massagers are busy with their focus groups. As Democrats, we need to keep them from regaining "brand equity." So how to we kill the Republican brand now that it's down?
If we want to permanently destroy the Republican party, or better yet, revive it as a responsible political institution, we need to take away their ability to leverage a minority political position plus lots of money into a bare majority of votes, as they did in 1980, 1988, 2000 and 2004. Here are some suggestions as to how we might start:
- Lobbying Reform. It's obvious that big money still rules in Washington, as shown this week by the outright rejection of a Single Payer Healthcare Plan in the Senate. This needs to change. While you can't take money out of politics, you can limit the access that money can buy, in the same way that lawyers who give money to a judge's reelection campaign can't directly lobby him on cases they bring before his court.
The reason this needs to happen isn't so much to reform the Republican party as to improve the Democratic party. The Democratic party will fail in the eyes of the public to the extent that it is seen as being in the clutches of big business - who are largely to blame for our current social and economic predicaments. It's ridiculous that you've got Democrats like Evan Bayh and Ben Nelson (both of whom have been "my" senators in the past) who are firmly in the pocket of various corporate interests. We tried "third way" corporatist DLC-style Democrats in the 1990s, and, as Kos and others have abundantly and correctly pointed out, they fail on many different levels. To the extent that we can make a clear distinction between the Democratic Party and big business, Democrats win.
- Reinstate the Fairness Doctrine and revisit the FCC rulings on how many radio or TV channels a particular company can own. Right now, we have a right-wing corporate electronic media oligopoly, which finds it convenient to flood the AM radio waves with conservative talk radio, stifling local and regional views, and filling our television screens with entertainment-driven, largely-shallow "news" programs.
While forcing radio and TV stations to air dissenting opinions, and returning control to local or regional companies, won't do that much to change public opinion, it at least decentralizes it, which hampers Authoritarian (i.e., Right Wing) movements more than it does Populist (i.e., largely Progressive) ones. The fact that national Republicans scream about even the idea of returning to the Fairness Doctrine tells us just how much it will hurt them.
- Expand the electoral base. Republicans thrive when voter turnout is low, which is one of the reasons they love negative campaigning so much (it drives down turnout). Republican efforts at voter suppression over the last couple of election cycles have shown just how important this issue is to them. There ought to be national laws limiting how long states can disenfranchise felons who have served their time and requiring states to go with an Oregon-like system of mail-in ballots. There should also be national laws making it easy to vote. Your Social Security Card should serve as your voter I.D. card, meaning that if you pay taxes or receive benefits from the government, you're automatically registered to vote. Local voting offices just make sure that you get the right ballot for your voting districts.
Hell, have a national voter lottery, where if you vote you're automatically registered to win a big cash prize. That will really draw in low-income, low-education voters who tend to play lotteries, and vote Democratic, in disproportionate numbers.
- As long as it represents a public good, and can be done in a just and legal way, hit the Republican donor base. Certain industries, which are bad for the environment, and bad for society at large, give money in disproportionate amounts to Republicans. Specifically, multi-level marketing outfits like AmWay (which, at their worst, can be little better than pyramid schemes), defense contractors and fossil fuel extraction companies are big Republican donors. In a better society, these industries wouldn't exist, or would exist in far different, probably smaller, form. They can be effectively put out of business with the proper strokes of a lawmaker's or regulator's pen.
Another way to reduce money going to Republicans is to reinstate progressive tax policies, especially the estate tax. In the short run it will do nothing to stop money going to the Republicans, since donations to political parties tax deductable, but in the long run it will help the Democratic Party. In a culture where there is less income inequity, the elite political donor class will be smaller, and political parties will need to fund themselves on small donations - like those which helped Obama. While small donations by the Religious Right remain a threat, they still represent a minority of the American population. The need for small donations will force political parties to play retail politics - which forces them to pay attention to the needs of ordinary citizens, rather than the elites.
