Democrats must shape a winning message for the 2012 campaign that is appealing to both their core constituencies and to independents. The President appears to be working in this direction but the Democrats are very slow at picking it up and spreading it. We should start shaping and spreading our message now in preparation for 2012, in parallel with re-activating and strengthening our grassroots organizations and intensifying our fundraising efforts.
In Part I of this diary entry we provide suggestions for defining the Democratic message, for exposing the Republican actions since taking control of the House in early 2011 and the intentions of the GOP extremist agenda, as well as facts for countering the GOP falsehoods and misinformation about the Democratic and Presidential records. We focus mainly on the Economy, though National Defense, Health Care Reform and other Democratic agenda items are also briefly discussed. Then in Part II we dispel several falsehoods and myths about important economic facts and trends that Republicans have ably propagated and for the most part imprinted on the public opinion.
To win back the House, retain control of the Senate and re-elect President Obama in 2012 the Democrats must strongly appeal both to their Base and the Independents. They must energize their base, bring back the progressives into the fold and conduct a campaign that brings out again large numbers of young voters and first-time voters as well as the minorities who supported the President and the Democrats in great numbers in 2008.
131 million people voted in 2008, only 87 million voted in 2010. The 2010 electorate was older, more white, and more affluent. The enthusiasm gap favored the GOP, and the Tea Party with the help of the 501c(6)'s Groups and money from undisclosed donors ensured that the Message War was won by the Republicans. This resulted in many new Tea-Party backed GOP House representatives and even some like-minded Senators.
Many factors may still weigh heavily against the Democrats in Fall 2012. The economy may continue growing at a slow, sluggish rate, the unemployment rate may be still above 7% or even close to 8%. Gas prices may still be too high. The Afgan war theater situation may deteriorate and even Iraq, seemingly more stable right now, may get worse
And at this point we do not know what compromises, if any, the President and the Senate Democrats may be forced to accept for the raising of the debt ceiling in summer 2011 or for the 2012 Budget later in the summer. It is not easy to predict either the content of the content, or the way it is sold to the public, or most importantly the impact of these compromises.
However, one matter remains clear. If the President and the Senate Democrats do not hold the line on the dismantling of Medicare and Medicaid dictated by Ryan's Budget Plan, all hell will break lose and the Democratic Party's as well as the President's prospects for 2012 will greatly diminish
The Message Targeting The Democratic Base
This brings us to the Democratic message for 2012. It should have several key ingredients to appeal to the Democratic Base:
(1) Defend the social safety net and expose the GOP plan to dismantle/privatize Medicare and Medicaid while offering tax breaks to the rich and the corporations
(2) Talk about how to create jobs though additional investments in infrastructure, innovation and education that increase our global competitiveness
(3) Talk about ways to curtail the off-shoring of jobs and to increase corporate investments in facilities and jobs on American soil
(4) Talk about the need to reform the corporate tax code by eliminating unnecessary and wasteful tax credits and subsidies to corporations
(5) Talk about the need to reform the individual tax code so as to increase tax rate for 2% of earners and eliminate itemized deductions and other loopholes as well as possibly tax capital gains at higher rates.
(6) Call and push for significant gradual cuts in our excessive defense spending; these together with items (4) and (5) are essential for reducing the budget deficits. Push for a ultra-flexible mobile smaller military and phase-out unnecessary large weapon programs
(7) Talk about streamlining government operations and eliminating duplication, waste and fraud; explain that the freezes in discretionary spending and federal pay have already been undertaken and no deeper cuts to domestic spending are necessary
(8) Talk about the need for a national energy program that encompasses all forms of clean energy but also allows for safe nuclear energy and some limited safe off-shore drilling; emphasize the need for eliminating our over-reliance on fossil fuels
(9) Talk about the need for a comprehensive new immigration law that balances measures for increased border security with a fair process for naturalization and assimilation of the undocumented immigrants and workers and thus their incorporation into the American system and economic life. Also push for the passing of the DREAM Act that provides citizenship to children of undocumented immigrants who made it into college or serve in our military.
(10) Push the Administration and Congress to start pulling out of Afganistan in a slow but steady pace after July 2011 and also to downgrade our footprint and involvement in Iraq even further and to bring our troops home thus ending these two wars.
(11) Talk about the successes in the War Against Terrorists and the adoption of a strategy that effectively combines human intelligence with high-tech surveillance and surgical military strikes using special operations forces
(12) Talk about the need to strengthen the provisions of the Affordable Health Act so as they control costs better (e.g. bring back the public option and introduce strong collective or even government bargaining for prescription drugs) and expose the consequences of GOP's intent to repeal it for patients with pre-existing conditions, seniors, college students etc.
