Many people a week ago expressed enthusiasm over democrats making more of the theme of
accountability as we rebuild the party and fight back against Republican "branding" of us.
Now is a time we can start building that theme more effectively, through opposition to the Gonzales and Rice nominations. Bush has effectively desensitized America to what should constitute a scandal. These nominations are outrageous.
We need to oppose these nominations, vocally. Even if we lose,
- they should only win 51-49 confirmations in the Senate, and
- Republican senators should be made to firmly embrace these hacks ("group photo everyone!") for reference in future campaigns.
Proposed Key messages below.
Proposed key messages:
- Democrats believe in accountability and good government
- Bush and Republicans clearly do not.
- They are apparently willing to reward incompetence because they are maniacally obsessed with loyalty and obedience
- Bush and Republicans are desperate to escape the fall-out of burgeoning scandals and think it helps them to get warm Senate embraces for rogues like Rice and Gonzales. They hope to reference these confirmations as part of a misdirection campaign at some time in the future, as the walls start to cave in.
- If these two are confirmed, given their track record, our country will only get weaker and less secure every day of the next 4 years.
Part of the lesson of the Kerry campaign is to stick to simple messages. If we have to go deeper, though, here's some more proposed framing:
1. Accepting these nominations is effectively to say:
- It was OK you were asleep at the wheel and let terrorists kill more than 3000 of our citizens on 9/11, despite intelligence warnings
- It was OK that you fabricated rationales for an invasion that has caused death and injury to more than 15,000 U.S. soldiers (and untold numbers of Iraqi civilians), let Osama bin Laden get away, has made us less secure at home, has cost more than $250 billion so far, foolishly undermined 60-year alliances, reflected a gross misreading of the situation in Iraq
- It doesn't bother us that the Iraqi reconstruction (partially directed by Dr. Rice) was appallingly botched due to lack of planning, cronyism, administrative incompetence, and outright corruption
- It is OK that we have let North Korea play us like amateurs, taking advantage of our self-created distractions in Iraq to expand its nuclear arsenal. This is another example where Condi seemed unable to spot an obvious threat, and clearly unable to formulate an effective response.
- The abuses at Abu Ghraib (enabled and encouraged by a Gonzales memo) were OK -- despite the fact they reflected the discarding of core American values, made us the moral equivalent of our enemies in the eyes of many, made the duty of our troops even more dangerous, dramatically undermined the prospects of success in exiting Iraq
- The collapse of Enron (for whom Gonzales was a counsel) was just capitalism at work, despite the Republican-engineered bulwarks that protected vast corruption from public scrutiny, and too bad about the thousands of pensioners left out in the cold
2. Appointing Rice to be Secretary of State is a
tactical blunder, reflecting continued poor judgment by President Bush
- Rice has no prospect of being taken seriously by other foreign ministers - they regard her as compromised and untrustworthy.
- Appointing her is effectively to say that the U.S. will suspend its foreign policy for the next four years. This is the wrong time to be setting aside our diplomatic toolbox.
- Appointing her dooms any prospect of restarting the middle east peace process, or of rebuilding our tattered alliances.
3. Colin did the best he could under difficult circumstances - the administration is dominated by ideological fanatics out of touch with reality. He was the only grown up. It is a shame he so tarnished his legacy by association with Bush.
(It doesn't benefit us to scorch Powell. He's gone, but the idiots are still there and should continue to be the target of critique. And we would like Powell to write a nice, long, incisive, detailed memoir of the last few years.)
