Crossposted at My Left Wing
Markos revisits the "message" issue for 2006:
Democrats in DC think that keeping their mouths shut and letting the country see the GOP debacle in all its glory will earn them dramatic gains. The corrosive consultants whisper in their ears that taking a strong stance will only earn them enemies, galvanize partisan Democrats to turn out. So they remain in relative silence. Heck, even admonishing Dems like Russ Feingold who have the temerity to speak out against the disaster in DC.
But silence doesn't motivate. People ARE seeing that Republicans can't govern. There's no way around that. What they AREN'T seeing is how Democrats will be any different. How they offer change.
. . . You cannot have leadership without offending someone. Someone once said you could measure Bobby Kennedy's greatness by the number of enemies he had. George Bush and Karl Rove know this, and they don't care who they offend as they seek to inspire and motivate their core supporters.
I don't disagree but I think "throw the bums out" remains the most powerful message. In any event, while we may disagree on WHEN the "Change Agenda" needs to be rolled out, we don't disagree that it HAS to be rolled out prior to the elections.
The recent discussions on the Common Good lead the way in my view. I wrote:
We need to embrace proudly our commitment to civil rights, women's rights, economic justice, equal protection under the law, the right to privacy.
We are for these not because we are serving special interests. African-Americans are not special interests. Women are not special interests. The working class is not a special interest. These are Americans. Who deserve a fair shake.
We are for the Common Good and for doing the right thing. For being fair and being honest. Because that is the Democratic Way. And the American Way. We don't divide the country in segments or groups. We believe that ALL Americans are entitled to good , honest, competent government.
And the Bush years make clear that Republicans are not. They are beholden to one group, that has not only imposed its views on the Republican Party, but now will settle for nothing less than imposing their views on the entire country. We've seen how the Republicans govern - disastrously. We need to make sure the country understands this.
The country saw how Democrats governed in the 1990s.
So the question to be presented to the voters is clear - "Are you better of now than you were in the 1990s?"
The answer is clear. Democrats are the answer.
E.J. Dionne identifies a powerful issue to drive home that point. I'll discuss it on the flip.
Dionne writes:
Rove never stopped being political, even when he had formal responsibility for policy. What's intriguing about the shift in the direction of Rove's energies is that it marks a turn from the high politics of a partisan realignment driven by ideas and policies to the more mundane politics of eking out votes, seat by seat and state by state. Most of Rove's grander dreams have died as the president's poll numbers have come crashing down.
It's forgotten that the president's proposal to privatize part of Social Security was not primarily about creating solvency in the system, since the creation of private accounts would have aggravated deficits for a significant period. It was part of a larger effort to reorganize government and bring the New Deal era to a definitive close.
The president's "ownership society" was a political project designed to increase Americans' reliance on private markets for their retirements and, over the longer run, on their own resources for health coverage. The idea was that broadening the "investor class," a totemic phrase among tax-cutting conservatives, would change the economic basis of politics -- and create more Republicans.
The collapse of the Social Security initiative was thus more than a policy failure. It was a decisive political defeat that left Bush and Rove with no fallback ideas around which to organize domestic policy. And just as the growing unpopularity of the war in Vietnam after 1966 forced Lyndon Johnson to abandon his Great Society programs -- partly because of large GOP gains in Congress during that year's midterm elections -- opposition to the Iraq war is undercutting Bush's effort to create a kind of Great Society-in-reverse.
Yes, it was a political defeat for Bush. But Democrats need to make it an ELECTORAL defeat in November. Jim McDermott understood the potency of this issue long before the pundit class - which now hails it. Jim McDermott in May 2005:
[I]f there's anything that's lost, that we've lost in the last . . . while, it's . . . the sense of the common good. . . . I think the biggest thing that's missing in the Democratic Party is that we have lost the idea of the common good. That's what Franklin Delano Roosevelt was going with social security . . . and herein comes the President who says "we have to get rid off that, we want to put you on in the ownership society." What he means is that we want to put you out on your own and that's splitting again the idea of the common good. . . .
Armando: I have to tell you my first reaction ... you talk about the theme of the common good, it is very powerful, I think you really hit on something there congressman.
This is a winning issue. A timely issue. The Common Good vs. The Norquist and Dobson Haters of People and Government.
It works as a synthesizing message to "Throw the Bums Out." I think it is our way to victory in November.