Time travel doesn't exist.
If you weren't aware of that already, now you are. Congratulations. We can't change what happened yesterday. We can fill up the rec list and spend all our time arguing about how things got away from us, but what good will that do? At the end of the day, we'll be right here in the same place: 53-ish seat majority in the Senate, Republican majority in the House.
Instead of fighting with each other about how we ended up in this hole, we can start figuring out how to climb out of it. So how do we do that? Where do we go from here?
I've got some ideas that I think all us Democrats can agree on AND bring those frustrated independents back to our camp, if you'll follow me...
Few, if any, of these things will get done during the 112th Congress. They just won't, thanks to the Right-controlled House of Representatives. My ideas are straight out of the pro-labor, pro-regulation, FDR-is-my-hero playbook. But they are good things to argue for, for next time. In 2012, the voters will have a choice: Obama, Dems and these populist, economy-growing ideas, or Repubs, who consistently said no to them in favor of maintaining the oligarchy.
Get rid of Free-Trade agreements like NAFTA, and get out of the WTO. Revitalize the American manufacturing sector.
Globalization is creating a race to the bottom. Foreign goods used to be taxed with tariffs. Any money a company saved on labor costs was lost through these tariffs, so prices remained competitive with domestically manufactured goods. But in Big Business's pursuit of the almighty profit margin, they lobbied hard and got the tariffs wiped out. Now there's no downside to manufacturing overseas. The money saved on labor costs are no longer lost through punitive tariffs. It gets pocketed as pure profit. With such a huge profit margin, they can drop their prices a little and watch consumers flock to their cheaper product.
This has a really bad domino effect. American Manufacturers who are proud to employ Americans and put that "Made in America" sticker on their products can't compete with the cheap alternative because their labor costs are comparatively high. They have to pay American wages and cover health insurance and such. So they're left with two options: Sell and close up shop, or move the factory offshore. Either option is obviously bad for America: The middle-class factory workers who work in that factory are laid off. Their consuming power is wrecked as they require unemployment assistance from the state until they find often-lower-paying replacement work. Free-trade hurts the nation's median income and destroys communities. Many towns, particularly in the midwest, are built around factories. Take the factories away and these towns become ghost-towns. Sad little places filled with street after street of empty mom-and-pop shops and restaurants. All replaced by the giant glowing neon Wal-Mart smiley face.
Reimpose the tariffs. Make offshoring unattractive again. Reopen American factories for American workers and American consumers.
Build a big fuckin' thing.
That's right, Lewis Black. We should build a Big Fuckin' Thing. It can be functional like the Hoover Dam, or it can be not-so functional like the St. Louis Arch. I don't care what it is. As long as it's big, and it's a fuckin' thing. Put Americans to work building something. It puts money in their pockets, it creates a sense of pride in our communities, and it stimulates tourism! Tons of people visit the St. Louis Arch, the Hoover Dam, the Washington Monument and Mount Rushmore every year! People buy gas to drive there, or plane tickets to fly there, and they buy cameras to take pictures of their visit, and they spend money on souvenirs and food and hotel rooms when they get there!
But that's just the tourism side. Let's talk about functional big fuckin' things again. Our infrastructure is crumbling. Cheaper labor costs aren't the only things driving businesses away. Here in Seattle, Microsoft and Boeing are often bitching about the state of disrepair our roads are in, and occasionally threatening to pull up stakes and head off somewhere else if the problem isn't taken care of. We need to repair and modernize our interstate system, build mass transit systems and fix our bridges.
Perhaps you've heard about this from a diary written on dkos the other day: The Chinese have finished a new extremely-high speed rail system. Where is ours? We could use one. We could use several, connecting San Diego to Los Angeles to San Francisco, Boston to New York to Philadelphia to Washington, Chicago to St. Louis, etc.
And how about our electrical grid? Remember that blackout a while ago, where a big chunk of the eastern seaboard lost power? It's the future, that kind of stuff shouldn't happen anymore! We need to repair and modernize our electrical grid.
While you're at it, invest in alternative energy.
Coal is a 19th century fuel source, and a finite one. We're gonna need to find something to replace it eventually... might as well start now. Pennsylvania and West Virginia aren't gonna like hearing that very much, so sell it to them this way: Reinforce existing power sources with new and clean ones like solar and wind. Put solar panels back up on the White House roof. If there are already solar panels up there (I can't remember if there are or not), add more of them!
Recommit to ending our dependence on oil. Notice I didn't say "foreign" oil. That's because, as Chris Hayes once said, there are no barrels of oil sitting around marked "foreign". Oil is a fungible commodity, and the domestic oil producing apparatus is all privately owned, so we pay the same for "foreign" oil as we do "domestic". It's all oil, and it's all expensive. Demand better fuel efficiency from auto manufacturers. Japan and Europe are leaving us in the dust in that respect.
Inspire curiosity and wonder.
NASA's current boondoggle is coming to an end, and it's being replaced by nothing. Curmudgeons concerned with Earthly matters might not care, because it saves a couple pennies... but what about the rest of us whose souls have yet to be crushed by drudgery of the rat race? I wasn't impressed by the do-nothing Space Shuttle missions, but NASA should nevertheless be doing something, am I right? Properly fund NASA and give them a mission that's worthy of their giant science brains. Obama is exactly the right guy for this, I think, because deep down, he's a geek, a nerd... technology and science is cool to him.
We should inspire people to look up at the stars again. Give them something that makes them gather around the TV, gives them goosebumps, and makes them say "Wow!" Something they'll tell their grandkids about. If that means tackling the extraordinarily difficult task of sending humans to Mars, then so be it. As JFK said, we should choose to do these things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.
But a more practical matter that we can also work on is a Celestial Body Defense system. Earth lives in a rough neighborhood. There are comets and asteroids zooming around out there that we don't even know about. They potentially have the capability to wipe out all life on Earth. That is not an exaggeration. It has happened before, and there's no law that says it can't happen again. We should develop a system to find these threats and defend against them. Trillions of dollars were spent on nuclear weapons in the hope that we would never have to use them. Why can't we spend a fraction of that money for a defense system that we hope we would never have to use?
But I digress. The point is, America has always been a land of science, engineering and adventure. We must revitalize that portion of the American spirit, which would also help with this next item:
Recommit to education.
America is dumb. I think you'd all at least partially agree with that, especially in light of yesterday's election. For a nation founded during the Enlightenment, and inspired by Rome and Greece, our education system is very poor. I'm no teacher, so I couldn't tell you everything we need to do to solve this problem, but solve it we must.
Pieces are already in place. We have a system of fantastic publicly funded colleges and universities, we need to make them more accessible to more people. Every town has a public school system. We need to fix them up, shrink class sizes, and teach a curriculum that encompasses more than just the basics, and certainly do more than "teach to the test". Science, Music, PhysEd, History, etc. All are important.
This is not a list of all our problems. There's a lot more that should be done. But it's a list of stuff I think is important, and it's a list I think Democrats can run on in 2012.