Dear Rick,
It's freaks like you who are running people to the Republican Party. They hate your filthy mouth and your stupid ideas (when you have any). Please keep it up.
Posted on 07/28/2005 2:52:20 PM PDT by kristinn
The centrist Democratic Leadership Council meets this week in Columbus, Ohio, with Senator Hillary Clinton the newly named chair of their newly launched yearlong "American Dream Initiative." Her mission: to come up with a new idea agenda for the Democrats. Recently our former national correspondent Rick Perlstein gave a speech to a group of powerful Democrats suggesting an agenda of his own based on his new book The Stock Ticker and the Superjumbo: How the Democrats Can Once Against Become America's Dominant Political Party. Here, with some identifying details changed, is what he told them.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The name of this panel is "Building a New Idea Infrastructure for Progressives."
I was given the privilege of coming before you today, I suppose, because of my expertise on the history of the conservative idea infrastructure.
So it may come as a surprise to you that I've never been impressed by the argument that we need a new idea infrastructure. We've got more ideas than we need.
Sure, the right talks about "ideas" all the time. But they define it exactly opposite from us. For us it is a synonym for clever, complicated new policy options. For them, it's Plato's definition of Ideas: as unchanging essences. The stuff that builds foundations.
As usual, Ronald Reagan boiled it down to essentials. He liked to say—maybe he said it to some of you—"There are no easy answers. But there are simple answers." I'm here to say he's right. "Building a progressive idea structure" ain't the problem. It's recovering the progressive foundation. Do that, and we are un****withable.
It's simple. Barack Obama put it exquisitely in his victory speech: "Government can help provide us with the basic tools we need to live out the American dream."
Here's a dirty little secret. The Republicans know this. Nothing scares them more than us returning to our simple answers.
Here's Bill Kristol, in a famous 1993 memo I'm sure you're all familiar with: "Health care is not, in fact, just another Democratic initiative . . . the plan should not be amended; it should be erased. . . . It will revive the reputation of the . . . Democrats, as the generous protector of middle-class interests."
I'd say this memo is the skeleton key to understanding modern American politics, if it didn't make me yawn. There's nothing here that's unfamiliar to historians who've read Republican secrets going back 25, 35, even 70 years. You can sum them up in 10 words: "If the Democrats succeed in redistributing economic power, we're screwed."
They have reason to fear.
There is a website that thousands of committed Republicans spend hours on, giving and receiving marching orders. When people stray from the party line, it's not unusual for them to be banned. Free Republic, I'd argue, is far more crucial to the Republican infrastructure than the Heritage Foundation.
Please refer to your handout. The first column records some typical things "Freepers" say. The second records what the same Freeper said after the Senate voted cloture on the president's bankruptcy bill. Column A: "We are going to see a day, in our lifetimes, when schools force children to engage in homosexual acts as 'projects' or 'homework' for sex-ed." Same guy, column B: "The newly amended bankruptcy law is a criminal act perpetrated, bought and paid for by commercial pirates masquerading as legitimate businesses."
I won't belabor the point that I believe that the Democrats pay a huge long-term price for those Democrats who let that bankruptcy bill go through. The Republicans understand us better than we understand ourselves. When we are not credible defenders of the economic interests of ordinary Americans, we amount to little. When we are, we're a nuclear bomb to the heart of their coalition.
The Christian right is a political machine. Very little is asked of its cogs: just that they consult the call board on election day, and vote the way it says. It takes enormous effort to get them to do just that, as any of their leaders will freely tell you. Any of Richard J. Daley's precinct captains would have told you the same thing.
It doesn't take much to demobilize a machine voter: Just install some doubt that people who claim to be their champions are not really their champions. If the Democrats had been united against the bankruptcy bill, we could even have demobilized some of these Freepers.
That's the way they did it with us. The stuff about the Democrats being "cultural elitists" spread a nagging doubt. People stopped looking to the call board. Even some of the activists.
