I love this excerpt because it perfectly captures why appealing to the base is the way to go in 2004.
This post includes most of this excerpt, but you can read the whole thing at
http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?itemid=15440.Apologies if this has been posted before...
----------------
<...>
I think of Eula's fling when I look at my Democratic Party these days. It's run off with Mr. Green!
Green, as in the color of big political money. It has abandoned its loved ones, who yearn to have the party of Jefferson, FDR, Truman, JFK, and LBJ come home, back to the grassroots where us working folks, retirees, consumers, small farmers, independent businesses, young people, poor families, and more need a champion. If we sent it bus money, would the Democratic Party come home?
Probably not, at least not right away. It has locked itself inside Washington, so infatuated with Mr. Green that it's doing unspeakable things there - not only dancing to the tune of Wall Street and the global corporate powers, but even sleeping with the Bushites! The sad truth is that none of George W's agenda would be hanging around our necks without the complicity and often the direct support of national Democratic leaders. They've doffed the Red-wing workboot bunch and thrown in with the wing-tip crowd, going all wobbly on the whole concept of why America needs a Democratic Party.
Watch out, here come the Wobblycrats!
The $1.3 trillion that Bush scooped right off the top our public treasury and dumped on the rich would not have passed without the votes of 13 Wobblycrat senators. The vote for Ashcroft's liberty-sucking PATRIOT act was 96 to 1 in the senate, 337 to 79 in the house overwhelmingly and almost unquestioningly backed by Wobblycrats. Rigging tax loopholes and loosening accounting rules for corporations was a specialty of the Wobbly Clinton administration, with enthusiastic backing by the party's money-soaked congressional leaders. NAFTA and the WTO - twin sledgehammers giving global corporations the power to crush the strength of workers and environmentalists around the world - were rammed through congress by Bill Clinton with Wobblycrat votes. The Homeland Security blob that further suffocates American freedom was passed 90 to 9 in the senate, which was under Wobblycrat control at the time.
It's not just a legislative failure though, it's a failure of spirit and purpose. The Democratic Party exixts to be on the other side of these issues.
THE MANDATE
"GOP sweeps," trumpeted the headlines after last year's congressional elections, and the heavily-moussed pundits of the airwaves were unanimous in hailing the brilliance of the Rove/Bush strategy. Now Bush can claim the mandate that eluded him in '00, marveled the pundits, practically in unison.
Mandate? Hold your tiny pony right there, George. The great majority of the people either didn't vote or voted against your autocratic, plutocratic regime. Curtis Gans of the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate reports that in the congressional races, where Bush claims his mandate, only 33 percent of eligible voters could stomach casting a ballot. And 15 percent of those eligible voted for Democrats, while 1.1 percent voted for candidates from Libertarian, Green, Working Families, Independent or other parties.
So let's blow the foam off this beer. The "Big Mandate" that the Bushites are claiming for themselves comes down to a puny 17 percent of the people.
That's the Republican base, not a juggernaut. It's the same 17 percent that they won twenty years ago in the midterm elections during the Reagan infatuation, and it's nearly three points less than they got in the '94 midterms when Newt Gingrich surged to power.
Now, just as Newt did in his famous four-year-flame-out, the Bushites are pushing a corporatist and extremist agenda that is anti-working families, anti-poor people, anti-women, anti-environment, anti-liberty, and pretty damned much anti-everyone who doesn't fit comfortably inside their 17% core group.
Also they've elected Tom DeLay to be their majority leader and their loudest voice in the House. This guy is not only a rabid right-winger and notorious corporate bagman, he's delusional Newt without the charm. This blowhard declared that the Lord God Almighty is behind the GOP win and is using Tom himself as a godly instrument to promote "a biblical worldview" in American politics.
This is not a group determined to erect the welcoming Big Tent of political and economic inclusiveness.
