This line from Barrack Obama's
DNC keynote moved me nearly to tears (emphasis mine):
I say to them tonight, there's not a liberal America and a conservative America--there's the United States of America. There's not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there's the United States of America.
In the most fear-ridden campaign since the times of the Alien and Sedition Act, Barrack Obama gave me hope. In his spirit I propose that we can co-opt those Republicans who opted out of the George Bush suicide cult and govern America from a position of overwhelming support. Below the fold I will talk about how.
The Opportunity
Over the next four years, my crystal ball predicts a humiliated Republican party crippled by indictments and scandal. I'm expecting what most people would call the best-case scenario because at this point I don't see any way the Republican party can lose gracefully. As soon as they lose control of the DOJ their leadership is cooked. Look at it another way: the GOP is going for broke. Even if they win lies and scandals will come due in such force that they won't survive much farther in a fair and democratic system. They will either win and permanently bork American democracy, or they lose the farm and go to jail. So either I'm right or it doesn`t matter.
If we win, we have the opportunity pull the best and the most honest into a ruling coalition that makes this the Democratic century that the 20th should have been.
The Risk
Notice how the public reliably leans Democratic on the issues but votes Republican anyway? It's annoying as hell. Give the GOP credit for strategic thinking at the very least; they've survived the Democratic century by enforcing party unity and demonizing the left. Retired insurance agents compare accident rates before they buy a plane ticket, retired grunts scan the horizon and chastened Republicans will search for the first excuse to band together against a liberal enemy.
Maybe it's inevitable. I don't think so. Read through the extensive list of Republicans who endorsed Kerry and you hear the faintest bit of hope amidst the fear. Coming from a party that speaks too often in categoricals, that small opening means something to me. There's a big block of Republicans that's weary of the bile and ready to be pleasantly surprised.
The Plan
We need to rob Republicans of their constituencies with reckless abandon. Bill Clinton tapped into the sentiment that I'm talking about. Bless his heart, the man had the bad luck to come into office at the peak of the rightwing hate machine and he still stands as one of the more accomplished two-termers in US history. He should get a DC monument for balancing the budget alone.
We on the left never really trusted Clinton. When you want the whole pie it feels like a sell-out to get one small slice at a time. Well, after four years of Bush one slice of pie starts to look pretty darn good. Further, I will argue that incremental collaboration is the only way to get the pie.
We can go a long way by fighting to re-frame the issues in our favor. This is more than a small point. Despite its real positions, the rightwing wins because it frames well. Second, I propose that we pick battles strategically. Republicans, at least the non-cultie kind, want many things that aren't necessarily opposed to our own goals. Find those things and push them relentlessly. Land a big fat slice of pie on an "opponent's" plate and he will feel a lot more sympathetic the next time you need some cooperation for something that's a bit more removed from his interests.
The culties and hysterics? Forget about them. You can't govern effectively from a position of pleasing the extremists all the time, ours or theirs. You can rule, at least for a while, but that only works if you deeply pervert the institutions of democracy.
Here is a brief rundown of how I think we can win the major issues:
National Security
Eight-inch putt. The Bush doctrine has already done the gracious thing and blown up in the president's face. That takes care of the practical side of the Bush Doctrine. On the theoretical side, you don't need that much sophistication to disprove a doctrine that's based on a third-grade understanding of world politics. Americans are a lot smarter than Republicans give them credit for. Honestly, in my opinion John Kerry has done a fine enough job of laying out a security policy with bipartisan appeal that I can't think of much more to say. Democrats had the right approach before Bush and we don't need anybody's help to get it right again.
The Economy
A chip from the edge of the green. At this point Republicans don't really trust Republicans to balance the budget or set intelligent tax policy. They don't trust the Democrats either, but at least we're even. Bring back Bob Rubin, or clone him if you have to, but at any rate my crystal ball tells me that events will force us in the direction of budget-balancing no matter what. The real landmine here, of course, is tax policy.
The Republicans have set themselves up as the party of one-way tax ratcheting. That makes getting their cooperation on sensible tax increases nearly impossible, so our critical first priority should be to nail in the public mind why the Republican position is stupid. This should be a huge issue in the lead-up to the 2006 mid-terms: the approach doesn't work as it's normally applied, and if Republicans always got what they wanted we'd soon find ourselves living in Haiti. People need to understand that nobody has ever gotten the government to spend less by cutting taxes. Eventually taxes go back up, and all you get for it is a federal budget crisis and higher taxes at the state and local level.
Republicans drop lines such as "job-killing taxes" like improv comics use gay jokes: it's easy filler that you throw in when you don't have anything else to say. Appeal to the animal hindbrain and hope that nobody stops to think about what they're saying. Now that we've got our own noise machine we can put it to good use: take away this easy faux populism and make Republican candidates think for a change.
The Environment
In my view, this issue is a five-foot putt that we hit the wrong way into a lake. Americans used to identify overwhelmingly not just as environmentally concerned, but as environmentalists. What happened?
Environmentalism is by far my most personal issue so I can't avoid giving a history colored by my feelings. I don't apologize for the toes I step on, but please disagree or correct me in the comments. That said, here is my best explanation for how we environmentalists lost our luster, and what we can do to turn America green again.
