Now that I've had some time to reflect on our losses this week, I think I have a better understanding of what's happening in America. If you watch the news, you'll hear a lot of chatter about the moral election, a theory straight from Ralph Reed's talking points. The problem is, there's a grain of truth to this.
Here's the simple facts, folks: repubs are better salesmen than Dems, and have been for some time. They have managed to reshape the venacular of politics again and again, and sell the public on things that they really don't want. Death taxes. The contract with America. Defense of marriage. This could go on, but you get my point. There is no way that Bush should have been re-elected, and the repubs certainly shouldn't have gained in Congress, but they did. And they succeeded because they change the debate on issues to a make it seem like a debate on morals, which is something that is truly important to most people.
We lost the election because we tried to be nice for too long. We had a great convention, where everyone except Jimmy Carter was very nice. And what dod we get from it? Nothing. The repubs eviscerated John Kerry in their convention, and then went on TV and said they didn't. What did they get? A 5 point bounce.
The repubs made Bush seem like the moral choice. Iraq is the moral war. Cutting taxes during wartime is the moral thing to do. Of course, they do this in the most duplicitous ways possible, but it works because they have the "liberal media" so cowed that they have practically no opposition. Their agenda is goven only cursory scrutiny, and the media has become a partner.
That's why the talk among Dems about reaching out to the repubs and working with Bush absolutely boggles the mind. If the situation was reversed, what would the repubs do? They'd come out swinging, just as they did with Bill Clinton. After Clinton was elected, the repubs swung further to the right, not toward the middle.
America isn't becoming more conservative, the repubs are, and they're the only ones doing the talking. So how do we compete? Simple, we fight. This is not the time to roll over and play dead just because Bush thinks he has political capital. Despite his claims, he will not try to work with Dems unless he absolutely has to. We need to raise our voices louder than ever before.
We need to make America understand that supporting gay rights is the moral choice, not the other way around. Paying down the deficit is moral because we can't ask out grandchildren to pay our bills so that Charles Schwab can get more tax breaks.
The repubs will come at us with everything they've got, but we have the moral high ground, not them. The first step is to swing left, and remove the gloves.