Well, clearly, I am not. And I am sure that he has handlers with quite a bit of advice to give. Still, I am interested in what the dkos community has to say about how to put a nail in the coffin, if you will, for this debate. What advice would you give the contender as he steps into the ring tonight? Quite a few people I've spoken to think that we should run out the clock. While there is some wisdom in that, we've have got the ball. I guess my personal feeling is that now is the time to bring a little bitchyness to the table.
So some points I might make:
- Confront the stupid head-on. Uh no, I am not a muslim. No, I am not a terrorist. No, of course, I don't want to raise your taxes. I am running for president because we need to confront the problems this country faces. Remember how we are fighting two wars? Remember how the economy is collapsing? Remember when we didn't have to worry about getting laid off because we ship our own jobs overseas? Remember when we cared about our own infrastructure and our own environment? In grade-school we were told to have pride in our work, but now I worry that our elected leaders and even our media would rather do what is easy than what is right. Well, it is easy to call names and easy to scare people but I, for one, don't want to do just what is easy.
- Empiricism. We have an opportunity to work together now. Imagine you are a scientist. You have a hypothesis, and then you test it. If the data doesn't support the hypothesis, then you need to revise it. Too many partisans will never revise the hypothesis, no matter what happens to the American people. I think the American people are tired of this ideological inflexibility--especially when in the case of the Bush administration we have seen it fail so horribly from foreign policy to the economy.
- Drill, baby, drill is stupid and a bandaid. Let's say so.