Un****ing the Donkey ( Rick Perlstein Says Free Republic More Crucial than Heritage Foundation)

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."

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.

That's great. But here's the catch. They have to have somewhere to go. That's where the simple stuff comes in.

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."

What gets me about Mr. Perlstein is that he refuses to give even the most terse reply to a single one of my comments.

Not one response...ever!

Over the years I've been able to maintain a cordial correspondence-via the Internet-with writers of divergent viewpoints, everyone from noted Israeli conservative pundit and scholar Steven Plaut, to the author of the "Chatterbox" column in Slate, to even that egotistical, H.L. Mencken wannabe who pens a regular column for the Newark Star-Ledger.

However, for some undisclosed reason he doesn't see fit to communicate with another member of the same website.

Go figure.

If you thought health care was expensive now, just wait until it's "free." -P.J. O'Rourke

LOL! No kidding... he's got that right.

OTOH, spending a good ten hours in a hospital emergency room with a four year-old daughter with an ear infection.... well I'll call that "quality time." ;)

Quality time, plus plenty of quantity time. :)

thanks for the ping, Shapka. Or, should I say, do not dub me Shapka.

Etc. :) Have a good weekend, Not SB. :)

Sorry, dndmsb, I just saw the thread. Glad to chat with you now, here or privately. I maintain cordial correspondence with several conservatives; one of them, in fact, put this thread up.

Perhaps we can start the discussion with this. Many people were offended with my suggestion that FR bans dissidents. My last time participating in a Free Republic thread I wrote a FReepmail to a poster congratulating him for his independent-mindedness in suggesting that Rove might be guilty. He wrote me back reticently, and then said this: "I am usually a little reticent on FReepmail, ever since I learned that it could be monitored by TPTB."

FReepers are nervous about getting their mail judged by the owners of the site, it seems.

Where does this paranoia come from? Is it entirely unfounded?

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."

Anti-Democrat Sarcasm Torpedo ARMED. FIRE!!

And after this, he thinks he can accuse US of using 'marching orders', with a straight face?

What

It's not entirely unjustified, I suppose.

I can't say that I necessarily have any misgivings about the concept of a closed forum.

In other words, a website such as DU or FreeRepublic, which makes it explicitly clear beforehand that the forum that has been established is intended for the specific purpose of promulgating a clearly delineated point of view, and that anyone who might not concur with that perspective-for whatever reason-should look to other online venues in order to exercise their freedom of expression.

The problem-as I see it-arises when those rather nebulous parameters, be it the fact that you are a conservative traditionalist or a progressive/liberal, or more narrowly defined, a registered Republican or Democrat, are restricted to the point where exclusive membership becomes contingent upon a wholly arbitrary decision, the criteria left open to the judgment of certain moderators who each have their own peculiar dispositions and pre-existing prejudices.

Then again, whether or not I agree or disagree with a given decision is really immaterial, since I'm not the one defraying the majority of costs associated with operating one of these ambitious projects, or carrying the attendant legal obligations and responsibilities.

"Government can help provide us with the basic tools we need to live out the American dream."

Very true. Government can also destroy your life just for trying to make a living. Conservatives recognize both these aspects of reality while Dems embrace the former as a religion while condemning those who point out the latter as heritics.

Further, Dems also refuse to recognize that much of government is only meant to help those who are in government. Yes, Virginia. There is a Boss Tweed (who was a Dem)

So if the bankruptcy bill is so important to you Rick, why not just concede the homosexuality issue to the conservatives, hmmmm? Hubert Humphrey or JFK or FDR or Harry Truman would have. Why not you? Could it be that those who run the party feel that embracing homosexuality as a virtue is more important than the fiscal stuff?

Perhaps we can start the discussion with this. Many people were offended with my suggestion that FR bans dissidents. My last time participating in a Free Republic thread I wrote a FReepmail to a poster congratulating him for his independent-mindedness in suggesting that Rove might be guilty. He wrote me back reticently, and then said this: "I am usually a little reticent on FReepmail, ever since I learned that it could be monitored by TPTB."

Two comments, Mr. Perlstein:

Anybody who thinks that something they post to the Web is accessible only to its intended recipient is too naïve to be using the Web.
Would you congratulate a poster on DU for his independent-mindedness in suggesting that Rove might not be guilty? And, perhaps more pertinently, would you post a message on DU detailing possible reasons for believing that Rove might not be guilty? After all, it's not as if left-leaning folks don't try to enforce their own orthodoxies. Ask Tammy Bruce about that, for instance.

Here's Rick's problem.

Rick believes that the interest of the Democratic Party supercedes the interest of the United States as a whole. He won't admit that, but that's the truth. He might come on here and lie and say otherwise, but that's the case.

What the Democrats did with Social Security, for instance, is simply refuse to address a mounting problem. They have, literally, no answer. Yes, kristinn, SS is a huge Ponzi scheme, which must come tumbling down someday.

What Rick refuses to realize is that you can't beat something with nothing. The Republicans have the ideological initiative because they are the ones putting forward the policy ideas. What's Rick's solution?

National Health Care.

Why?

Not because it would lead to efficient distribution of goods and services in the health care industry: it doesn't. 60 years after Clement Atlee introduced NHS into Great Britain they're still having debates about nursing shortages and Wait Times in Parliament. I won't start about wait times for critical surgery in Canada.

Democratic Socialists desire NHS in the United States not because it would help Americans but rather because it would help the Democratic Party. That subtext runs throughout Rick's entire article. What Perlstein didn't get from Kristol's memo is what Kristol actually perceived the Clinton's to be doing: purchasing votes with taxpayer money. The Clintons were NEVER after the efficient distribution of health care. They wanted to set up an NHS system as a huge patronage scheme for the Democratic Party.

Rick is simply not intellectually honest enough with himself, and his audience, to recognize a patronage scam when he sees one. He's too blinded by partisanship. He will always put the interest of the Democratic Party before the country, and will rationalize it by concluding that what's good for the Democratic Party is good for America. Conversely, what's good for Chimpy McBushhitler must be bad for America.

It doesn't appear that he supports our effort in Iraq, either. But that's another debate. It is in our interest that the Democrats morph into a pacifist party during this war. The more Pacifist they are, the longer we will hold the Presidency, the Senate, and the House. It appears that Hillary has underestimated the Sturmabteilungen quotient in the Democratic Party's activist base. This is all to the good. We shall be out of Iraq within two years, and they will have shot their wad at having become the Michael Moore party.

Nixon won an astounding reelection victory in 1972 after having taken 20,000 KIA between 1969 and 1971. We are in a far better strategic position worldwide that Nixon was in at this same point in the war, and the Democrats come across as the party that has lost its nerve.

Be Seeing You,

Chris

So you're a Freeper too? In case you missed it:

Government can help provide us with the basic tools we need to live out the American dream."

Very true. Government can also destroy your life just for trying to make a living. Conservatives recognize both these aspects of reality while Dems embrace the former as a religion while condemning those who point out the latter as heritics.

Further, Dems also refuse to recognize that much of government is only meant to help those who are in government. Yes, Virginia. There is a Boss Tweed (who was a Dem)

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 bankrup

So if the bankruptcy bill is so important to you Rick, why not just concede the homosexuality issue to the conservatives, hmmmm? Hubert Humphrey or JFK or FDR or Harry Truman would have. Why not you? Could it be that those who run the party feel that embracing homosexuality as a virtue is more important than the fiscal stuff?

But understand something, Rick. We, unlike most Dems, can pick up the B.S. You and the Dems are limo libs interested in what's good for you, not what's good for those whom you claim to represent.

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