- Sic the IRS on the Megachurches. For the last 20 years, the IRS has looked the other way while right-wing churches have blatantly and illegally mixed politics and religion. While I've been in left-leaning churches where the line between religion and politics was dangerously blurry, an IRS crackdown would hurt the right more than the left.
The effect won't be to stop people from going to right-wing churches, but it will shut up the loudest authoritarian fundamentalist voices. By and large, the big-name right-wing religious leaders are opportunists. If the legal climate makes it hard for them to play politics from the pulpit, they'll back off - most evangelical leaders are more concerned with making money and keeping power within their church than playing in secular politics.
- Destroy the Republican administrative bench. Many of illegal activities of Bush the Lesser's administration were perpetrated by people who should have been taken down with Nixon during Watergate or with Reagan during the Iran/Contra Affair. The only lessons the bad guys learned from those incidents was "don't get caught." We need to change that.
Unless we render the current crop of Republican second- and third-tier political appointees politically non-viable, by justly and legally indicting and convicting them for their crimes, they're just going to be back with even more power in a future Republican administration, having learned nothing more than "don't get caught." In the meantime, they'll be warming chairs at the Heritage Foundation or Cato Institute, acting as a shadow government to make life tough for our guys.
Yes, this stinks of political persecution, like Karl Rove (possibly) did to a number of Democratic office-holders in the south, but unlike the Republicans, we don't need to make up evidence or use a politicized Department of Justice to get convictions. In many cases, international opinion, and international law, demands that the U.S. act to prosecute war crimes committed by Bush administration officials. Better that the U.S. deal with its own than letting some foreign court decide the issue.
- Keep on showing the electorate that the Republican "brand" sucks and the Democratic way works. Right now the polls show that a majority of people, especially younger voters, identify with the Democratic Party. But the underlying lesson is that we're missing is that the young voters' identification with the Democratic Party comes because they came of age when Bush was unpopular. By contrast, Gen-X seems to have a hard-on for Republicans because they came of age when Reagan was popular.
The lesson we should be learning from the polls is that future voters only identify with a political party to the extent that its leaders remain popular. That means that that Democrats constantly need to keep approval ratings up, while simultaneously keeping Republican approval ratings down.
Straight negative campaigning won't work to do this, since that drives negatives up for bot the attacker and the defender. Instead, the way to gain popularity is - surprise - to govern well. To a lesser extent, this means showing how Republicans are are corrupt, self-serving and incompetent. Republicans are already all over this, in part because they're masters of marketing and dirty politics, but also because they know that their only hope for getting back into power by 2010 or 2012.
They want to make Obama and the Democratically-controlled Congress so unpopular by 2010, by sabotaging their policies, that they have a shot in 2010 or 2012. They also want to hide as much of the malfeasance of the Bush administration as possible, so that people forget just how bad the Bush years were.
To fight this, we need to keep our own lackluster corporate Democrats in line (Arlen Specter, et al., I'm looking at you), and elect better Democrats. We also need to keep up the constant drip of information about just how bad the Republicans are. Prosecutions for war crimes and other Bush-era malfeasance will help, since it will take years to play out, and the public and the press generally see the court system as being above politics.
The Obama information needs to keep on declassifying all those records from the Bush administration, so that there's a constant drip of information about Republican scandals. I'm also sure that as more information is released, it will reveal full incompetence and brutality of the Bush administration, and any Republicans associated with it. That will be especially valuable as the Republicans push the lie that "Democrats can't govern" in 2010.
We also need to push back hard at the notion that "It's O.K. if you're a Republican." Scum is scum and wrong-doing is wrong-doing.
If we can do some, or all, of these things, people will eventually get the message the Republican "brand" is toxic, despite attempts by their marketers to "rebrand" it. We need to push it to the point where people associate "Republican" with concepts like the Ford Edsel, Thalidamide or the nuclear-powered aircraft - old-fashioned, short-sighted and dangerous.*
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*For the sake of fairness, the Edsel was a decent, reasonably safe, car for its time, thalidimide has legitimate pharmacological uses - as long as you're not pregnant or planning to get pregnant, and nuclear power makes sense for certain spacecraft. But you get the idea.