In 2022, every Dem and Ind candidate for elected office should be armed with the same script (see below) when they are on stage debating their lying and cheating GOP counterparts. They should add unique zingers that reveal and condemn the specific crooked and immoral quotes and positions taken by their opponent, but those rejoinders must be short and to the point.
Their opening arguments may be focused on Hope and Change, but their closing argument must be more than 50% Sturm und Drang. (Ok, I’m not explicitly advocating the overthrow of the Enlightenment cult of Rationalism, but their delivery must be full of “storm and desire”).
Their responses to individual questions by the moderator should contain praise for Biden’s accomplishments, but each response should also include a future pivot toward the dread (“who is my government going to intentionally hurt next?”), disgust (“how will I explain such widespread incompetence and willful ignorance to my children”), and shame (“what new forms of cheating and lying will my tribal opponent sink to next?”) that all Americans would experience under unfettered Republican rule.
Their rebuttals against their opponents’ false charges of socialism should be positive, proud, and plucky. They should offer a cool blue invitation to Purple voters to toss away their allegiance to the party of death and join the party of “the good life” (which is focused on acts of goodness, restoration of civic honor, and love for their neighbors).
Here are some examples, in point-counterpoint form:
- My Democrat opponent wants your children to stay home from school!
- My Republican opponent is supporting Team Virus.
- Why? So he can claim blame nature for all the deaths and he can exonerate himself for advocating his idea of “normal”.
- Guess what, he’s responsible for gross negligence because 97% of prior American generations warmly accepted vaccines for mumps and chicken pox and polio.
- My Democrat opponent wants to take away your freedoms!
- My Republican opponent is opposed to sensible gun control and opposed to sensible mask mandates and opposed to sensible education about the evils of slavery.
- My opponent would vote (has voted?) for nonsense in the name of freedom.
- I stand for freedom, but not when it turns common sense upside down.
- Americans should not choose the fake type of freedom that says it’s ok to yell “Fire” in a crowded building.
- My Democrat opponent is a socialist!
- My Republican opponent is an anarchist.
- My opponent wants government to do nothing to prevent your electric power from failing during a long cold spell (like Governor Abbott did in Texas).
- My opponent wants government to reduce taxes on corporations and ultra-millionaires because they support him with big donations.
- My opponent wants to reduce government funding for enforcers who can recover tens of billions of dollars in underpaid taxes from fat cats who think it’s ok to cheat the rest of America’s hardworking taxpayers.
- My Democrat opponent supports dead people voting!
- I am opposed to cheating. Buy my Republican opponent has officially supported cheating!
- He supports reducing the number of polling places in poor neighborhoods and then criminalizing giveaways of free water bottles to voters standing in a long line.
- He supports redistricting that disenfranchises 80% of Democratic voters who want blue legislators in equal proportions to their numbers.
- He supports giving state legislators the power to replace local election boards in cities and blue counties for no good reason — just because the red legislators don’t like the outcome.
Please add more rebuttals in the comments, or please publish your own list and circulate it to you favorite blue candidates.