If you want to win elections, you have to change the talking points
Published by punkass marc September 25th, 2006 in PoliticsToday I got a mailing list message from Howard Dean and the Democratic Party. He explained his plan of attack for the fall:
We’re sick of playing defense against a Republican leadership that uses national security to scare people to win elections. We’re not going to be pushed around, spun, and defamed by right-wing extremists and those whom they use to disseminate their propaganda.
Our plan for this election is to go on the offense — to talk straight about the Republican failures and lay out a clear Democratic plan to take American foreign policy and national security in a better direction.
The email offers us a chance to donate money to make this plan happen, despite not telling us any specific ideas on which Dean intends to elaborate.
But you know what? His specific ideas don’t really matter. Whatever Dean says about national security or the War on Terror, almost no one will vote Democratic because of their foreign policy position. The Republicans have been lying about their expertise in the arena for decades, and while they’re actually terrible mismanagers of international relationships and responsible for creating more foreign threats than they extinguish, the lies have worked. People believe the Republicans have the national security issue locked up. Though generally unpopular, Bush and Republicans consistently poll well on terrorism — not Iraq, mind you, but terrorism and national security. We’re barking up the wrong tree.
We’re doing this because, for too many years, the Democrats have let the Republicans define the terms of our political debate. Liberalism is a dirty word, the only acceptable government is small government, we must show deference to the baby Jesus, and national security is the only issue worth mentioning.
Every single one of those ideas is a conservative talking point. We have to play the whole game by their rules because the Democrats refuse to create their own. In Bill Scher’s book “Wait! Don’t Move to Canada!,” he produces quality evidence that Americans like liberal ideas, can be swayed by the idea of effective governance regardless of its size, and badly want someone to address issues like the environment, health care reform, and government accountability.
If ever want to do more than win a few fluky elections against unpopular incumbents (see: Ford, Gerald and Bush, George HW), and if Democrats ever want to regain lasting control of Congress, we must change the talking points. We can win on the issues mentioned above: the environment, health care reform, and government accountability/effectiveness. We just have to get the country talking about them.
This happens 3 ways:
1) We must inject our ideas into the minds of the public. They have to lead off every Democratic speech, every politician’s answer to a question, every party advertisement. We must talk about the present problems in clear terms, saying things like “the planet is going to bake us off its surface if we don’t give it some TLC.” We should also talk clearly about what we intend to do about them, like taxing polluters and creating American energy on which we can depend.
Notice that I framed the energy independence issue as “creating American energy.” This is a bit more visceral and less abstract than the former term. It sounds like jobs and growth while still capturing the idea of self-reliance. We must find as many of these phrases as possible and say them until they’re permanently part of the lexicon.
2) We must dwarf the Republican talking points with our own. When a conservative talks up the threat of terrorism, a liberal can shrink it any number of ways:
- “Why would we expect a Republican government to fight an effective war on terror when they can’t even balance the budget?”
- “Fighting terrorism sounds like a good idea until you realize how many preventable diseases and illnesses are killing tens of thousands of our own people, all because they can’t seek help when they need it. That sounds like the real national security issue to me.”
- “Terrorism? The real imminent attack on Americans is about to come from the planet itself. If we care about our way of life, maybe we should focus a little more energy on not getting cooked to a crisp sometime this century. 9/11 will pale in comparison to what rising sea levels will do to New York, and it’s time someone said so.”
The change won’t be automatic, but if we keep saying these things, they’ll start to stick. Eventually, “terrorism” will sound as ridiculous as it actually is.
3) Find or create new media sources. Obviously, we have to deal with the mainstream media, and by working with points #1 and #2 above, we might be able to use them effectively, but if we really want to change the way people think, we must find new ways for the Democrats to reach people directly. I have a few thoughts on the idea, but we’ll discuss those later this week. Surely you recognize we can’t let the consolidated corporate media filter what Democrats say and expect our primary message to reach the people of America. A communication revolution is possible; we just have to force the issue.
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We don’t have much time to get this right. The planet needs our attention badly, and our government is crumbling. If you really believe these things, we can’t play losing political games any longer. We have to get very serious about rethinking how to be Democrats.
This starts by change the national political debate to focus on the Big 3 topics that dwarf anything the Republicans can lay claim to:
-keeping the planet from killing us
-keeping diseases from killing us
-keeping our government from killing our way of life
It’s been proven that most people want the government to address these issues. Right now, though, they have to be reminded. And that’s what we have to fix.
Reproductive rights, LGBT rights, immigration, and millions of other issues must be engaged, but the Democrats can do that much more effectively if they actually control our government, and the way to do that is to focus exclusively on environment, health care, and governemnt accountability at election time.
11 Responses to “If you want to win elections, you have to change the talking points”
- 1 Pingback on Sep 28th, 2006 at 5:59 pm
- 2 Pingback on Sep 30th, 2006 at 11:53 am
I like the American energy idea a lot. It really will create a lot of jobs—I’ve seen predictions well into the millions.
Sorry, Marc, but I think you’re wrong here. You’re not wrong about getting the Democratic message out on health care, the economy, and honest government — these are three winning issues for the Democratic Party and the more the public hears about them, the better. However, you are misguided if you think that this message will be effective if we abandon the issue of terrorism and national security to the Republicans.
Terrorism is a real issue. The Bush administration’s incredible demagoguery and cynical use of terrorism as a means of manipulating the American people by fear cannot cause us to lose sight of this. There really are Islamic radicals in the world who are funded by oil money and who really do want to kill the infidel Americans — who, indeed, have done so within recent memory and who even now plan to do so again. Anybody who hopes to get elected to office in America right now had better be aware of this and have some ideas on what to do about it.
