Hypothetically, Unnamed Democrat is running for a Senate seat in a reddish-purple state, and is opposed by Generic Republican. This is a transcript of his opening statement in a debate between them.
Thank you, Madame Moderator; my thanks also to everyone who worked to put this debate together; to my distinguished opponent for agreeing to take part; to all of you ladies and gentleman here in the audience; and to all of you who are watching at home.
It is a great honor to be a candidate for the United States Senate, and naturally you want to know why you should consider according me the further honor of electing me. If I am elected, I will vote in favor of raising the minimum wage to $10.10 per hour; I will vote in favor of extending unemployment benefits; I will vote in favor of hiring and paying for workers who would repair our old bridges and roads and build new ones; I will vote against tax cuts for the rich; I will vote against any proposal to repeal the Affordable Care Act – “Obamacare” – or to cut benefits to those who receive Social Security, or to raise the age for receiving Social Security; and I will vote for the immigration reform proposal which would make it possible for people brought to the United States by their parents to gain citizenship through public service. Basically, that is, I will vote for the proposals supported by the great majority of the Democratic Party.
I suppose that pretty well covers it. [Makes a motion to walk away from the podium and shake his opponent's hand; laughter from the audience. Returns to the podium]
Well, we still have about an hour fifty-nine minutes left, so I suppose I will stick around. But at this point, I would say that basically nine-tenths of you pretty well know whether you will be voting for me, or for my opponent. In other words, I got about forty-five percent of you on my side in about forty-five seconds, and now I have to see whether I can get another six percent of you on my side in the remaining fifty nine minutes of my time. Of course my opponent is in essentially the same position.
Essentially the same position, but with some interesting differences. Because I do look at polls from time to time – shocking, I know – and every one of the stances I have just outlined actually enjoys a clear majority of public support. Over sixty percent of the people in our state support an increase in the minimum wage, extension of unemployment benefits, more spending on roads and bridges, and immigration reform of the type that the Senate passed and the House refused; and over sixty percent oppose the repeal of Obamacare or cutting Social Security benefits. My opponent is on the opposite side of me – and of the clear majority of voters in our state – on every one of these issues. So why couldn't I just state my positions and waltz away to a landslide victory?
I think the primary reason is that there is a considerable element of fear that Democrats like me are just looking to gain office by adopting popular positions, but that there is a further agenda we are after once we get in office; a more controversial agenda, a more ominous agenda. And the Republicans have worked constantly, feverishly, to suggest or to declare straight-out that these fears are justified. Bluntly put, they tell you that the Democratic Party stands for Big Government, for Socialism, for creating a nation of welfare-addicts, for an end to freedom and the American way. They want you to believe that I may seem like a friendly fellow looking to serve the interests of the public as I see them, but beware: they have seen the secret translation of the book I am using, and “To Serve America” is a cookbook! [Laughter].
Actually, I'm going to try my best to meet this accusation as seriously and explicitly as I can, and in order to do so, I am going to defy one of the oldest and most fundamental rules of campaigning: I am going to spend a good deal of time denying accusations. Many of you have heard the story of the candidate who accused his opponent of being a horse thief. “Do you really think people will believe that,” a campaign advisor asked, and the candidate said “No; I just want to hear the sonofabitch get up and deny it.” I have heard this story too, obviously, and I know the reason why it's become a lesson to candidates that they must never, ever, let themselves be put on the defensive. Nevertheless I am going to get up – or stay up – and deny being a socialist, or a proponent of big government, or a conspirator in a plot to turn America into a “welfare state,” defined basically as a place where a smaller and smaller percentage of good citizens are suckered into doing all the work and paying all the taxes while a larger and larger percentage happily just sit and cash government checks. Nobody wants this, nobody is working towards this, and nothing I'm proposing would put us one step on the path to such a depressing future.
Ask yourselves, ladies and gentlemen: would it be easier for a Democrat to win election if a Democratic administration were in office when unemployment was under five percent, as it was way back in the Clinton administration? Or would we instead by trying our best to bump unemployment up to fifteen percent so people would be grateful to us for their unemployment checks? And would we be proposing putting people to work building roads and repairing bridges if we were itching to get people on welfare? I can almost hear a voice, sounding much like the voice of Generic Republican, crying, “but government jobs ARE welfare!” I just find it very hard to understand this. Police are welfare-addicts? Firefighters are welfare-addicts? Soldiers are welfare-addicts? Construction workers are on welfare when they build airports, but not when they put up office buildings? Why should we take this seriously?
And surely, if a high minimum wage, high taxes on the wealthiest, and large-scale public works are signs of socialism and dictatorship and the destruction of American values, there ought to be some historical evidence that this sort of thing leads to that sort of thing, that the Republicans aren't just screeching “Fire! Conflagration! Blazing Inferno!” for nothing. So let's look back at some fairly recent American history and see if their fears, or more precisely their fear-mongering, has any basis.
In 1956, in the middle of the administration of Dwight D. Eisenhower, the minimum wage was $1.00, which is the equivalent of $8.60 today, after inflation. That's considerably higher than $7.25, which is what we have now. So I suppose if we get the next increase passed, raising it to $10.10 it would make us maybe just a bit more socialist in that regard than Eisenhower. About fifteen percent more, which I guess is reasonable, since we're liberals and we all know Eisenhower was a moderate-conservative Republican.