(13) Talk in favor of the collective bargaining rights of public sector unions wherever these have been challenged and fight for re-installing them in states that have weakened them or eliminated them
(14) Talk about and fight against voter identification legislation in states that Republican are pushing for those or have already passed them promising to repeal these voter disenfranchisement laws
(15) Talk about and support all other traditional items of the Democratic and Progressive Agendas regarding choice for women, fair pay and equality for women in the work place, equal rights and civil unions for LGBT (here emphasize the repeal of DADT), suppression of discrimination and hate crimes against gays, protection of the environment, food and drug safety, financial consumer protection, Wall St regulation, help for homeowners and several other ... Many of these Agenda items experienced significant legislative advances in 2009-2010 under the 111th Democratic Congress, please read the list of Accomplishments provided in the last section below. These should be explained, promoted and advertised widely. We do not elaborate on these here.
The Message Targeting Democrats and Independents
It is also important to expose the extremism of the Republican actions and policies after they took control of the House in January 2011. This is important for both the Democratic Base and the Democratic-leaning Independents.
This should involve exposing the truth about GOP Ryan's Budget Plan and the declaration of class war against the elderly and the poor; for this please read the recent Daily Kos article in Reference1. [To read a particular reference, please click on it].
Moreover, we should be exposing GOP's war on labor, the busting of public sector unions, the suppression of collective bargaining, the attacks on Planned Parenthood and the provision of abortion and other services all over the country, the attempts to suppress voting of the minorities and college students with new restrictive voter identification legislation, the plan to eliminate Pell grants for college students, the serious overall cuts in education across many states, the proposed drastic cuts for environmental protection, the attempts to deregulate again Wall St, defund SEC and the newly established FCPB (Financial Consumer Protection Bureau), the cuts on low-income housing, heating assistance, and food stamps.
The details of the GOP 2011 budget plan which was wrongly focused on non-security discretionary spending alone and called for significant cuts in needed government programs and services are provided in Reference2. Moreover, the GOP attack on the diverse programs and other issues above, represents a clear over-reach. They enraged several Democratic constituencies and have unwillingly mobilized our base in a good many instances (attacks on public unions, cuts in college education and the environment). We should capitalize on this dissatisfaction and craft specific targeted messages suitable for each one of the constituencies to ensure their mobilization and participation in the process.
The Message Targeting Independents
For the independents, the Democrats also need to emphasize the successes in the war of terror and the killing of Bin Laden. President Obama has been very aggressive against Al Qeida, including the use of drones in Pakistan, and many terrorists and Al-Qeida operatives have been killed. He took aggressive, decisive action both in the case of the Somali pirates to free the captive captain of the cargo-ship and in the Team 6 Navy Seal operation that killed Osama Bin Laden. Obama succeeded where Bush miserably failed by diverting US attention from the war in Afganistan to the war of choice in Iraq and subsequent nation building there.
He also re-focused the war effort in Afganistan, surged the troops there for an anti-insurgency effort and is expected to start drawing our forces out in summer 2011. It seems that the President has been successful in taking the issue of national security away from the monopolized ownership and advantage held by the GOP over previous Democratic candidates and administrations. This levels the play field on matters of national defense and national security.
Democrats should also emphasize that the President has made sincere efforts to control deficits in a balanced, responsible, and equitable manner, as compared to the extreme proposals of GOP Ryan's 2012 Budget (Reference1), which offer tax breaks to the rich and corporations while calling for drastic cuts to Medicare and Medicaid. Moreover, the 2011 Budget Compromise for $78.5 billion in discretionary spending cuts attests to his deficit reduction efforts; for details on this please read the Erie Times News (ETN) Op-Ed Reference3 and the Daily Kos articles Reference4 and Reference5.
On the other hand the President has been all along promoting pro-growth investments in infrastructure, innovation and education which will create jobs and increase US competitiveness in the Global markets, as he outlined in his SOTU address in January 2011 (details provided in Reference6) and in his proposed 2011 budget (details provided in Reference2 together with comparisons to the 2011 GOP Budget). The investments in clean energy technologies aimed to liberate us from our over-reliance on fossil fuels -- also an issue of national security, in transportation (hybrid and electrical cars, high-speed rail), in infrastructure (updating our power grid, expansion of high-speed fiber and wireless internet networks) and in research (advanced medical research and information technology) should be appealing to many Independents.
As expected the President's pro-growth agenda has been stalled and obstructed by the GOP-controlled House; even programs like high-speed rail that still have unspent funds from the 2009 Stimulus have been rejected by GOP Governors of several Red States.
