Welcome to Afternoon Latte, a series intended to be not too serious. Just a little pick me up for the end of the day, something to keep your mind going when you'd rather nap!
Okay, so maybe I am channeling Niccolo Machiavelli this afternoon, but I thought of an idea that is not really strong enough for a post, but might be just right for the Afternoon Latte.
One of the problems that the Democratic Party has is that we get really distracted and down very easily. Our base is not like the Republican base that is breathing fire and all but drinking their own urine at the idea that anything Democrats want or support might be enacted.
This gives them and advantage in midterms all the time, where mostly older more conservative voters vote. It is part of why a party that really has no new ideas and whose old ideas are so bad they don’t ever poll well keeps managing to gain seats in State Houses and in the Congress.
What can we do about that? Well maybe it is time to take a page from their book and throw some red meat to our base on a regular basis. How do you do that? Well what if we (Democrats) start proposing a bunch of State and Federal Constitutional Amendments?
You things like making it unconstitutional to treat corporations as people with rights? Or say an amendment that makes it clear that marriage is a right between any two adults who wish to be married? Or maybe something that grants card check organizing rights to labor?
Now to be clear, I don’t approve of legislating through Constitutional Amendments. I think it is bad policy. But here is the thing, I don’t think any of these items would pass anyway, which is kind of the point. What we are looking for here is a way to keep Liberal ideas and ideals front and center in the news.
We want it to have to be reported on, even if the report says it is going nowhere for two reasons. First off having something to vote for is really important in voter turn out. An organizing amendment would turn out labor and labor sympatric voters like no ones business. Even if you don’t win, you have traditionally Democratic voters coming to polls and while they are there they might as well vote for Dems.
The second reason is even more insidious. If there are news report after news report after news report about the efforts to move the Liberal agenda forward it changes the conversation. We stop hearing about just the wackadoo Republican ideas like ending birth-right citizenship and start hearing about the Liberal ideas.
If you think there is not power in repetition of ideas, then you have never heard of Madison Avenue. This is the soul of marketing, the repetition of an idea until it becomes not only acceptable but common wisdom.
The final benefit is one that Democrats suck at; training our voters to turn out every time rain shine or crappy candidate. I am not going to make an argument that everyone should vote for a candidate just because he or she is a Democrat. We know what that leads to. But when the top line Dem is objectionable, far too often Democratic voters stay home and we wind up with jackasses in Congress and the Senate.
By consistently giving Dem voters something to turn out for and vote, we start getting them in the habit that conservative voters are in, namely exercising the sovereign franchise.
So there is it Kossacks, a little idea to chew over in the late afternoon. What do you think? What amendments to you think would achieve the goal of getting the Dem voters out and making the Republicans crazy at the same time?
The floor is yours.