- Jul 29, 2001
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http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/A New Strategic Vision For The Left
Let's start with some good news -- which might make you sick, when you realize that Kerry, Lockhart, Shrum, Cahill and the rest of those wienies failed to understand this. Your average American voter is far more progressive than he votes. He is with us on the questions of universal health care, improving schools, restoring our manufacturing base, protecting American jobs, and protecting American wages and living standards. Gore learned this in 2000. When he stopped playing "Republican-lite" and started sounding populist New Deal Democratic themes, he started doing better.
Fancy that. People want Democrats to be Democrats.
There's even more good news. The track record of Democrats in creating broad-based "bottom up" prosperity is undeniable. Likewise, the track record of Republicans creating stagnant, slow growth, high-unemployment economies is similarly undeniable. The proof of that is a simple fact I discovered about a year ago. No Republican adminstration has ever left office with unemployment under five percent. Three Democratic adminstrations have since 1933. Democrats create robust "full employment" economies. Republicans don't -- including this adminstration. That isn't opinion. That is verifiable historical fact.
As I said in the "flagship" article for this site -- Defeat the Right in Three Minutes -- Republicans are "cheap-labor conservatives." They don't really like robust "full employment" economies. Too many opportunities for working people make them harder for the corporate lords to control. The Republican agenda is all about corporate serfdom -- and they are hard at work bringing it about. If you don't believe it, take a look at an interview with chief Republican strategist Grover Norquist. He says he wants "the McKinley era, without the protectionism."
Do most Americans want that agenda? Even nominally "conservative" Americans? Rush Limbaugh's flying monkies clearly want it. But are they a majority?
No, they aren't. That's the good news. The bad news is that no one in the Democratic Party's leadership seems to have a clue about how to "strip the bark off those bastards."
Well I do, even if they don't.
The winning strategy against the cheap-labor conservatives is so very simple it's ridiculous. EXPOSE THEM FOR WHAT THEY ARE. The great weakness of being a cheap-labor conservative is that you have to hide it. You have to invent disingenuous rhetoric about "less government." See the Patriot Act, if you buy that crap. You have to turn all of the prosperity creating infrastructure of New Deal liberalism into "tyranny." Social Security and Medicare are "tyranny" but the Patriot Act isn't. You have to run on bogus "wedge issues" like "gay marriage." Yes sir. We have a net loss of jobs in this country for the first time since the Hoover adminstration, but the burning issue of the day is "gay marriage."
How about this line in a speech, Senator Kerry? "While they've got you all worked up over two gays committing themselves to a monogamous civil union -- like that's a bad thing -- they've bankrupted the government. What do you think is more important?" The way you win is by keeping people's eye on the ball. The response to EVERY wedge issue is the same. "They are distracting you with bullshit, while they pick your pocket." Which is exactly what they're doing.
Cheap-labor conservatives specialize in defining us, the way they want us defined. They specialize in framing the issues the way they want the issues framed. Here's a line I heard several times cross the lips of George W. Bush. "They want to empower the government. We want to empower individuals." Doesn't that sound good? Of course, he sets up a false dichotomy. It's either we empower government or we empower individuals. None of our present crop of Democratic strategists knows how to respond to that -- or apparently understands the need to destroy such images. Framing the issues like that wins -- in case you're wondering. It's why so many ordinary Americans buy into all of that 'less government' rhetoric.
The response is simple -- and needs to be made. Public schools empower people when they educate them. Public highways empower people, by making it easier for them to travel. Public infrastructure like dams and rural electrification empower people, by giving them access to electric powered technology from washing machines to the computer screen you're looking at. Fair trade policies empower people, by protecting their wages and living standards from competition with cheap-labor cesspools. Full employment empowers people, by giving them opportunities and bidding up wages. The legal infrastructure for labor unions empowers people to collectively bargain with giant corporations. Even corporations -- creations of the law -- empower people to create heavy industry like steel mills, railroads and oil companies that individual partners would never have the capital to create. [See, there are even conservative examples.] Laws, public infrastructure, public institutions, and even private institutions supported by a democratic government empower individuals. Suggesting otherwise is a lie. The very purpose of a democratic government is to empower individuals, and the New Deal did a damn good job of it.
But Dubya -- and the rest of the cheap-labor conservatives -- have no interest in "empowering individuals." They are interested in chaining you to the oars of corporate America. They want you broke, isolated, disorganized, distracted with "wedge issues," and utterly dependent on the corporate masters for your very survival. When Dubya talks about "empowering individuals," he isn't talking about you. He's talking about his "skull and bones" buddies. He wants to empower them, so they can enslave you. If you don't believe me, take some time to learn about "the McKinley era" also known as "the age of wage slavery."
The vast majority of Americans don't want to return to the McKinley era. That's all you need to know. If progressive candidates and progressive activists can succeed in demonstrating to the voting public what these cheap-labor conservatives have in mind for them, they will reject that agenda. The Republicans conceal their agenda. Dubya didn't run on the things he announced just today. He didn't run on "fixing" social Security. He barely mentioned it. He didn't run on a national sales tax. He didn't mention that one at all. We know what he ran on. Terror -- which as I write this two days after the election, is starting to look like exactly what we all knew it was. It is starting to look like a grand distraction from a domestic agenda he barely discussed at all.
