Rove is slimy. Rove is sneaky. Rove takes cheap shots. Rove isn't a genius, but he's a guy who knows how to play no-limits blackjack with the best of them.
He's a guy who seems to have no sense of right and wrong, only what's best for his side. He'll do whatever he wants, whenever he wants, and he'll do it without worrying about logic, tact, or any conscience-based reaction.
We knew all this. We've known it, we've said it, other people have said it.
It's fact.
So how do we deal with it?
Well, first of all, we recognise it for what it is.
It's a ploy.
And it's desperation.
If Rove comes out into the spotlight, there's a reason. He's not liberal-bashing. He's not conservative-lauding. He's not politicizing 9/11. He's not trying to distract America from the real issues--Iraq, Social Security, flag-burning amendment, stem cell research, economy, ethics, Plame, abortion, gay marriage, Gitmo, Bolton, filibusters, whatever. He's not trying to fight sagging poll numbers, he's not shoring up an administration on the verge of a sheer drop. At least, he's doing none of these things by themselves.
He's doing all of those at once. Even if you hate the guy, you've got to admit, that's a master play. And on top of it, he's handing us an even bigger distraction--dealing the cards himself.
So that's the first step: recognising that he's just anted up a whole lot more chips than we might have immediately noticed.
Now we've got to meet or raise his bet.
How?
Meeting his bet is easy. Or so it would seem. But to do it we need to get past the divisions in the Democratic Party and work together. We need to come to a point of unity and decide that we're going to fight together. And then we work it out and divide it all up.
We decide which group debates Rove, which group keeps watch on Iraq, which handles Social Security, the flag-burning amendment, stem cell research, the economy, ethics violations, the leak on Plame, abortion, gay marriage, Gitmo, Bolton, filibusters, whatever issues we decide to fight for. That way no one person is expected to keep up with everything. That way our chips don't get too unwieldy to stack up, that way we've got eyes on the table looking for the cards dealt from underneath.
But one key to that is communication, and the other is unity. We don't have enough sense of either within the party to accomplish this right now. We've got Clinton-backers and Dean-backers and these backers and those backers, and that's fine. It's as it should be. But we need to find some point of consensus between us all, even if it's only that this game is worth winning.
To keep our chips on the table, you might say, we need to work as one player. Otherwise we're only taking each others' chips away, and the dealer's going to rake it all in.
And meeting Rove's bet is all well and good--if the dealer busts, we win it all; if we push, at least we keep our chips. And hey, the odds are with the house and always have been in this game. Losing isn't what we need to worry about. It's not playing at all that we should fear.
So how do we raise his bet?
We don't just meet him. We go further. We take every opportunity not just to say 'You're wrong!', but to say 'You're wrong, and here's how we would have done it right!'
We don't stop sliding chips forward until we're ahead, in other words.
'Social Security privatization is
wrong, Republicans. And here's how we'd do it right--
we'd make sure the program is funded, and we'd lock that money away so no one can take it all back out and undercut the program to manufacture a crisis!'
or
'Hey, Republicans, you're wrong to want to want to get rid of the filibuster just because you're having a hard time with it. If it were us, we'd be glad to respect the long-standing tradition of the filibuster, which is an important part of the system of checks and balances that make this country great! In fact, we'd
bronze it!'
It doesn't matter
what the issue is or what our solution would be. What matters is that we show America that not only can we put our chips on the table, we know what to do with them.
We have to let them know that we're not just talkers. We're
players. Our minds are in the game. They need to
see that.
It struck me, watching The Daily Show last night and listening to Howard Dean, that Jon Stewart was handing Dean a perfect opportunity to prove that we do have concrete plans to change America for the better. And as well as I think Howard Dean did--frankly, I love the guy, and I think he did fine--I think it was a missed opportunity as far as the details went. Yes, we can call the Republicans on their B.S. We can meet their bet.
Better to raise it. You never know when you're going to need a big jackpot coming your way. And it isn't going to happen if you just meet the minimum bet.
It'll take a lot of work. We need to communicate, to convene, to decide what we stand for and to make detailed plans for accomplishing it.
That means 'step 1 is appropriating the money, step 2 is putting it in a lockbox, step 3 is hiding that lockbox from everyone, step 4 is putting a Marine contingent in to guard the door' sort of plans, not just 'we'd like to keep it from being spent' plans. We need to prove we can do it. You can't do that speaking in generalities.
We can't afford to let America lose faith in us. We're on the verge. We can't drop over the edge.
This is our chance to start up the machine, boys and girls. And that baby's not a hybrid. It takes a lot of gas. We need a jackpot. And we need to start piling up the winnings
now.