Try the new Third Way Diet DINO! No calories, no sodium, and no principles! We won't go to your waist, and we won't get in the ring for you either. Try our new controversy-free, focus-group-tested, deodorized and inoffensive candidates! One sip, and you'll hardly believe they were ever there!
And remember, we suck less than those mean, nasty Republicans.
Doesn't that make you want to run to the polls and cast your ballots for them? Doesn't that make you want to call up your local Democratic office, sign up to GOTV, beat the pavement and make those phone calls?
What? It doesn't? Where's your enthusiasm?
The Democratic Party is falling into this trap again. The rationale is something like this. "We need to get those folks in the middle so we can win elections. So we've got to raise money from the usual folks that can write us the big checks. And to do that, we can't offend them either. So we have to be the Reasonable Adults at the Table." The resulting positions, of course, are the ones that are determined by the Consultants and Think Tanks to piss off as few people as possible. Especially the one-percenters with the big checkbooks.
It didn't work for Al Gore. It didn't work for Kerry, and it didn't work for Sink. Given the choice between Republican and Republican Lite, the low-info-voters will go for full flavor.
So the issue positions from the Republican-Lite strategy have that magic buzzword "bipartisanship". First, it brought us health care reform that originated in the Heritage Foundation. Granted, it's a slight improvement over the previous situation of cancer patients having to lose their houses to pay for chemo, because the insurers fucked them with pre-existing condition clauses. But just because health care reform was 3/4 right-wing, it didn't get the right wing shriekers to stop howling "COMMUNISM!!!111" But we're still at the mercy of insurance companies and pharmcos with all the compassion of Hannibal Lector. There's just a change in the economic incentives and ground rules to add a little more lube.
We got a party that pushed Simpson-Bowles for endless months. We got "right-sized" military presence in Afghanistan, but we're still in there playing Whac-a-Mole after close to 13 years. We've got TPP, cooked up in secret smoke-filled rooms, because they know if the secret got out, the peons would grab torches and pitchforks.
We've got a President who really, gosh-truly wants to do something about global climate change, but hasn't killed Keystone XL like it desperately deserves, and contrary to right-wing howling, has let our nation and the world drill-baby-drill right past 350ppm of CO2 in our atmosphere. Enjoy the weather lately?
President Obama claims to respect our civil liberties, but protects and feeds the military-intelligence-industrial machine that's destroyed our Fourth Amendment rights. Anyone that dares to blow the whistle on the three-letter agencies either gets thrown in prison with a kangaroo trial, or run out of the country by threat of Supermax. Did I mention that the only person in prison that's connected to torture in Iraq is the one that blew the whistle?
The GOP-Lite strategy is flawed. Do you see Democrats coming out today like we did in 2008? Here's why.
Big campaign money is unhelpful.
Oh, but the Third Way strategy gets the money from the big donors. There's a problem. The money's not to help your candidates get elected. It's to castrate them. Keep them from making too much of a fuss against the corporate masters, make sure they toe the line when the unpopular shit comes up for a vote, so there's no alternatives when the Masters of the Universe come to give the peasants their assfuckings.
To add insult to injury, the big donors will still give the majority of the money to the Republicans. Democrats (or should I say "Democrats") get enough of the big checks to keep them playing the game and begging, but it's the Republicans that get the big war-chests. To stay on the good side of the plutocrat class, you have to pull a Feinstein.
Inoffensive isn't. Don't step in the bipartisanship.
You're going for being inoffensive to rake in those undecided, unaffiliated voters? That doesn't work either. For one thing, you're not being inoffensive, no matter how hard you try. Simpson-Bowles isn't inoffensive. It's still the Cat Food Commission, and calling it "bipartisan" won't make it look better. It still cuts Social Security and Medicare, and it's still a huge blow to those who are least able to withstand it. At best, those preaching this position can claim they are screwing the little folks less than the Republicans, but the votes you get from that are so feeble that the Republicans can just call out the Tea Party and the fundies, and rake in the votes using demagoguery, playing to dog-whistle bigotry, jingoism, and religious nonsense. Oh, they're good at that!
Worse, when you make those kinds of compromises, you compromise core principles. Do we compromise with Nazis? Do you say "Hey, let's split the difference, and only put half of the Jews in the ovens?"
Fuck. No.
Do we compromise on GLBT rights? Fuck no. We demand full rights for all members of the GLBT community, and fight viciously when we don't have them. We have to be so fired up that we are willing to risk jail and risk violence for our principles.
That is why the GLBT community has been winning. They win because they fight, and they will not accept half-ass "rights".
Does the low-information voter see an Adult In The Room when he sees the Bipartisan(TM) Democrat? No, he sees a wimp, a weather-vane politician, a quisling, who won't fight for anything worthwhile. At least those Republicans will put up a fight. A fight for principles written by Satan, but a fight nonetheless. The Republicans know better than to fall into this trap.
The inoffensive shrink-wrapped diet candidate is left collecting dust on the shelves. Democrats have to pick a better strategy, and field better candidates, and better issue positions that reflect our core values, rather than being inoffensive.
For one thing, we have to come up with new ways to combat the money monster. My suggestions:
Little Money. Be like Obama was back in 2008, when everyone thought he was a progressive. Remember that so much of his campaign funds were from the little donors - the people that would throw in twenty bucks or five bucks.
Demonize Big Money Well, the Koch Brothers demonize themselves, but in the age of the Internet, surely, it can't be hard to spread the meme that politicians that accept money from the big corporate and billionaire donors are essentially taking bribes. Getting help from super-PACs to avoid having to put the money on your own books is still taking bribes, just with more difficult accounting.
Spread the word that every corporate dollar is bribe money, and help out groups like MoveToAmend.org. Those millions of dollars of Koch-fueled ads may just end up backfiring for those who play that game.
Candidates must be fighters, not compromisers.
Again, this depends on candidates being willing to stand up to the guys with the big checkbooks. But the thing is that when you do stand up for principles, fight for the little guy, not give a fuck if it gives offense to the right wing, and be an asshole when the situation demands you be an asshole, all of the sudden, you don't need the big donors. You'll get lots of fans, and the money rolls in more easily. Better yet, you get lots of people making calls for you, making Youtube videos for you, spreading the word on the Internet, and dragging people out to the voting booths.
Principles count
Despite all the meta, remember there's a reason we're progressives. We believe that health care should be a right. We believe that we work better as a country when we lift up those who need help, rather than throwing them into a gutter or into prison. We believe that reckless wars for resources are fundamentally immoral. We believe that we need to solve our environmental problems, instead of feeding the monster that is Big Oil. We believe that we should enjoy all of our Constitutional Rights, and demand that our government be held to account when our rights are violated.
When we stand for what we believe in, and hold to our principles, to the point where, as Malcolm Reynolds said in Serenity, that "It's time to misbehave," that's when the people will take our side, watch our backs, and bring us political victories. When we field nothing but shrink-wrapped, inoffensive politicians that stand for nothing, we'll hear crickets.