But what are the Democrats going to do to break - dare we dream? 15 percent? The group now controlling the party apparatus calls itself the Democratic Leadership Council. It's corporate-funded, has a Republican-lite agenda, and practices political minimalism. Forget the party's base, is the DLC's message - instead appeal to a narrow strata of conservative-tilting Soccer Moms and Office Park Dads. The strategy is to appear not to be scruffy, working-family Democrats, but to dress up as the moderate wing of the Republican party, hoping to siphon away two or three points from the GOP's 17 percent plurality. It's a loser, as was forcefully demonstrated in the '02 elections, but it's also a cowardly strategy that's unworthy of a party that has been known in the past as The People's Party.
PUTTING THE DEMOS BACK IN DEMOCRAT
Excuse my impertinence here, but let me take a wild flyer at something a tad different from the present Democratic strategy of collecting money from corporations and hurling it at television stations, hoping to seduce politically-fickle soccer moms. What if Democrats went to the people? No, seriously! I mean really go to the people. You know, in person.
All of the people, is my thought, the snuffdippers as well as beansprout eaters. Wait . . . a voice is trying to reach me now. Yes Eleanor! I hear you. (Shhhh, it's Eleanor Roosevelt.) Go where? Go where the Democratic voters are? Well, sure, why not! Democrats have tried winning over Republicans, so what's to lose? Think of the genius of this - appealing directly to: Democrats.
Specifically, what if the party reached out to the 67 percent of disenchanted to disgusted folks who aren't voting? Overwhelmingly, they're working stiffs and the poor (often both in the same person, thanks to today's wondrous economy - a twofer). That's 121 million people who are politically homeless. Add even 10 percent of them, and the Democrats start winning every race.
What does it take to win over such people, Hightower? You're going to think I've gone barmy beyond belief, but I'd suggest this appeal: Self-interest. Just as Bush's base supporters respond warmly, even lovingly to George's unabashed support of their interests, so might the Great Unwanted begin to warm to politics if Democrats began to speak their language. Here's a short to-do list we could offer that would strengthen America by investing in the workaday majority:
A tax cut on working stiffs: remove the cap (now at $85,000) on the grossly regressive payroll tax, reduce the percentage bite on people making less than that, and spread the burden up to include the billionaires' club;
Healthcare for all, provided by a single-payer system;
Free education for everyone, preschool through higher ed, modeled after the enormously successful GI Bill;
Energy independence for America through a ten-year moonshot project that'll put Americans to work building an oil-free future based on alternative technologies and systems;
Public financing of all elections, so we can get our government back from the greedheads; and
.
A six-pack is plenty. Stay focused.
Well, Hightower, I see you want to move the Democrats back to the wasteland of the left. No, stupid, the need is not to move left or right, but move out into America and get on the side of the majority of people who are alternately being ignored and stomped on by the economic and political elites of our country. As Paul Wellstone used to put it: "I'm in the democratic wing of the Democratic Party."
And when I say "move out," I mean literally and figuratively get out of Washington. At present, progressive groups and funders direct probably 80 percent of our energy, talent, and money toward DC, putting only 20 percent into the countryside. Yet our strength is not inside the Beltway but out here, where people are doing great things and wondering why the Democratic Party isn't with them. Reverse that ratio and start focusing on building a grassroots organization that communicates, organizes and mobilizes across America, block by block.
Politics can't be viewed as something that involves people only in the last thirty days of an election. Rather, to be a movement capable of governing, it has to be rooted in people's reality right where they live. In addition to a high-tech outreach, we have to get back to a high-touch politics that physically, emotionally, and soulfully connects with people's lives 365 days a year. Yes, talk issues. But through potluck suppers, block parties, festivals, salons, and saloons. Fewer Meetings, More Fun. There's a bumper sticker.
Nothing's more fun than winning, and winning in politics requires getting more people (not more money) than the other side gets. To get people, there has to be a long-term strategy of listening to them, appealing to them, enlisting them, and trusting them. As the fighting populist Fred Harris puts it: "You can't have a mass movement without the masses."
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
