Yesterday, in a typically inane column Brooks argues that voters want a few simple things from their government. As usual, he proposes some mythical third way that doesn't exist, but here's the kicker:
This is not liberalism, which inserts itself into the crannies of life. It’s not conservatism, suspicious of federal power. It’s a gimlet-eyed federalism — strong government with sharply defined tasks.
I'm 37, and maybe I don't remember a period when the Democratic Party wanted control of the intimate details of people's lives, but I have extremely specific memories of a Republican Party that in recent memory, has advocated:
(follow me over the fold, please...)
- Keeping the unfortunate Terry Schiavo alive when her husband believed that she would have wanted to die.
- Eliminating the right to abortion and to any kind of birth control some religious people consider abortion (i.e. IUDs, the pill, etc. You know, the kind that actually works)
- Pioneered a federal program to promote traditional marriage among the poor, called the Healthy Marriage Initiative
- Tried to dictate who can marry whom through the Defense of Marriage Act
- Pushed through demonstrably ineffective abstinence only sex "education" in public schools.
- Made it legal for the federal government to spy on private citizens without a warrant or permission of the courts.
You know, those Republicans, who are so suspicious of federal power?
The day before, speaking in Nashua, NH, candidate Mitt Romney declared that "Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama or John Edwards will take America in a sharp left turn towards Europe with big government, big taxes, Big Brother running your lives," he said.
Are we going to let them get away with that?
If the Republican party ever owned privacy as an issue, it has long since sacrificed that issue on the altar of the religious right. Our Democratic candidates need to hit back hard when they try to use that meme against them. The Republicans have not only been behind every Big Brother initiative of the last 20 years, they have run on that platform!
This effort to turn privacy into a Democratic problem reminds me of those repulsive Republican ladies with the purple-heart bandaids at the Republican National Convention: taking their own candidate's greatest weakness, and their opponent's greatest strength, and turning it backwards and upside down. It's a shocking trick, and we can't let them play it again.
Here's the meme our candidates need to circulate: if you value your privacy, the right to do as you please, the right to make your own decisions about your personal life, VOTE DEMOCRATIC!
Also: The party of Big Brother is the Republican Party. And they're damned proud of it!
Of course, the party that is costing our grandchildren billions of dollars to pay for a disastrous and illegitimate war has little claim to the mantle of small government and fiscal responsibility, either, but that's a subject for another diary.