I have been dismayed by the Right Wing's mindless attempt to sell to anyone willing to listen, the meme that no matter what happened on Election day two weeks ago America, remains a "center-right" country. The question for me initially was WHY did the Republicans feel the need to come out with this ridiculous notion that, although Americans elected a President that they tried described as a Socialist, the country really wanted to be governed with center-right principles. I soon switched my concern from WHY the right wingers were so obsessed with selling that pipe dream, to coming up with the answer HOW we should properly respond. So far I have seen responses from liberals/progressives/Democrats on TV that have run the gammut from saying the election WAS in fact a mandate for PEOTUS Barack Obama to govern from the left, to the WEAKEST SAUCE EVER that in fact America really IS center-right but the Democrats aren't really all that liberal anyway. So what IS the proper response? We stop disputing it and hang it around their necks! Allow me to explain how we can turn this meme on its head and continue the destruction of the Republican brand...
The biggest reason why we should stop arguing over whether the county is center right, center, or center left, is because those are arguments that are just too hard to quantify for either side. I am convinced that at least part of the reason why the right wingers have come out with this "center-right" meme is to goad us into engaging in the debate in the first place. They realize that who actually wins the argument comes down to a matter of perception. And they realize that the more we respond to this bunk, the more they get to frame the argument. What I mean is the more we push back that the country is center-left, the more they get to try to connect center-left to radical leftist principles that nobody really agrees with like "abortion on demand" and the "fairness doctrine." Thats why they keep building up those strawmen, to try to make them synonymous with the Democratic party. And interestingly enough the more we push back on the center-right meme, the more we give them the opportunity to make that kind of stuff stick.
Now I myself am a fighter. I hate with a passion the prevailing characterization that Democrats are weak and won't fight back. Unfortunately the party has EARNED that derision up until now by never fighting back against attacks from the right (The Joe Lieberman debacle didnt help either by the way). By "taking the high road" we have allowed the right wingers to define what being a Democrat is and what a being a Democrat isnt. I was one of those who kept hoping that Obama would come back harder against John McCain during the general election. I was also one of those who applauded furiously every time he DID his McCain back in his face in response to the slimy attack ads that McCain and his people were putting up. I am also proud to say that I was in fact one of those "outraged lefty libruls" who pitched a fit earlier this week when Harry Reid and the rest of the Senate Democrats allowed Lieberman to keep his gavel. So why oh why would I be saying to "surrender" to the notion that our country is center-right? Its simple. Instead of fighting them on it, we use the meme to continue defining them as idealogues who put party philosphies over what is good for the country.
There are a couple of stories that have come out in recent days that will help us tar and feather the right wingers with their own meme. The first story is the one that came out yesterday about Mitch McConnell. It seems he sent a threatening letter to Harry Reid insisting that the Democrats include the Republicans in the legislative process, again something that nobody has said they wouldn't be allowed to do. Then he had a press conference which revealed this nugget.
"What I’m saying to the new president and the new administration: ‘Do big things, and do them in the center, and you’ll be surprised at how much support you might have,’ " he said at the news conference.
Otherwise, McConnell warned, his party would stand together and block a far-left agenda.
"You're likely to have very significant unity among Republicans," he said.
Notice something here. Mitch McConnell makes no allusions to whether legislation his party would band together to block would be good for the country or not. His primary concern is not whether Democrats will push an agenda that will help most Americans. His primary concern is that the solutions not be formulated in a "far left" ie progressive way. Let that sink in for a moment....
We have just been given the best ammunition we could have EVER hoped for in the runoff race in Georgia and I hope some enterprising Jim Martin aide will put those words into an attack ad TODAY! The Minority Leader of the U.S. Senate Republican Mitch McConnell has proclaimed that he will base his and his fellow Republicans' support and or lack thereof on upcoming legislation on whether the legislation is too liberal or not conservative enough INSTEAD of basing their support on whether the legislation is good for American and its citizens. If you talk to somebody who has just lost their job or their house, or someone that has no health care or has just lost their retirement savings, or someone who is working for the Big 3 in the rank and file whether this country is center left or center right you are likely to get cussed out and rightly so. Average Americans couldn't care any less about how people define which way this country is leaning. What they do care about is that their leaders in Washington are working to help solve our nation's problems no matter what kind of packaging those solutions come in. We are more concerned with if something works than if the solution is labeled liberal or conservative. But the Republicans have exposed themselves this week as ideologues who are more interested in rehabilitating their brand than working to come up with solutions. Its more important to the Mitch McConnells of the world that America is defined as center right than it is that the economy gets fixed that the stock market gets stabilized. And that is why it won't work this time if we continue to expose the right wingers for who and what they are
Now another great article came out yesterday about Tom Daschle and how he will push for universal health care. Now there are a couple of nuggets we can take both from that article and from a response to the article. As it happens I will use the nugget from the response to the article first because it gives us background. From Washington Monthly's Steve Benen we get this blast from the past about why the Republicans opposed Hillary Clinton's universal healthcare plan back in the early 90s.
