I'm sorry if I don't feel like joining the pity party here, the prognostications of woe and whatnot. It's not that I'm having any more fun than you are, or are much more pleased with the results.
But as things go on, the frustration I face is that so many have just decided to give up. Yet those same people believe they can tell the folks in Washington that they're dumb for not having gone all the way, as far as you wanted them to go. I don't see how it squares.
In my opinion, after any such defeat or tough negotiation, the smart thing to do is to settle down and calmly look over the results of what just happened. Join me over the jump, I've got some suggestions.
1) People are going to be pissed off by all this. Does it benefit us more for them to be pissed off at us, or at the Republicans?
Well, duh. It benefits everybody more if the hostage taker loses the weapon of the majority, if they once again become the minority party in Congress, on both sides.
So make the suggestion to people that if they want an end to this bullshit, it's time to stop putting their trust in the Republican Party to govern. Tell them that the cuts, the unemployment and everything all represent something that the Republicans forced on the Democrats by the threat of the economic collapse of a default.
2) People are already pissed off that we came this close to such a default, that government got this dysfunctional. So long as we're even handed, fair and balanced to be sure, we give people the wrong impression. We help reinforce a narrative that I think people here hate when somebody else brings it. No, the Democrats were not the unreasonable party here, in any and all senses of the word. We tried to bring balance, to spread to burden, even to offer the Republicans a clean Debt Ceiling increase to avoid the controversy altogether.
If you want a reason for this dysfunction, and any dysfunction that follows, the devastating logical case is that it was necessary for the Republican Party to have set these events in motion, for it to have happened at all.
3) The Republicans are splintering as a party. The sooner that splintering is complete, the better. We want them to undermine their own ability to form a majority. We want to show the Tea Parties to be the inflexible assholes they are, unable to govern. We want one side of the Republican Party to resent the other, and act to block the other side.
We want the full weight of the last two years of controversy and anxiety to fall right on the weakness of the Republican Party. So, what we need people to do here is put pressure on the GOP on all fronts in a all ways to act contrary to what the Tea Party wants. Where cuts they pursue, we want controversy that kills their poll numbers. When they go after Medicare, or endanger it by playing out the Super Congress clock, we want seniors picketing their offices, and their phones, e-mail, and twitter accounts jammed by hostile messages.
4) The Super Congress is a hostage drama waiting to happen. That's not necessarily a plus for the Republicans. See, with this deal, the default option is literally out of their hands. The worse they can do is force dramatic cuts across the board. They can't absolutely kill the economy.
But who will they be holding hostage? Entitlements. Right before an election. Entitlements. It's a gift from heaven for us. If they go through with their bullshit, we can nail them as having brought this on, nail them for it.
But didn't we agree to this?
5) It's an agreement under duress, stupid.
That's right. We're not responsible for forcing this. The Republicans did it. They forced the job killing cuts in spending. They forced the burden to fall lopsidedly on the poor. In fact, they specifically shot down proposals that would have spread the burden.
I know some of you will quibble, but I don't think you're understanding the dynamics of a political story. If there is to be a good guy and a bad guy, why are we trying to portray ourselves as equally bad? Does that make the Dems we like more electable? No, they get shot down with the rest, because people don't distinguish. We have to look at this in terms of the overall gestalt of how the party is viewed. If we told people a story, a proveable, largely correct story to boot, that explained how much of the unwanted cuts and deprivations came because of Republican efforts, I think it would go a long way towards swinging sympathy our way.
Sympathy, and votes.
It's simple marketing, people. We're not going to win by saying we're not as bad. We're going to win by saying we're much better. We're not going to win by portraying ourselves as weak, we're going to win by portraying our opposition as psychopathically callous, abusive of their power, in need of a quick exit from office.
We're not going win by playing the media war in a fair and balanced way. We need to look at our situation, and see how we can turn it to our advantage, rather than lazily just lose hop and abandon our poltical efforts to avoid the pain of disappointment.