Why didn't he discuss it? Think about it. He didn't discuss his plans for his second term domestic agenda BECAUSE HE WOULD LOSE HIS ASS IF HE DID. That means, by the way, he would lose by far more votes than he could ever hope to steal.
There's your strategy. Pin him down on his cheap-labor agenda -- and every other Republican, while you're at it.
Now let me show you in concrete terms how this works. Let me first of all say, I am gratified by many people who have visited this site -- including in particular those wonderful folks who I have made friends with at my forum. I am gratified to see the 200 or so blogs who have spread the "cheap-labor conservative" meme to the 150,000 people who have visited since the summer of 2003. Unfortunately, no political campaign has put it to work. They need to. Here's how you do it.
First of all, learn a lesson from the cheap-labor conservatives. They spend a lot of time doing something known as "opposition research." As George W. Bush said to John Kerry, "you can run, but you can't hide." Every cheap-labor conservative in Congress has record. He has bills he has sponsored. He has votes he has cast -- both in committee and on the floor. He has statements he has made, duly recorded in the Congressional Record. He has speeches, articles, op/ed pieces, fundraising letters, and a wealth of source material to verify his beliefs. For a year already, I mention Grover Norquist's goal of returning us to "the McKinley era." Norquist said that in an interview in The Nation two years ago. I make it my business to make sure everybody hears about it.
That's how you do it. That's how THEY do it. Think about the Republican "attack ads" you've seen. They find some obscure statement a Democrat made, or some obscure vote on some piece of legislation -- sometimes they find things that are decades old -- and they use those few facts to paint their opponent as exactly what they want him to be. They use his own record, just like I use an opposing parties own words and conduct against him. Nothing is more powerful. John Kerry had to answer Dubya's charge about "voting against weapons systems" or "voting to raise taxes." What did John Kerry present about Dubya's record.
Look at Republican advertising, and then look at Democratic advertising. Republican advertising is a hundred times more powerful. I recall a Democratic commercial I saw a month or so ago. There was an empty factory, and George W. Bush was heard talking up the economy. It didn't work. You know why? Two reasons. First, you had to be watching to get the impact. If you were listening in the other room, all you heard was Dubya talking up his economic record. Which brings me to the second problem. The ad made the viewer do too much work to get the irony. Irony has a very limited place in political advertising. You have to beat people over the head with a two by four.
Think about it. Some people watch TV. A lot of other people run the TV, without really watching it. People talk about television being "passive." You can just sit and be entertained. Even that is too much work for some people. They run the local news while they read the mail, balance their checkbook, watch the roast in the oven, read the note from the teacher, chew the fat with their girlfirend on the telephone, all while the TV plays in the background. Democratic ads are aimed at people watching. Republican ads are aimed at people who simply have the TV playing. Their ads are simple, high impact messages designed to be heard in the kitchen.
That's why a Democrats ads need to say simple, direct things like, "Tom Delay voted to privatize social security. He voted to for a national sales tax. When asked to describe his vision he said, 'I want to return to the McKinley era.'" Entirely too many Democratic political advertisers want to be cute. They want to be funny. They want to be intelligent. They forget that their target constituency is that working mother who got up a 5:00 in the morning, worked all day, and is busy in the kitchen while her children are fighting because it's past suppertime and they're hungry. She's got all the mental stimulation she can handle. She wants you to get to the fusking point -- assuming she's paying attention at all. Meanwhile, she hears Dubya on the TV -- playing in the next room -- touting his economic record. She can't see the empty factory, because she isn't in there watching. Then she hears someone say "John Kerry voted to raise taxes 793 times, voted to cut weapons systems 847 times, and now he says he's ready to protect you from terrorists."
Which message does she hear? She may not even realize that the first commercial was a commercial for John Kerry. She knows the second one wasn't. Is it any wonder she is a little confused when it comes time to vote as to just who exactly is on her side? If you are wondering how the Republicans create the images and impressions that show up in polls. If you're scratching your head at where people get these ideas, I just told you how they do it. This last year, the Bush administration's record was so bad, it cost them a hundred million dollars to make those cut-through-the-background-noise messages stick. But stick they did -- in part because John Kerry never countered them with cut-through-the-background-noise messages of his own.
As for the progressive future, "cheap labor" is a phrase our working mother will hear in the kitchen. She knows all about cheap labor. She lives it everyday. The voting records and public statements of cheap-labor conservatives can be melted down into short, high impact sentences -- that she will hear in the kitchen. All Democratic candidates have to do is dig up the material, boil it down to short sentences in hard hitting advertisements, and "strip the bark" off those cheap-labor bastards.
Let me share with you a remarkable outcome from this recent election. In Florida, George W. Bush won by 350,000 votes. On that same ballot was a ballot initiative to establish a state minimum wage, a dollar an hour higher than the federal minimum wage, and indexed to inflation. Not only did the measure pass, it passed with a 3,000,000 vote margin. That's a total 4.5 MILLIION votes for the measure out of 6 million cast on the issue. It passed with a million and a half votes more than John Kerry got -- which means an awful lot of Dubya's voters voted for it. Cheap-labor conservatives hate the minimum wage -- like the devil hates holy water. With support like that for a staple Democratic issue, don't tell me that Democrats can't win, and win big.
And don't tell me that John Kerry's loss wasn't his own god damn fault.
More there on touch screen voting too. He debunks it.
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