I love our community, but sometimes we're like a bunch of magpies. We see the shiniest things, and we start adorning our nest with them. In this election cycle, the shiny things are: 1) ridiculous politicians (O'Donnell, Angle, Rand Paul, etc.), and 2) the hypocrisies of rank-and-file Republican candidates. This focus may be satisfying--it's an "elaboration and ornamentation of the consensus" amongst ourselves (a beautiful phrase from Marilynne Robinson's novel Housekeeping, which comes all too often to mind). But this is not how elections are won.
We need to be putting forward strong arguments FOR government programs, FOR Democratic candidates--and when we attack, we should try to do so in a way that speaks to an audience that doesn't already agree with us. We need to imagine our way into the conservative mentality.
For instance, I believe liberals have totally overestimated the effectiveness of attacking Republican hypocrisy on pork-barrel spending and government programs. We jump on news that the wife of Senate candidate Joe Miller (R-AK) claimed unemployment benefits or that Missouri House candidate John Cauthorn received hundreds of thousands in farm subsidies, and we post and repost videos of Alexi Giannoulias attacking the hypocrisy of Kirk's claim to be a "fiscal hawk", but first we need to understand the mentality that leads to such seeming hypocrisy.
However incredible we may find it, conservatives (and many moderates) suffer no cognitive dissonance when they oppose government programs and benefit from the payouts of these programs. In a sense, it's tax reduction by other means. They're saying, in essence,
I oppose government programs, but as long as we're stuck with them, I'm going to do everything I can to get those dollars back--for myself and for my constituents.
We are not going to affect this thinking at all by pointing out the hypocrisy as if it were a contradiction. For them, and for those who remain open to voting for them--i.e., the people whose votes are up for grabs--there may very well be no contradiction whatsoever.
This is why, when WaPo's "The Fix" announces that "voters still want pork in their home districts,", we shouldn't be surprised. We're not going to get anywhere by trying to convince them that this thinking is hypocritical. Instead, we need to differentiate progressive government programs from "pork" in the vilest sense, and make strong, value-based arguments for these programs' survival.
Make every spending decision, an apples-to-apples choice. For instance,
I oppose giving billions of free money to the richest Americans, because that's going to take money away from the Medicare program that helps seniors from all classes survive their retirement.
or,
We can't afford to assume that there's no fat to be trimmed in the Defense Budget. How are we going to fund a decent education for our children, if 42.2 cents on every dollar is paying for wars, while only 4.4 cents is going to every education and social-service related program that makes education possible.
see the National Priorities Project (30 minutes surfing this website should be a basic element of any citizen's civil education)
We feel like we're shooting fish in a barrel. We're not. Let's stop gibing and get down to the serious business of discussing our spending priorities.