I agree with your questioning about how we grow to an electoral majority. I too have used the metaphor of the big tent and I agree with you. In my judgment one does not extend the roof of the tent willy-nilly and hope to drape sufficient yardage over the heads of a portion of the electorate to gain 50+1, rather, the idea is to open the flaps to let the people come in who will come and if they are attracted to the saliency of the message. In other words, do not pander, proclaim.
And we proclaim an attractive message because "we clearly define what we are for".
As to the social issues, there is no question that we are opening ourselves to real and substantial dangers, especially from the media. They will give legitimacy to their most naked kind of demagoguery directed against advocates of social issues on the right. Nevertheless, I think there is some social issues which we must take a stand on. My rule which determines that which we should stand fast on and that which we should give way on has to do with the presence or absence of an identifiable victim. In other words, a libertarian test. So I would fight to the death to oppose abortion but I am not particularly disturbed by the prospect of homosexual marriage because I do not see the nexus between making that union legitimate and a threat to heterosexual marriage, this though I am fully aware as a student of The Frankfurt School that the object of the left is to undermine those institutions which support capitalism and democracy, the family being prominent among them.
We face, as you point out, a partisan guerrilla war against us waged by the media which is difficult to cope with. We have tried ignoring them to death and that has failed several consecutive elections. My recommendation is that we attack them personally. We make them pay a price. We try to destroy their careers. We make life ugly for them every time they stick their heads over the parapet. We do to them what they have been doing to us. We go on Meet the Press and we attack NBC and MSNBC and we attack David Gregory. We quote him back to himself. We ask him if he will repudiate the statements of Andrea Mitchell or does NBC stand by them?
Finally, we are now four years away from the next presidential election in two years away from the next by election. We have time to sort out which issues we want to run on which is somewhat different than the issues we want to ground ourselves upon. I have suggested that there be many different groups in addition to the Tea Party Movement because I presume that the Tea Party Movement will not want to depart from its strict adherence to economic issues. That leaves the field open to other groups to do what the NRA has done, identify themselves with an issue and run with it. That is in effect what the Democrat party has done by empowering all their special interest groups. By the time of the election, we should have found out what works and run with that.