It's largely faded from memory, but I'd argue one of the more important moments in the debate over the Clinton healthcare plan in the early 1990s came when Kristol distributed a memo to congressional Republicans in December 1993.
Leading conservative operative William Kristol privately circulates a strategy document to Republicans in Congress. Kristol writes that congressional Republicans should work to "kill" -- not amend -- the Clinton plan because it presents a real danger to the Republican future: Its passage will give the Democrats a lock on the crucial middle-class vote and revive the reputation of the party. Nearly a full year before Republicans will unite behind the "Contract With America," Kristol has provided the rationale and the steel for them to achieve their aims of winning control of Congress and becoming America's majority party. Killing health care will serve both ends. The timing of the memo dovetails with a growing private consensus among Republicans that all-out opposition to the Clinton plan is in their best political interest.
(emphasis added)
Yes thats right, Bill Kristol conspired to kill the legislation not because it would be bad for the country, no quite the opposite. He realized how powerful it would be to have a Democrat passing legislation for universal healthcare precisely because of how good it would be for the country and he decided it should be opposed on those grounds. Again let that sink in...
This guy helped to kill legislation that was good for the country to try to save the Republican brand. The millions of Americans who are afraid to get sick because they don't have any healthcare can thank Bill Kristol for their plight. But he wasn't the only one. The Republican party GLADLY followed his lead because it was more important to them that they be able to keep their seats in Congress than it was to make sure that the people of this country had the opportunity to get healthcare. It wasn't about the good of the country, it was about the good of the Republican party. So, has anything changed? Well lets take a look at the very first paragraph from the article yesterday in U.S. News & World Reports from James Pethokoukis:
The GOP strategist had been joking about the upcoming presidential election and giving his humorous assessments of the candidates. Then he suddenly cut out the schtick and got scary serious. "Let me tell you something, if Democrats take the White House and pass a big-government healthcare plan, that's it. Game over. Government will dominate the economy like it does in Europe. Conservatives will spend the rest of their lives trying to turn things around and they will fail."
Do you see any difference in the philosophy? I sure don't. It almost makes you wonder if the anonymous "republican strategist" is in fact William Kristol. But here is the thing that can't be stressed enough, the underlying premiss is actually true. Universal Healthcare WILL hurt the right wingers because it flies in the face of their philosphy of smaller government AND the overwhelming numbers of Americans will LOVE it. In fact the very first observation of Pethokoukis in the article is this.
- Passage would be a political gamechanger. Recently, I stumbled across this analysis of how nationalized healthcare in Great Britain affected the political environment there. As Norman Markowitz in Political Affairs, a journal of "Marxist thought," puts it: "After the Labor Party established the National Health Service after World War II, supposedly conservative workers and low-income people under religious and other influences who tended to support the Conservatives were much more likely to vote for the Labor Party when health care, social welfare, education and pro-working class policies were enacted by labor-supported governments."
Passing Obamacare would be like performing exactly the opposite function of turning people into investors. Whereas the Investor Class is more conservative than the rest of America, creating the Obamacare Class would pull America to the left. Michael Cannon of the Cato Institute, who first found that wonderful Markowitz quote, puts it succinctly in a recent blog post: "Blocking Obama's health plan is key to the GOP's survival."
And that is why we are faced with the prospect of still not getting universal healthcare even though every poll shows that the majority of Americans favor implementing some kind of healthcare program that will cover all Americans. For the Republicans its not about YOU having to self medicate at home because your doctor doesn't accept anyone who doesn't have insurance. Its not about YOU having to put off some needed surgery because you just don't have the money. Its not about YOU going bankrupt from piles and piles of medical bills. Its not about YOU having to watch your child suffer through common child hood illnesses like Ashma because you can't afford the medication to manage those ailments. No, its all about THEM and trying to rebuild their brand. I mean after all they feel we aleady have universal healthcare because everybody can go to the emergency room remember? This kind of shit has to go viral so every American will know exactly why it is we REALLY don't have universal healthcare in this country!
So in closing I repeat my stance from above. We should give up challenging the center-right myth coming from the right wingers. Instead of disputing it, every single time one of these jerks repeat that stale catch phrase about this being a "center-right" country there should be a liberal/progressive to respond, "Nobody cares whether the country leans left or right. What Americans care about is finding solutions to solve the problems that we all face every day. Unfortunately the Republicans seem more concerned with rebuilding their brand than being a part of finding those solutions." Game. Set. Match. One of two things will happen or both. The right wingers will stop spewing that ignorant meme over and over, and or they will actually drop their arbitrary opposition to progressive solutions to the country's problems. We deserve a government that doesn't check for a brand on a solution before they decide to use it and the only way that happens is if the Republicans are exposed every time they vote against the interests of American citizens and in the interests of their party.
Thanks for reading my diatribe