On a certain level, I don't much care if the Dem talking points are lies or not. Of course honesty matters, but what I mean is that regardless of the reason I disagree with their points, the point is that I disagree, so I want to disagree as effectively as I can.
The way to do that, the way I generally try to approach any discussion, is to determine on what premises their talking points rest. Premises are the load-bearing beams of argumentation. I can ignore 90% of what someone says by focusing on their premises and kicking at them until they fall, bringing down the whole edifice of their argument. The 10% that remain are lingering, jumped-to conclusions, emotional attachments, and subconscious biases, which are all far more easily dealt with after the premises are dispatched.
One thing the Democrats do very well is determine where best to strike populist chords with the American Public. They do this through the much-maligned dark arts of focus-grouping and polling. They've consistently outflanked the GOP in this way since after the 1994 Election, which, not coincidentally, was the last time the GOP seized the initiative in determining the populist pulse of the country.
The exception to this is the post-9/11 era. However, I attribute that less to a concerted Republican strategy than to the fact that the aftermath of a Historical moment well beyond the control of either party (that is, 9/11) played strongly to traditional Republican populist strengths in the areas of foreign policy and patriotism. That the Republicans used this to their advantage was more a matter of maintaining their post-9/11 momentum than to the striking any pre-emptive populist note with the electorate. Appropriately so, to be sure.
We're now, however, in a pre-2004 period, and I'm not convinced that the post 9/11 momentum will be sufficient to achieve hoped-for victories in that election, particularly not now, since the bar for an effective Senate majority has been raised by the Democrat judicial filibusters, and, to my mind, an ineffective GOP strategy for confronting them.
In light of that, I look at what you've told me about the RNC and the Bush-Cheney talking points, and I have some concerns. First, I don't trust the RNC at all, as they have proven themselves congenitally averse to any sense of populism since after the Gingrich insurgency of 1994, which lasted all of a year and a half before Newt was co-opted, only to fail spectacularly in that in the '96 and '98 elections. Time and again, the RNC gives every impression of being beholden to the Rockefeller country clubbers, whose only cognizance of populism is manifested in a disdain for those of us caddies and groundskeepers who have the poor taste not to shut up and do as we're told.
Second, the over-emphasis on Bush-Cheney (which I'm taking not only from your post, but also from the behavior of the RNC and many of the cheerleaders in this microcosmic forum), seems to me to be remarkably short-sighted. Certainly, the talking points ought to serve the purposes of their re-election, but a personality-based tunnelvision isn't going to help turn this country around in the long term. On January 20th, 2005, Bush and Cheney will, at best, be lame ducks with a mandate of a debatable shelf-life.
At that point, I presume, the RNC will coast on inertia until their new personality du jour emerges.
Yet, even if 2004 is a victory for us, its fruits will only last for a season unless we plant the seeds for future victories now. We can do that with talking points that establish populist premises that play to Republican advantage, as well as mounting assaults on Democrat premises.
Let's take an example, one that is largely moot because of the Republicans' failure to establish populist beachheads in the second half of the 1990s; that is, the idea of a prescription drug entitlement. The Democrats took the populist initiative with the premise that: drugs are expensive + seniors need drugs + seniors can't afford drugs = someone, like the federal government, needs to buy these drugs for seniors. So, the consequent premise was established that to prove one cares for seniors, one must support paying for their prescription drugs. President Bush conceded this premise in the 2000 campaign, and thereby gave up that ground to the Democrats. This tactic has been called, with no sense of irony, "taking the Democrats' issues away," to make something a Republican issue.
Did President need to give up this ground to get this "victory?" How could the he and GOP have effectively countered this? Preemptively.
The undeniable point of the welfare state is that it doesn't pay for anything, it merely transfers wealth. Anyone who gets out more than they put in is getting it not from the government, but from an anonymous taxpayer somewhere. The key to undercutting the Democrat premise is to put a populist face on that anonymous taxpayer. The Democrats know this, that's why, in their lexicon, taxpayers are "the rich." Not only are they "the rich," they are "the rich, right now."
But that isn't the truth at all, and the real face of that anonymous taxpayer isn't "the rich, right now," it's our kids and grandkids, in the future. They are the ones who will be obligated to fund the wealth transfers of the welfare state to pay for the prescription drug giveaway. That will get people's attention, to be sure, but it's not enough to close the door on the established populist premise of the Democrats. This is:
President Clinton's 1994 budget contained an actuarial projection (can't remember if it was CBO or GAO) of the tax burden on future taxpayers, our kids and grandkids, based on the outstanding obligations of the welfare state, into the period of the babyboomers' retirement. Not surprisingly, Medicare and Social Security were the biggest tickets, and it was projected that those future taxpayers would need to fork over about 82% of their incomes to support those programs.
82%. Our kids and grandkids. At the point when some entity has prior claim of 82% of your income, you are their slave. How populist is it to enslave our children? Yet, that's the reality which underlies the premise of the Democrats’ welfare state.
Those actuarial predictions disappeared the next year, just in time for the budget showdown between Clinton and the GOP Class of '94. However, I recall seeing an independent projection of what the future tax burden would have been had Clinton acceded then to the GOP's "draconian" demands: 80%. As it was, the GOP was successful in getting the number down to 81%.
Now, while we definitely need new numbers and have had some balanced and very unbalanced budgets since then, I've yet to see any plan that addresses the future tax burdens of our children to pay for the largesse offered in the way of entitlements in order to procure votes from election to election.
Doesn't it seem a better approach would be to get out of this cycle of bidding for votes? Wouldn't it be better to actually take the Democrats' issues away by denying to them their premises and establishing populist premises of our own, which play to our advantage? In the current model, we accept their premises and are left to fight interminable defensive battles on grounds of the Democrats' choosing. Talking points that continue in that mode, even if momentarily successful, only perpetuate the waste of energy.
Effective talking points are like seeds. Plant now, harvest later, and feast. If we decide now on the menu, we’ll know what seeds to plant.
