The Wobblycrats - an excerpt from Jim Hightower's new book

[snoochie]

Redux -- mea culpa for the violation!
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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...
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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...

[burr]

1. another Hightower quote...

from "If the Gods Had Meant Us to Vote They Would Have Given Us Candidates"

<snip>
Having it (democracy) on paper doesn't make it so. When it was first written, it wasn't for very many citizens at all. In the first Presidential election, 1789, only 4 percent of the American people were allowed to vote. No women voted (they were chattel), no African Americans (they were slaves), no Native Americans (they were considered heathens), and no one without land (they were riffraff). A broader sense of self-rule came later, and only with great effort, pain and suffering. From the abolishionists to suffragists, from populists to Wobblies, from sit-down strikes to lunch-counter sit-ins, blood has flowed as generation after generation has battled the powers that be for a share of Life, Liberity, and the Pursuit of Happiness.
<snip>

But now blood doesn't have to flow for us to have the right to elect our President. All we need is the support of our party and another populist movement.