[Given the recent rapid rise in candidate-centric discourse here on dKos and, with the 2006 campaign about to begin in earnest once Tuesday's local elections are over, I thought that I should break this post out of the
Grok Your World vault. It was written in Febuary 2004 by
David Caploe.]
While we had hoped to start at the beginning of 2004 … and then before the start of the primary season … we haven’t made it until now … so be it … the night John Kerry won the Wisconsin primary, and it looks as if John Edwards has become his main adversary, albeit one who seems more likely to be the Democratic VICE-presidential nominee than the “top guy” …
So … why is it more important WHAT any likely Democratic Presidential nominee says, rather than WHO it is (even tho it seems pretty likely at this point it will be John Kerry) ???
The basic reason has to do with the brilliant – if, in our view, somewhat twisted – way the Bush administration has managed – with the help of a bizarrely compliant mainstream media – to shape the structural dynamics of public discourse in the US,
a process that has been well underway since the summer of 2000, on which more later, either here, or, more likely, in a later post, altho anybody interested in this should check out two of the Cultural History lectures in the medianalysis Encyclopedia: Lecture 28, Post-Modernism with a Human Face, and Lecture 29, The Millennium Crisis: Initial Stages –
but which received a frightening ratcheting after the September 11 attacks, as was demonstrated by the strange outcome of the 2002 elections, in which, somehow, Max Cleland, then Democratic Senator from Georgia, who lost both legs and an arm in Vietnam, was able to be attacked as “insufficiently patriotic,” and thereby lost his seat to a Bush Republican.
In this context, by far the most important factor in the 2004 Presidential race will not be the personal characteristics of the Democratic nominee –
which, worryingly, seems to be one of (if not THE) main factors in the idea that Democrats are voting for Kerry because he seems most “electable”/capable of beating Bush –
but, rather – because of the way General Rove and Co. have managed to structure the dynamics of public discourse since the summer of 2000 at least – the nature of the program that nominee advances.
Broadly speaking, there are THREE main features of the program, and TWO key strategic orientations:
1) Repeal of just about all the Bush tax cuts– including the estate tax, which the Democrats should have called the “billionaire’s tax”, but which Bush has been successful in labelling the “death” tax …
And in doing so, the Democrats MUST make clear – in the way NY Times columnists Paul Krugman and Bob Herbert have done – that these cuts disproportionately benefit the wealthy, AND, have actually resulted in significantly higher costs for the vast majority of US taxpayers –
points that were novel when we first started making them, but now, thanks to Howard Dean, have become more or less the conventional wisdom for the Democrats …
Finally, in this context, they have to make clear the Krugman / Herbert point that this tax cuts for the wealthy are part of a conscious effort by the Republicans to eliminate ANY major Federal spending programs EXCEPT military through the intentional creation of MASSIVE deficits …
And because there is so much confusion about these points, it is crucial that the Democratic nominees CONTINUE to make this point, so it’s not lost in the Republican rhetorical fog about “it’s YOUR money” …
Put bluntly, the Democrats should NOT make the mistake Bill Clinton did in the first six months of 1993, when he failed COMPLETELY to educate the American public about WHY and HOW Reaganomics had failed –
with the result that the public now has swallowed the Dick Cheney line that “Reagan proved deficits don’t matter” …
2) The Democratic nominees absolutely must push for univeral, government-financed health care – yet ANOTHER issue Clinton completely screwed up by taking single-payer off the table at the very beginning of the process, thereby emboldening the doctors, hospitals, health insurance, and HMO industries to tell him and Hillary to fuck off without paying the slightest political price …
The reasoning here is clear: the health care system is OBVIOUSLY in a complete mess, with the latest Medicare drug bill a complete joke, as Congressional Democrats seem belatedly to have realized,
and there is NO reason to futz around any more trying to save a system that has visibly fallen apart, as people are paying more and more money for less and less, in terms of both quantity AND quality …
