For all of our anger, disgust and collective kvetching over our party's unceremonious surrender on the issue of meaningful benchmarks, timetables and redeployment, we, too, seem to be lacking something meaningful: a plan to respond.
To be sure, blog rants -- as impassioned and entertaining as they might be -- aren't a response; they're an outlet.
Those of you who know me know that I live my life in the world of message management, marketing, advertising and public relations. I invent brands for a living, and I've diaried often about the fall of the Republican brand and the Democrats' perpetual inability to muster one.
But we here in the netroots do have a brand, and it centers around action, creativity, mass assembly and unpoliticized truth. With that as our starting point, please allow me to offer some talking points to get us singing a common tune, and one participation-required action plan to get the song heard.
If I was the Brand Manager for the netroots (that would be some gig!), I'd create our three primary talking points as follows:
1. Democrats are a Party to the Crime
Here's the cold, hard truth:
Funding the war today is even more egregious than authorizing it was 4+ years ago. Why? Because now, very simply, we have the benefit of history.
Nevermind that we made a single, symbolic attempt at legislatively ending this war. Nevermind that we don't have the votes to override a presidential veto. True as those things are, they are hollow excuses for poor inter-party planning, inexperienced leadership, and a gross absence of creative problem-solving.
Frankly, those Democrats who still, to this day, have a hard time explaining their authorization vote will have a harder time explaining a "Yes" on this latest display of lemming-like collapse.
2. You Can Put Lipstick on a Pig...
But yeah, it's still a pig.
We'll hear a lot in the coming weeks about the lipstick (the minimum wage bill, assuming the White House doesn't find a way to get us to cave on that too), and undoubtedly, that's the right shade of lipstick for the entire country, regardless of your current income. But it's an empty "win" when viewed against the landscape of a stubborn, collosal blunder like Iraq.
Between the good (minimum wage bill) and the bad (no-strongs-attached funding for Iraq), there will undoubtedly be a lot of ugly in this bill, too: pork. Much of it will be Democratic pork. And there is no shade of lipstick that can beautify reckless spending that wouldn't survive either house on its own.
3. You've Lost Our Trust
By sometime tonight, I guarantee that a big handful of our party leaders will be saying things like...
It's not over yet.
We will continue to fight to end this war.
This is a temporary funding bill.
In fact, Harry Reid has already given us his version of "Hey, it's better than nothing!"
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada said that a funding measure with benchmarks still is "a lot more than the president ever expected he'd have to agree to."
Sorry, but you'll pardon us if that feels like Deja Vu all over again. This was your chance to do the people's work, or at least pretend to. Swing and a miss, as Keith Olbermann said.
Democrats are staking their political careers on a series of plausible assumptions:
A. The surge will continue to fail
B. Republicans will be forced to move to the good side of this argument just in time to avoid an electoral smackdown in '08
C. Sometime, very late this year, a veto-proof majority of Congress will be ready to grab its one collective testicle and finally end this war
They -- both Democrats and Republicans -- will be counting on our short memories and our better-late-than-never optimism to trump the cowardice that's exploding all over Capitol Hill today. It won't work on me; will it work on you?
My personal opinion is that it's time for us to get organized and get loud. As if we needed an occasion, it seems to me that Memorial weekend is the perfect time to do that.
So early tomorrow morning, I'll be posting a diary titled, The 435-District Pushback. The diary will contain a pledge to not financially support OR vote for any Democrat who votes "Yes" on the funding bill. I'll ask you to note your Congressional District in the comments, with the goal, albeit lofty, to secure participation from all 435 districts. When that diary is dead, I'll print it out in its entirety and mail it to all 281 Democrats in the House and Senate with your comments intact. Certain media outlets will also get a copy.
I'll do something in Thursday's diary I've never done. I'll ask for your recommendation to allow for greatest participation. Because that's how we get the song heard.
Let's get loud, shall we?