Politics today has a strong smell of The Emperor's New Clothes. The Monarchist Party touts the splendid fabric as exactly what the Empire's industry can produce once freed of burdensome regulations demanding that they prove what they make actually exists.
The Antimonarchist Party insists that the taxpayers' money would have been better spent helping the poor; but they too are falling over each other in their rush to praise the splendid fabric.
And the little boy who told the truth? He must be some kind of extremist. The Antimonarchist Party can't repeat what he said because if people knew that they agreed with what he said, the upcoming election to the Imperial Diet would be a slam dunk, and all the campaign consultants would be out of a job.
Every day, as I read the news and wade through a hundred campaign emails, I get the feeling that the Democratic establishment isn't nearly as scared as they want us to be.
This scenario is different from this election year in the US because exposing the lie about the Emperor's New Clothes would mainly draw in voters from the Left. In the US today, there are 4 lies which, if debunked, would help the Democrats attract voters in the Center. I have some words to say about attracting voters from the Left, mainly of the "I wish I knew how" variety.
The Centrist vote is very much out there, but the Democrats are going after them the wrong way. Two of the lies I discuss are of long standing; and I get a strong impression that the Democratic Party Establishment is afraid to tackle them, perhaps because they'd be too successful. The other pair I'm including because the lies do shift votes, and I have a suggested counternarrative for each.
The Liberal Media Bias lie.
For 44 years, I've been listening to the Republicans whine about the liberally biased media.
For 44 years, I've been watching the Republicans act with the perfect assurance the media had their backs.
Something I haven't witnessed in all that time is for a Democrat in a leadership position point out that cognitive dissonance: that either the Republicans know it's a lie or they're masochistically begging to be humiliated.
I've asked this question before, and one answer I got was that it would take a lot of time to shift people's perceptions. It makes me think of advice columnist Ann Landers's reply to a writer who wanted to go to medical school but worried that she'd be such and such an age when she got out. AL asked, "How old would you be in 4 years if you didn't go to Med School?"
Even if it did take 2 years, we could have done it 22 times over since Spiro Agnew started the Republican war on the media.
We don't need to attack the media directly (although some examples of Limbaugh dancing--bending over backwards as far as they can in hopes the GOP won't find something to whine about in the inch their shoulders are off the floor--deserve to be brought to the public's attention.) We could take an extreme Republican statement (I know, that's redundant.) and ask, "Didn't that candidate get the memo about media bias?"
The Campaign Contributions are Free Speech lie.
The purest example of free speech is Speaker's Corner in London's Hyde Park. When I was there 10 years ago, 3 people were speaking at once, with enough space between them that they didn't drown each other out. The first had a big crowd of listeners around him, the second a fair number, and the third just a few. The listeners sorted themselves out by who they found most interesting.
Now imagine the a British David Koch showed up with a kick-ass sound system that could drown out in Buckingham Palace 2 miles away. Would that convey information beyond the power of his own voice? No! Campaign contributions aren't speech, they're amplification. They say that money talks, but they don't say that it's always the same thing: "this is the value I put on getting whatever." Money per se does not inform, it just makes one person's information harder to avoid.
Besides, of all the people who believe that campaign contributions are speech, how many came to then-President Clinton's defense when he was caught "listening" to what foreigners like Riady had to "say?" The word citizen doesn't appear once in the entire Bill of Rights. On a more theoretical level, if there's a truth out there and only a foreigner has the guts to say it, does that mean the voters don't need to hear it?
The Photo IDs Protect the Vote lie.
Imagine that you run a store and you lose $70 a year due to shoplifting. (Work with me here, this is a thought experiment.) Imagine that a consultant comes in and tries to sell you a security system that costs $20,000 per annum. Wouldn't you wonder if he isn't actually trying to drum up business so friends who make the security systems will get more business? I suppose that most people would think that paying 3 to 5 times for security than they lose to theft can be justified because the people who get the money earn it. A ratio of 300 to 1 is simply bogus.
The reason that people aren't aware the ratio is this badly out of whack is that they don't envision themselves being without photo IDs, and this analogy has a much better chance of capturing their imagination.
The Contraceptive Coverage Violates Religious Liberty lie.
From the moment this issue first arose 2 years ago, I saw this as being about the employees' money. Picture the Company Store as the term was understood 100 years ago. If you worked in a company town, your boss was your landlord and your grocer. Now imagine that boss is Jewish, and he argues that because the money to stock the store goes straight from his bank account to the wholesaler, he should have the right to pay for only kosher food. Would that right outweigh the employees' right to spend their hard-earned scrip on pork?
I have heard lots of responses. Some made me refine my argument. None really disputed the logic.
Now imagine that Notre Dame University had a credit union, and they refused to honor checks that Protestant and Jewish professors sent to Planned Parenthood. That would be corporate suicide. When it's harder for workers to get health insurance outside the company store, does that turn the moral equation around so that the employees must accommodate their bosses' consciences?
A Disquieting Rumor.
This year, some pundits are saying that certain people want the Republicans to win the Senate because that'll make it easier for Hillary Clinton to win. This isn't the first time I've heard such a rumor--it was most devastating in 2000 as people thought that the High Tech Bubble was sure to bust, and it would be better for Democrats if it fell onto George W. Bush than Al Gore.
I think that these pundits are sensing; but can't bring themselves to accept the full implications, that the Democratic establishment isn't putting its every effort into winning, These are the punches that are pulled: The "Liberal media" and "Campaign contributions are speech" lies should have been debunked a generation or two ago, but they haven't.