Or... was he? Because if you start looking at things like public works, Eisenhower looks a lot redder – in the Communist sense, not the “red-state” sense. We Democrats are just proposing that we repair some bridges and extend our highways in places. But Eisenhower went ahead and used the power of the federal government to actually build the Interstate Highway system! So if we're socialists on account of our proposal, what name can we call Ike? He must have been an extreme leftist, a fanatical Marxist, pulling the wool over America's eyes by pretending to be a regular Republican.
And that's not the worst of it, far from it. G.R. and his friends howled and howled when the top tax rate was allowed to rise from 35% to 40%, saying that this was obviously the end of our great American experiment in individual liberty and the beginning of our slide into socialist tyranny. They actually said stuff like that – elected Republican officials, Republican party spokespersons, they explicitly talked about how this five percent difference was actually the difference between freedom and dictatorship. They never explained of course how we could be a free people when a millionaire paid ten thousand a year in taxes, but we were no longer free when he paid ten thousand five. Well, let's look back once more at the Eisenhower years. Do you know what top tax rate was in 1956? Ninety one percent! So if we Democrats are tyrannical socialists for raising the rate to forty percent, that makes Eisenhower... Stalin? Mao? Pol Pot? We must have been living under Big Brother's totalitarian dictatorship, and amazingly, we hadn't even noticed!
You laugh, ladies and gentlemen, and I'm relieved that you're laughing, rather than running out to order dehydrated rations for the coming apocalypse. Because if there is one thought I would like to leave you with from today's debate, it is this: there is no reason to take anything a Republican says seriously. No reason to take seriously their predictions about the deficit, or about inflation, or about unemployment, because they have been utterly and objectively and unambiguously wrong about all those things. And especially – especially – there is no reason to take seriously their nonsense about socialism and dictatorship. Because they themselves very clearly do not take any of this seriously. They just turn out the lights, put flashlights under their chins, and try to regale you with scary stories which make no sense at all in the light of day. They know what the history of the minimum wage is; they know what the history of public works is; they know what the history of upper bracket tax rates is; they just pretend not to know, so they can pretend that we're turning into Soviet Russia tomorrow unless you give them political power. Whereas the truth is that if they tried really hard to select the right set of numbers about the budget and taxes and so forth, they might, just might, make the case that there was some danger – a small one, but greater than zero – that if we Democrats had our way on every piece of legislation we proposed, it might be the beginning of the possibility that America would gradually become more... like... Canada! I suppose that might be a horrible fate to some people who have deep phobias about hockey or Canadian bacon, but obviously it doesn't work quite as well as Soviet Russia when you're trying to tell scary campfire stories.
But some of you may be thinking: what about Obamacare? Isn't that where the real scary stuff is going to come from? Because we've had one Republican presidential candidate from 2012, Michelle Bachmann, say that passing the Affordable Care Act puts us on the direct road to tyranny. And we have a man, Ben Carson, who looks like he'll be a Republican presidential candidate in 2016, say that it was like slavery. And we have another likely GOP presidential candidate, Ted Cruz, who says fighting against it is as necessary as fighting against Hitler. So there must be something to all that fear, mustn't there?
No, there's nothing at all to it. If you look at the Affordable Care Act, you find it's built basically on three things: first, young and healthy people have to buy health insurance, and by doing so they put money into the system which effectively ends up getting passed on to older and sicker people, so they can better afford insurance. Second, the government directly subsidizes insurance for those who can least afford it. And third, we regulate insurance companies more strictly, preventing them from considering pre-existing conditions; that is, preventing insurance companies from keeping their customers as long as they don't much need insurance, but dropping them as soon as they get sick and do need insurance.
But what happens in politics is this: most people don't have the time to study these issues in much detail, and so they very naturally rely on some common-sense rules, like “where there's smoke, there's fire.” So people who don't know the details of the Affordable Care Act do know that there are people who are saying it's like tyranny or slavery or Hitler. And these voters say to themselves, “I know politicians exaggerate, but... even if it isn't really tyranny, and even if it isn't really like slavery, and alright it's just plain crazy, disgusting and morally insane to to talk about it in the same breath as Nazism, but still, they couldn't be saying all these things if there weren't something behind it, something to be afraid of, could they?” And so that voter turns his suspicion towards the Democrats who wrote and voted for that legislation, and is reluctant to vote for the Democrat.
And that, of course, is what the Republican is counting on, that's the reason he conjures up these crazy scenarios about how tyranny is coming and slavery is coming in the first place. If you don't think this is true, listen carefully as this debate unfolds, and see if my opponent ever comes within a hundred miles of offering any explanation, which any sane person would take halfway seriously, for how subsidizing health insurance for poor people means slavery, or how regulating insurance companies will lead to concentration camps. Of course he won't.
Now we could have a discussion of whether or not the Democratic proposals will end up making people better off or not, but we'll never have that discussion if the Republicans insist instead on telling scary campfire stories. We have to cure the Republicans of their addiction to these stories, and the only way we can do this is to stop rewarding them; not only, stop taking them seriously when they say these stupid things, but punish them when they cynically try to exploit you this way. I'd think of it this way: if one of your children says he doesn't want to eat the meal you've made because he thinks he might have an allergy to something in it, of course you take that seriously. If, however, he says he doesn't want to eat it because his brother used a magic spell to conjure cyanide and put it in his food, then he's asking for a spanking.
Ladies and gentlemen, it's long past time to give the Republicans a good spanking.