The time is ripe to do it to them. A Pentecostal friend of mine just returned from a mission to El Salvador with his childhood church from rural Louisiana. He used to regale me with tales of annual July 4 Pentecostal retreats that were like Nuremberg rallies in praise of the Great Leader. That's over now. The straw that broke the camel's back, he tells me, was people not being able to afford to go to the dentist. They also have vanishingly low faith in Bush's foreign policy, and in the Iraq war.
They're getting demobilized.
That's great. But here's the catch. They have to have somewhere to go. That's where the simple stuff comes in.
Let's talk about Social Security.
The most glorious thing about congressional Democrats is that they have drawn the line and said: No further. Don't. Touch. Social. Security. It is a heroic stand. What's more, it's been enormously politically effective.
Now think about this: They are drawing on the capital of an entitlement passed 70 years ago.
They'll be drawing on the capital from Medicare 35 years from now. Congressional Democrats won't let them kill it. Because they understand: These programs make life in America fundamentally better. And because these gooses, Social Security, Medicare, lay golden eggs. They manufacture Democrats.
It is the duty of every generation of Democrats to produce new geese to lay 70 years of golden eggs. It is the only way our party has grown—as Bill Kristol puts it, by reviving the reputation of the Democrats as the generous protector of middle-class interests. They know they're screwed if we're credible in our pledge to deliver new kinds of power to ordinary people in their every day lives.
Democratic congressmen can do that, for example, by making a credible collective pledge that if you vote Democrat enough you will never pay another medical bill as long as you live. You really think people wouldn't stop voting Republican then?
It makes a virtuous circle. The most important exit poll finding from last year's election was not about moral values. It was all the people who said they disagreed with Bush on the issues, but they were voting for him anyway because they knew what he stood for.
What I call "superjumbos"—grand policy commitments that span generations—add value by the very credibility of the commitment.
It isn't any accident that not raising taxes is a pledge every Republican makes, on pain of political death. It has not hurt them even though, according to Stanley Greenberg's polls, only 30 percent of Americans call high taxes a very serious problem.
To complete the circle—in the same poll 77 percent called "the state of health care in America" a serious problem.
Remember when Dick Morris used to tell President Clinton that he couldn't afford not to be on the side of any issue supported by 60 percent of Americans? Paul Krugman reported a poll that 72 percent of Americans favor "government-guaranteed health insurance for all."
Guaranteed. Health Insurance. For All. Not, as I found it formulated on the website of even one of the most liberal senators, "access to affordable health insurance."
Simple.
Not easy.
So Democrats, let's get to work.
I only answer to Protest Warrior.
The CIA pays much better.
:7)
-good times, G.J.P. (Jr.)
They are the ones who get marching orders.
Somehow, the fact that he repeatedly vetoed partial-birth abortion bans that were supported by over three quarters of the American electorate-in order to placate one of the Democratic Party's more rabid constituency groups-seems to have escaped his astute analysis.
-good times, G.J.P. (Jr.)
As usual the dimwits are wrong. I am a registered Libetarian who posts occasionally on Free Republic. And I have on occasion been critical of Republicans. Never been banned. I should note however that I mostly vote Republican. The main reason of course is that the Democratic alternative in this two party system is typically unpalatable. Hopefully the Dimwits will continue imploding and the second party will eventually be the Libetarians. Then the real debates about the future of our representative republic can begin.
Just Sheesh!
:o)
That's news?
By all means, return to your Marxist roots.
Great thinking!
Dear Rick,
It's freaks like you who are running people to the Republican Party. They hate your filthy mouth and your stupid ideas (when you have any). Please keep it up.
That's like NARAL saying that 65% of Americans are PRO-CHOICE. They just add 5% more whenever they feel like it. Pretty soon they have convinced themselves it's true.
I don't know anyone else who sends out proforma letters like the left wing kooks do. I would call that "marching orders". I have yet to have ANYONE tell me what to think, as if I would listen.
It's comforting, really. Have I told you yet today that 
??
Can you say projection? Have you, in your time here, ever heard them come up with original ideas? Sheesh, talk about your top-down thinking points....