Finally, other major pieces of legislation passed by the Democrats in 2010 like the "Small Business Jobs Bill", Financial (Wall St) Reform and the establishment of the FCPB as well as the "Patients' Bill of Rights" part of the Affordable Care Act should also be appealing to Independents, but we do not elaborate on these here.
Defending the Democratic Accomplishments of 2009-2010 on the Economy
Democrats should also explain that Obama and the 111th Democratic Congress averted the pain and misery of another Great Depression, stabilized the financial system, and set the economy on a path of recovery. Whatever jobs have been created -- more than 2.1 million jobs so far (almost 900,000 in 2011) by the private sector + 2.3 million jobs saved by the 2009 Stimulus -- was the result of the Democratic efforts alone. GOP only obstructed in 2009-2010 and since Jan 2011 they have focused on anything else than on creating jobs.
For a List of the Achievements by the President and the 111th Democratic Congress (2009-2010) please read Reference7a, where item by item the Democratic achievements on most areas are enumerated. This list is detailed but it does not claim to be exhaustive. The Democratic achievements should be promoted and broadly advertised. They should also be contrasted with the total GOP obstructionism and in 2009-2010 and inactivity in 2011 on creating jobs and calling for spending cuts and additional tax cuts for the wealthy.
Additional very useful references are the Obameter of www.politifact.com (Reference7b), which provides a list of the 508 promises made by President Obama during his 2008 campaign and categorizes them as kept (135 so far), kept but compromised (40), broken (42), stalled (69), in the works (220), and not yet rated (2), and a similarly structured GOP-Pledge-O-Meter (Reference7c) that keeps track of the GOP promises made during the 2010 campaign. Both references provide specific details about the promises in each of the aforementioned categories.
More specifically on the economy, two ETN Op-Ed's (reproduced in Erie Lead) describe in good detail the 2009 Stimulus (Reference8) as well as the 2010 Tax Deal (Reference9); they elaborate on the essential composition of these two "stimulus packages" -- the former provided tax cuts and credits to individuals and corporations, as well as major assistance to the states to help cope with the great recession, but also direct pro-growth investments, while the latter only provided tax cuts of which only a small portion were true stimulus -- and provide a critique of the stimulative potential and impact for the economy of their various components.
A criticism of the initial stimulus and its impact -- it was unfortunately insufficient in size and not fast acting and thus resulted in a slow economic recovery (given the depth and breadth of the Great Recession of 2008-2009) and ultimately the slow recovery affected adversely the Democrats during the 2010 election -- is provided in Reference10. The article also discusses the magnitude of GOP's misinformation campaign in 2010 and the specific falsehoods on the economy that they ably and widely propagated and greatly influenced public opinion. Several of these falsehoods are addressed and dispelled in Part II of this diary entry.
Closing Thoughts on The Democratic Message
Democratic appeals to just the rational self-interest of people by reciting well-intended economic programs and pro-growth agendas alone will not do. We need systematic shaping of the Democratic message so as to appeal to the emotions, deeper feelings, and guts of the electorate -- in particular the blue-collar whites who have been defecting the Democratic Party en masse since Reagan -- and not just to their rational self-interest. Here the writings of professors George Lakoff of UC Berkely, Ian Mittrof of USC and Joan Williams of UC Hastings College of Law may become useful. Hopefully there is ongoing work to this direction at some of the progressive Think Tanks. Conservative Think Tanks have been working on these issues for over 30 years now and sometimes use dangerous methods from psychology and the social sciences (that sometimes approach Goebels propaganda methods) and have perfected political message management techniques. I am not suggesting to imitate them completely but we should attempt to develop effective antidotes to their techniques of message shaping and management.
Moreover, we must continue to expose and confront the Republicans and their fringes with economic and other facts. Not necessarily hoping to convince them, but to expose to independents and to moderate Republicans that the GOP and its Tea Party backers are extreme free-market ideologues, social and cultural extremists, enemies of civil-liberties and union rights and often war-mongers. We must uncover that they are servants of the wealthy and the big corporations, and that most importantly that it is the Reaganomics and supply-side economic theories and policies of the last 30 years -- namely that high spending, coupled with low taxes for the wealthy and tax loopholes, credits and subsidies for the corporations and total unwillingness to curtail the off-shoring of jobs -- which brought the high deficits. In the same vein we must expose the detrimental effects of their current austerity policies, their attacks on the social safety net for the elderly and the poor, which are bordering on open class war, and their focus on anything else but job creation. Part II of this diary entry is an attempt to accomplish for the economic issues exactly what is described in this paragraph.