This is, BTW, a HUGE political winner and key wedge issue for constituencies that are otherwise solidly in the Republican column, as long as the discourse remains as it is, focused on cultural issues …
Put bluntly, a lot of NASCAR dads – a truly disgusting term – as well as “soccer moms,” in both the South and elsewhere, have either themselves been out of work or know people who have been out of work – and hence, have had their access to health insurance terrifyingly imperilled …
A lot of people who might otherwise (wrongly, in my view) think Bush is a successful “war president,” or a defender of the “sanctity” of marriage – a joke in a society in which the divorce rate among straight couples has been around 50% for the last several years –
could not help but be DEEPLY attracted to a system that can be sloganized as “you choose your own doctor – the government pays,” as my friend Jonathan Simon puts it …
3) They must militantly attack Bush on his betrayal of the memory of the victims of 9/11 by completely avoiding the real threat of political Islam, painting him – accurately – as the lackey of the Saudi royal family on the one hand, and the global oil industry on the other …
above all, in order to make it impossible for Bush to claim to be a “war president,” as he so “eloquently” told Tim Russert in his nearly incoherent Meet the Press “interview” …
The broad lines of argument have already been laid out, BTW, by Florida Senator Bob Graham, who correctly argued that not only was the invasion of Iraq problematic in and of itself – for all the reasons identified by both Howard Dean and Dennis Kucinich –
but also, and in a certain way, even more compellingly as a DIVERSION from the MAIN and VISIBLE CHALLENGE to the US, namely POLITICAL ISLAM …
By attacking some Muslim power center, Bush has tried to make it look as if he’s doing something … but in fact, he has studiously avoided ANY sort of values confrontation with political Islam, for fear of offending the Saudi royal family …
[In this context, imagine how much better off we would ALL be, in the aftermath of September 11, if Al Gore had been President –
someone who, whatever his faults, would nevertheless have understood the necessity of confronting political Islam at the level of values, a level from which Bush has consistently fled …]
That is, it is crucial to attack the invasion of Iraq not just because it is lawless and based on outright lies, but, even more significantly, because it aggravates – while trying to avoid – the real challenge to the US, namely Sunni political Islam …
Given these three main points, there are TWO main strategic orientations that need to go along with this …
1) The Democratic nominees must be blatantly disrespectful of Bush as a person and a President …
This may seem wrong-headed, but there is no other choice, given the outrageous character assassination in which Republicans engaged during both the 2000 and 2002 campaigns, with the happy collaboration of the mainstream media –
and here, for reasons we’ll discuss some other time, we mean basically what went on in the NEWS COLUMNS, and NOT THE EDITORIAL PAGES –
as evidenced by the hatchet work done on Gore in 2000 by Richard Berke of the NY Times and Ceci Connolly of the Washington Post, which emboldened others further down the media food chain –
as well as what happened to Democrats in 2002, with the Cleland outrage topping the list …
A start has been made by the fact that FINALLY the issue of Bush’s National Guard service is being seriously looked into – it was ignored in 2000 –
as well as the whole Harken Energy fiasco AND his DUI in Maine, which makes clear the guy is a LIAR about just about everything, not just Iraq …
and in this context, last but not least,
2) The Democrats MUST attack the mainstream media for being willing servants of the Bush administration … and not just once or twice, but on an on-going basis …
I know this scares a lot of them, but here they must also take a page from the Republicans playbook …
For DECADES, the Republicans have kept up the nonsensical drumbeat about a “liberal media”, which MAY have been true during Watergate and into the mid-70s –
see here, BTW, Lecture 26 of the Cultural History series, “Dazed and Confused: Stagflation, Cable TV, and the Crisis of Political/Cultural Liberalism, 1973–1979” –
but which certainly has NOT been the case since the 1980 election and the Reagan administration …
While scary, to be sure, the Democrats MUST make this a structural orientation … otherwise, the ridiculous discourse that has been dominant since the summer of 2000 will continue, and George W. Bush will SURELY be re-elected in November 2004 …