Yesterday, I talked about narrative. Today, I'm going to administer a lesson on just how pernicious and dangerous the narrative in this party is to the party.
Obama's spending freeze is discretionary spending, and it's going to be selective. The overall budget will increase, and so will the money for jobs and other programs like it, and it's going to amount to 25 billion a year out of a 3.5 trillion dollar budget. It is basically a sixteenth of the spending we did with the Stimulus plan, every year. It will not even go to over half. And it won't start for another two years, giving current federal spending time to work.
And yet the folks out there, well-intentioned enough, seem to be reacting to this, first and foremost from ideological and simplistic perspective. They fed it into the Obama Betrayal Story before they even knew the full facts. And now we have this unfounded loss of faith in the President rippling out. Folks? This is why the Democrats are having problems right now. We are like a dog that's been kicked too often by others, and now shrinks away from even those who are its friends.
We are dominated by a fear of ideological betrayal, and ironically, it's helping to give aid and comfort to our rivals in the political world, folks who aren't just putting forward the spending freeze to put the Republicans on the defensive.
What's really sick and really sad about this is that if we had just waited a few seconds and canned the hysteria, we might have started out on the right foot of taking the folks on the right wing and calling their bluff.
See, more than anything, that's what our president's proposal is about. Yes, it will save some money, if it's allowed to work. It will add to Obama's fiscal credibility, and the Democrats by association.
We need that. We need that breathing room so we can spend on what matters most. Not recklessly, mind you, but frugally, and in ways that demonstrate that a disciplined government doesn't have to be an unkind one. If we were smart, we would go along with Obama's plan, because that's what it represents.
If the Republicans were smart, they would go along with this, because they would not want to be caught obstructing deficit reduction, no matter what their excuse. And if they acted unwisely and started trying to get in the way of that, we have a brand new narrative: the GOP are a bunch of freaking hypocrites about spending. They are all fine with fiscal conservatism when they talk, but when they are called upon to act, they spend like drunken sailors.
Except we've gotten really foolish about this. Now, in my terminology, that's not saying we're stupid. That's saying that right now, we're not thinking too wisely. Right now, instead, we are taking a valid principle, the fact that we need to stimulate the economy in the near term, and are getting angry and scared and feeling betrayed over a long-term deficit reduction measure we should know would have been necessary over that time span anyways. Right now, we are marketing to everybody who will listen the notion that Obama is betraying his people and breaking his promises.
So, effectively, we are turning what could have been, and may still be a beneficial move to change the narrative that would do little harm, and we are turning it into a wedge issue against our own party, and fulfilling a pernicious stereotype about Liberals who can't bear to see spending cut.
Way to take charge of the narrative!
Folks, we still have time here to get our heads on straight. The intertubez have a way of letting people shoot their mouths off before they've had a chance to think, or to educate themselves, but that default is by no means the only way we can react to things. If you want to be able to understand what's going on, much less shape a positive, productive narrative for your strategic purposes, you have to hold back long enough to look at what is being talked about and assess it as objectively as you can. Otherwise, you're just going to be going off in random directions.
We're fitting new items we just saw, in brief, to a narrative we already had there, and we're not bothering to see what the real story is, much less come up with the story we can tell that can further our interests. We are spinning chaotically, and unthinkingly, and that is costing us votes and voters out there. We are beating the crap out of our own morale, and feeding this sense of doom and gloom to the point where people can hardly see straight to oppose the Republicans.
Even if what Obama's doing is a bit of a turn to the right, and I've listened to his rhetoric long enough to know that this is part of what he promised to begin with, even if, no turn he could take would have the severity or the cruelty of the cuts that the Republicans would make. Obama's cuts will not touch the stimlus, the Republicans would cut the stimulus itself, and use it in a truly Hooverian way to cut the deficit.
This is the problem with the exaggerations coming from people in this party, the unthinking use of the strongest terms in order to gain rhetorical advantage; we are forgetting that there is a party out there that would really show us what sold-out, hooverian, corporate and all these other negative terms really mean. We are forgetting our own recent experiences of these things under Republicans.
We are dominated by a fear of ideological betrayal, and ironically, it's helping to give aid and comfort to our rivals in the political world, folks who aren't just putting forward the spending freeze to put the Republicans on the defensive.
We are committing what I consider to be the unforgiveable political sin of once again drawing equivalent comparisons between our party and the Republican Party, simply because so many of our party members aren't purist liberals. I admit, we do need to clean house and get better Democrats as well as more Democrats. I've always said that.
But what I will say is that even if I don't get better Democrats, we truly need more Democrats in Washington, not less. Because the real story is, the Republican Party is a party that has lost its mind, and the capitulation of the centrists and conservatives in our party is nothing in its intensity of ideological fervor or incompetence or stupidity next to the policies of our rivals.
And should I need to remind Democrats of what happened the last time we misunderestimated that difference?
2010 can either be the start of a happy ending, or the the beginning of our party's tragic fall from power. I want it to be the former.
Let's stop finding reasons to doubt and feel betrayed, to leave and lose hope. Let's start finding our reasons to stay, to fight back, and pick the battles to fight that we really need to fight. Not get into worthless, counterproductive arguments. Let's start kicking somebody else's ass for a change.