I'll stop ranting now. I could go on, because I saved all the faxes from H.Q. I must sleep, because JimRob has me signed up for ten hours tomorrow.
You can fool some of the people all the time, and all of the people some of the time...
Stories by Rick Perlstein
The Eve of Destruction
George Bush is getting four more years to remake the world in his image. (Too bad for us, he already started.)
Posted on Jan 20, 2005
Tribal Warfare in America
A 30-year-old book by a progressive journalist finds that the passions of reformers can sometimes betray a contempt for the common sense of ordinary people. Sound familiar?
Posted on Nov 16, 2004
The Church of Bush
These are the people who, even in the face of evidence of his casual cruelty, of his unchristian contempt for weakness, of his lying ways, see something angelic in George W. Bush and love him unconditionally.
Posted on Aug 2, 2004
In Line for the Rapture
The Apostolic Congress, a Christian Zionist movement, has some attentive ears in the White House. How much influence do they wield on American policy in Israel?
Posted on May 25, 2004
The idea that slavish captives of the financial services industry-especially hypocritical, sanctimonious tools like Joe Biden, whose party affiliation might just as well read "MBNA"-can serve as tribunes of the poor is laughable on its face.
What's truly galling though is their complacency.
I can think of no better illustration of organized labor's chronic malaise than the recent vituperative op-ed piece penned by that ubiquitous snake-oil salesman-cum-minister Jesse Jackson, who had the nerve to cast the battle over whether national labor unions should continue to serve as the puppet-masters of the Democratic Party in virtually apocalyptic terms.
This from a man whose profession essentially boils down to demanding-and usually receiving-bribes from corporate boards in the form of numerical quotas for himself and his small coterie of racial hucksters and extortionists.
Anyone who believes that either he or his comrades in the Dem. Party-for example, Ted Kennedy, who was in large part responsible for the deregulation of the aviation industry-are genuine populists-instead of self-serving, parasitical leeches on the body politic-is deluding himself.
:)
This guy is a buffoon. I can only *hope* the Democrats take his advice.
That's the problem with the Demmicans and Republicrats. It's hard to sell the activists the party line while you're voting the corporate line. There is no way in hell that the Rats OR the Pubbies can sell their hardliners that they believe voting up corporate welfare is for the good of the country, after they've burnt up the campaign trail railing against the rich and the government, respectively.
And that's why neither party worries about it. They know the other party's got their backs. Nobody has to be concerned about the perks ever stopping while the big boys keep sending the campaign checks, and the only campaign issues continue to be stupid shit like flag burning, who narked on Plame, and whether Kerry spent his Christmas in Cambodia 20 years ago.
Meanwhile, both parties agree 100% about their most important platform plank: F anyone who doesn't send us a fat check before the elections.
"There is a website that thousands of committed Republicans spend hours on, giving and receiving marching orders."
Marching orders? LOL. I've seen our congress-critters draw their talking points from discussions on FR, but nobody here tells anyone else what to do. Liberals just don't understand the Free Market. We're here because the Left monopolized the information industry and shut all convservative thought out. So, much like talk radio, we established parallel venues to share ideas and counter the distortions of the MSM.
"When people stray from the party line, it's not unusual for them to be banned. Free Republic..."
Huh? I'm here because I can say whatever I like (as long as I don't cuss). I've been here since '98 and have never seen anyone banned for "straying from" the party line. If anything, FReepers here bitch and moan about our spineless reps in the Senate, this administrations failed border control policies, etc. Its why I left the Democrat Party (thanks Ronnie!) - liberals will not tolerate dissenting opinion.
This country needs a strong vibrant and honest oppostion party. The Dems have a responsibility, a duty, to provide one, for the betterment of the country. Problem is they have no new ideas and can't sell the old ones without lying to the public.
Rick's "analysis" is so far off the mark in its postulates that any conclusion he (or those he advises) draws are without merit. But keep at it Rick - do your part to ensure a conservative majority for the next decade.
Damn. You nailed it in less than a dozen words. ....I really need to learn to be more concise ;)
You mean that this *isn't* the worst economy since Hoover?!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.