[here begins the rant. Skip if you wish]
The industrial concerns got smart about their PR at about the same time as environmentalists got stupid about theirs. On the environmentalists' side, I trace the roots of strategic smartness/stupidness to the competing influences of Rachel Carson and Ed Abbey. It's a story that should sound familiar to anybody who watched the SCLC become the Black Panthers: as Rachel Carson laid the groundwork for a ubiquitous, unstoppable environmental front of concerned moms, dads and apple pies, Ed Abbey laid out a vision of environmentalism as the destructive hobby of self-indulgent outsiders. Rachel Carson took the time to authoritatively demonstrate why everybody who has a family or a backyard should care about pollution, and she framed her concerns in terms the spirit that I'm trying to evoke in this diary, Barrack Obama's DNC speech. There is one America, and it doesn't want its kids growing up stunted and sick. With Rachel Carson's influence we had a great thing going through the Nixon era. The reactionaries couldn't hope to stand in the way of huge steps like the Clean Air and Water Act, the EPA, OSHA, the Endangered Species Act.
Things changed when the Abbey-influenced groups appeared in earnest. Earth First!, PETA and their allies became god's gift to the other side. Don't get me wrong, "direct action" (combative tactics like disruptive protests, road blockages and nastier stuff like tree spiking) can be a lot of fun, and in the short term it can get results. Problem is, "direct action" has the same shortcomings that America faces in Iraq: tactical victory leads to strategic defeat. Abbey never really cared whether his sabotage actually slowed progress or turned it in a more productive direction, it was the acting out his impulses that mattered. Self-indulgent combativeness doesn't play well in Peoria. As I see it, by the end of the 80's we'd lost the heartland decisively. Maybe it was inevitable. God knows the corporate interests dumped money into negative PR, and on top of that environmental legislation has always driven the agricultural sector bonkers. That being the case, at the very least the Abbeyniks helped.
[here endeth the rant]
Whatever the reason, most people now thing of environmentalism like health food: you know it's good for you but it tastes like crap. That's bullshit. Here's why I think we should own this issue:
First, environmentalism is tasty. Eco-designed homes cost less to build and last longer, they save energy and, in my experience they can be a real pleasure to live in. Literally the only thing keeping people from living better is inertia - most architects don't know about the options that are already available, and zoning laws haven't changed to accommodate approaches that were proven safe and reliable decades ago. In most parts of the country if you want a truly green home then you pretty much have to design it yourself, and good luck with the zoning. This sort of environmentalism has a huge appeal to the things that are really sexy to Joe consumer: low building cost, low energy demands and easy maintenance. The same goes for cars. American carmakers have done bubkis for efficiency because the incentives don't exist. Tax incentives could do it easily: take that loophole that pays people to buy two-ton grocery carts, and turn it into a scalable write-off based on efficiency. Even the most minimal government-funded encouragement for near-term efficiency projects (as opposed to far-term projects like hydrogen) would be that much more than we have now.
It goes on: cities should have more mixed commercial-residential zones so that people can walk to work and meet their shopping needs on foot. Appeal to the immediate interest rather than an abstract Greater Good. That way, when you do have a Greater Good issue to address people are already sympathetic to your cause.
Second, choose your allies. Rightwing sporting groups can be your friend. I discovered one day that the Blue Ribbon Coalition, advocates of ATVs and snowmobiling, don't like factory hog farms any more than I do. Hunting groups want to have wild places in which to hunt. Farmers need insects to pollinate their crops. God knows the few "small farmers" left in America don't appreciate the way they are getting gang-raped by agribusiness. These guys won't go Democrat overnight, but with a little cooperation on issues that matter to them they will think an awful lot harder about endorsing local Democratic candidates when the Republican looks like the tool of development and polluting interests.
Revive the spirit of Rachel Carson. Make environmentalism an issue that every American outside of the wingnut suicide cult can identify with.
Wedge Issues
Let's talk about the mother of all wedge issues: Abortion. In terms of support the Republicans stand at about what should be their high-water mark for this issue. Why? They won the framing debate. "Pro-life" pretty much says what it needs to say. Who takes a position against life? feh. "Pro-choice" doesn't work so well. We know it doesn't work because people who should be our allies, aren't. Folks who think that women should have the right to abort only under the usual no-choice caveats (incest, rape, severe birth defects, a threat to the mother's health) seem completely oblivious to what the people they elect actually do.
My view is that the "pro-choice" label reinforces the false perception of one party supporting abortion-without-question and the other supporting abortion-with-limits. In reality we have one party supporting abortion-with-limits and one party supporting no-abortion-ever-period.
We should absolutely own this issue. Choice has always existed. Life-threatening or safe, women have always chosen abortions when they needed to. The only difference being that pre-Roe v. Wade, only wealthy women could afford to do it safely. The rightwing even teed this up for us with their legislation banning abortion under any circumstances. We've done a decent job of clarifying this issue but we can do better.
Second, it drives me crazy that Planned Parenthood and the (more reasonable) Lifers have the same basic agenda: reduce the frequency of abortions. Family planning and birth control moots the question of casual abortion by putting women in control of their own reproductive agenda. Why not sell it that way? Peel off the Life groups who will cooperate on community-health strategies to reduce abortions through planning and highlight the extremism of the Lifers who won't cooperate. At this point we've got more than enough public health studies to know for a fact which approaches in fact reduce abortion rates and which do not. Reframe the debate so that the moderate and rational opponents of abortion have more in common with us than they do with the bombers and other freakshows.
Divide and conquer. Governing won't be easy in the aftermath of Rosemary's POTUS, god knows we can count on the culties to do their usual thing. We can deal with that. On the upside, the rightwing noise machine is just about spent and the worst of the Gingrichites will go out with Tom DeLay. The moderates are hungry for a government that believes in intelligent legislation and the rule of law. Join me in advocating a Democratic century that follows the spirit of Obama's keynote address.
[update] I guess I should stick this caveat at the bottom of each diary. I'm not that Tom Frank, sorry.