Any candidate foolish enough to utter the words, “Fighting terrorism sounds like a good idea until…” would get about that far before being crushed beneath an avalanche of attack ads trumpeting that CANDIDATE SMITH THINKS FIGHTING TERRORISM ISN’T A GOOD IDEA!!! Which would pretty much seal his or her electoral doom in most any district in the country.
The correct tack for a Democratic candidate to take here is, “Yes, fighting terrorism is a great idea, so why have the Republicans done such a supremely awful job of it?” Republican credibility on national security comes, I think, mostly from Reagan and the Cold War. That was a while ago, now, and it is beginning to percolate through the national consciousness that Republican efforts to eliminate terrorism might not have been quite so resoundingly successful.
Perhaps you won’t convince anyone to vote Democratic solely on the national security issue, but you will convince those for whom it’s an important issue (ie, most people) that the Democratic party can be trusted to keep America safe. At which point they are then much more willing to evaluate the Democratic positions on helath care, the economy, government accontability, the environment, and so on — issues where the Democratic positions are overwhelmingly popular. But you’ll never get them there if you let the Republicans own national security. Frankly, that’s suicide.
I agree with the energy thing. There are a lot of other projects that would also yield a lot of good employment opportunities.
The problem is unless something is done to address the ridiculous gap between what workers get paid and what management pays itself, there will be no progress no matter how low unemployment is. That is one of the last topics that anyone seems willing to touch…
I’d offer spies a big monetary bonus, better funding and non-partisan support while I was heading into office if I was the dems.
It never hurts to make good with people who can slip you exploding cigars, and also gives the dems a chance to tap into the fact there is a huge and preexisting popculture concept of the dilligent and brave secret agent saving the world from the generic Other for puppies and liberty - whereas the repugs are trying to tap into the “greatest” generation’s ww2 worship, which the boomers don’t really like but go along with because they want to feel like they’re the “greatest” gen now.
It shouldn’t be too hard to come up with decent retoric that taps the fact that the boomers are the bond generation and hate the starship trooper generation that preceded them and bombed dresden. It’s obvious once you realise that the rank psychological insecurity of the boomers is the fulcrum upon which american politics swings.
Of course, if I was the dems I’d also stand up for liberty and justice as opposed to saying “bi-partisan” at random moments and going off to cry every time I got my ass whupped through my own rank incompetence, so it’s a big if.
eataTREE,
I am afraid I don’t see any evidence for your position that we can convince anyone to vote Dem on security. No poll backs you up, but there’s plenty of evidence to the contrary. When Dems start on the security issue, all people hear is poseur talk, whether or not that’s fair.
Your way of thinking failed with Kerry and it will fail in 2006 and it will fail in 2008. My way could change the issue landscape and shrink the terrorism issue considerably. Remember, outsizing terrorism allows us to set the priorities by reminding people how much _bigger_ the real issues are than terrorism in their lives.
Terrorism is important now because the Bush admin has continued to harp on the issue. We must combat that by harping on other issues. Again, it’s space people _want_ filled, whereas more terrorism talk falls on deaf ears.
Think new, and let’s start setting the agenda.
Another reason it’s pointless to talk terrorism is that there aren’t any really good ideas out there. There’s no magic bullet to fix it, and like it or not, it could happen again no matter what. The Dems, and even eataTree, can only point out that the Republicans haven’t done the job, but how do you go on the offensive with better ideas? Without them, you reinforce the idea that the Dems don’t know how to fix the problem.
It’s a dead issue for Dems, and the longer it takes for us to realize it, the longer it will be until the Dems take control of any part of government. We can’t change the landscape overnight, but we can change it by 2008, at the very least.
And remember: if we hammer the government accountability/effectiveness issue, it will show how ineffective they’ve been _in general._ Like I said: “How can we expect them to fight terrorism effectively when they can’t even balance the budget?” That kind of talk hits them twice. Ouch.
I think you can address the fear issue by talking up jobs. Most people have more reason to fear for job security than terrorism, and they’ll respond to job talk.
The way bush has turned the CIA and other intelligence agencies into partisan tools of hte republican party has seriously weakened our nation’s security because they’re our real first and last line of defense against terrorists - and at the same time the repug cooption of the intelligence agencies has gone hand in hand with the erosion of civil rights in america.
And ontop of that, international co-operation, as opposed to the double fuck up where the Bush admin released the name of a AQ mole before the operation designed to stop the london bombings, then the early reveal on the liquid plane bomb plot against hte advice of french and british intelligence agencies, is also important while the bush admin has done everything to make the entire world not want to cooperation with us on anti-terror intel.
There is an arguement for how to do the WoT better, it just requires the dems to move away from land wars in asia and towards giving the intelligence agencies actual support that doesn’t begin and end with handing them the power to extract false confessions out of people with torture so that the repugs can get the CIA to provide “proof” that Bill Clinton is osama bin laden’s lover.
I get that moving away from the entire WoT is a really fuckign good idea, if only because the very idea of the WoT is just KultureKampf, pure and simple, to excuse our culpability with the various anti-muslim pogroms that are occurring across the world right now, but the dems could rip the repugs a new one on security if they were any good at arguing their point instead of being total masterdebators who got their training in retoric from being on the high school debate team.
RM,
Great point. I mean, it does seem like a lot of Dems have bought into the idea that the WoT is a really huge deal when it’s actually just an excuse for imperialism, racism, and cruelty. Trying to come up with a Democratic way to do those things doesn’t make much sense.