We as moderates and progressives have a hard road ahead. We typically can’t see why the right holds its extremist views. We can’t understand how a group of sometimes seemingly intelligent people could have it so wrong. The first thing that we are failing to see is that the Republicans have a packaged rhetoric that allows people who may have feelings about their President that they can’t or won’t express, at least openly, for fear of larger societal repercussions to express there vitriol. The Republican rhetorical package allows them to speak in code that expresses racial sentiments without being slammed for saying out and out racist things. The Republicans have used this basic leverage about the President being different to wedge in expressions about all sorts of issues that don’t fall in line with most people’s inner most beliefs, however, people use the rhetorical packages because it allows them to appose the President. So they latch onto the program language that is fed them by right wing media outlets. They have packaged response to use about everything our President has done or says that always turn it into a negative. They also narrow their information gathering to right wing sources, which we know are not news at all but an enormous grinding propaganda machine for right wing pundits.
The only place left for influencing people is through personal contact. This is where we fall down. We have nothing to fight the programming that people have internalized. We have nothing to reprogram them back to thinking about their inner most values. With the Republican party they feel they are the insiders. They say seemingly outrageous things, claim to believe the unbelievable and easily accept convoluted constructs provided to them my the Republican Party, all to justify their desire to bring back the world to a status quo that never was, where only white men earned money, held political office and the government never assisted anyone. The vast majority of the Republican Party is almost to the point of cliché, white Anglo-Saxon, protestant. When Republicans talk about “American Exceptionalism,” what they are really talking about is WASP exceptionalism. When the Tea Party says, “We the People,” the don’t mean all of us, they mean WASPs we the people, but add an M for males, WASPM. Woman are not invited unless they fall into some Stepfordian construct.
I propose that we develop our own disciplined rhetorical responses. Not so that we can act like robots as the right wingers do, but so that we can inject doubt about what the right wing rhetoric is really doing. Our rhetoric should be designed to correct the packaged dogma of the right-winger propaganda machine. Below is a list that covers some starting points in how we might respond. I am thinking that this will make little balls of confusion ricochet around the right wing minion’s minds and maybe, just maybe put enough confusion and doubt on what they are being fed by the pundits to alter their programmed attitudes towards their President. Enough, I hope, that they might start straightening out what they know with what they are being told and see the light.
Affordable Care Act
National Romneycare - Currently the right wing calls the Affordable Care Act Obamacare as a way to refer to it in a derogatory manner. To get the balls bouncing around you should refer to it as National Romneycare. “Oh, you mean National Romneycare?” Then you can explain that the Affordable Care Act is modeled closely after the program that Mitt Romney put in place in Massachusetts, with the people in that state really liking it. The question that would develop in their minds would be something like, Obamacare is National Romneycare? This will either move people away from thinking that Obamacare is really, really bad, or get angry at Mitt Romney for having created the germ of Obamacare. The equation leads to a simple math that either Obamacare = National Romneycare = good, or Obamacare = National Romneycar = bad, but both work to our advantage
Read the Affordable Care Act - The right wing makes all sorts of claims that are not true about the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare or better yet National Romneycare). The full text of the act is available online, go to http://www.healthcare.gov/... . Go to the link and search each untrue claim tossed at you and tell the person doing the tossing that there is no language that states whatever claim they are making in the act, since at this point none of them are true. (i.e. Muslims and Christian Scientists are exempt. No language about that. You can’t change insurance companies if you change employment. Nothing about that. Death panels. Not in there. Etc.) If they persist on claiming that these things are true, then send them the link and ask them to read the act themselves. Before you let them off the hook, however, tell them all about the good things that the Affordable Care Act offers.
• Provides coverage for pre-existing conditions.
• Lowers prescription drug costs.
• Allows families to keep their children on their healthcare plans until they are 26.
• Makes health insurance affordable for ordinary folks by reducing premiums and out-of-pocket costs.
• Gives millions of Americans access to affordable insurance choices through a new competitive health insurance market designed to keep costs down.
• Puts American families in control of their own health care.
• Holds insurance companies accountable to keep premiums low.
• Offers free preventive care.
• Prevents denials of care.
• Provides for better chronic care.
• And adds a decade more of solvency for Medicare.
• Also, it reduces the deficit by $143 billion over next ten years and by $1.2 trillion more over the following decade; reins in waste, fraud and abuse, and it pays for quality care over quantity of care.
When faced with the word Obamacare say thank you Obama for Obamacare and then mention things from the list above.
Outsourcing vs. Insourcing
Hit on Global-Tech, the Chinese outsourcing company that Mitt Romney invested $14 million in.
Relevance vs. Romney being out of touch
Don’t say middle class. Say, “ordinary folks.” Don’t refer to the middle class, make it personal and inclusive. Use the word “us” to describe problems that the Republicans caused to hurt the middle class. “When the Republicans deregulated the banks it caused a mortgage crisis that hurt the middle class us.”
“When the Republicans deregulated the banks it caused a mortgage crisis that hurt ordinary folks like you and me.”
Using the words, “middle class,” just sounds like you are talking about somebody else. Don’t use it unless you have to. For special emphasis use “We, the people.” This makes it populist and popular. It empowers the listener and makes the speaker sound as if the speaker and the listener are united.
Deregulation
It was the Republicans who damaged our economy and deregulation was the tool they used to hurt ordinary folks.
Other things to consider
Run against George W. Bush and compare Romney to GW.
Run against all republicans and highlight extreme positions and laws passed around the country.
Bring in the Transvaginal Ultrasound controversy set up by right wing republicans in Virginia, or the forcing women look at their forced ultrasounds.
Run against the Tea Party in particular. Describe extremist views held by prominent Tea Partiers and compare them to the values of America or just put them out there and leave them there. Ordinary folks will look at those views and decide for themselves not to be associated with such extreme positions and such an extreme group.
I want to hear your ideas of what kind of language we need to arm ourselves with in order to blunt the rhetoric coming from the organized right wing machine.