The Best Analysis for Democratic Party Action Yet

From Hunter on DailyKos:
A minor point for discussion: I've been hearing talk in a number of places opining that the Democrats are "too reactive". That is, that instead of announcing policy proposals of our own, taking the initiative on issues, we are merely reacting to whatever gets tossed our way from the other side. Shouldn't we be ignoring sideshows like Justice Sunday and Ann Coulter, not letting ourselves get distracted by going 24/7 on parlor games involving Bolton, DeLay, etc? Shouldn't we use the extra time to promote our own agenda?

Hell, no.

Let's be blunt, here. The Democrats are coming off a ten-year period of being spectacularlyreact to thrown attacks. It's not that Gore lost, or Kerry lost, or the House and Senate have Republican leads -- all of those things happened by hair's-breadth margins, and in and of themselves are not very indicative of anything resembling a long-term catastrophe. What is of more import is the way those elections or particular legislative agendas have been lost, often times in circumstances where public opinion was clearly -- unambiguously -- on the Democrats' side. The problem is -- and this is important -- current national politics has almost nothing to do with policy. inept in national politics, and I would chalk a fair amount of that up to being categorically unable or unwilling to

We're all clear on that, right?

It's not about the facts of the argument, when there is no place where the facts can be debated. It's not about reasoned discourse -- there aren't any channels interested in showing that right now. It's not about deciding who has the better proposals, on a given issue: there's simply no forum to present them to. Every time I hear a liberal talking about how we need to be more "policy driven", therefore, I get a bit confused. Isn't that missing every lesson of contemporary politics? I'd love for our national discourse to be policy driven. But that hasn't happened, and the Republicans have made it a major strategy to make sure it doesn't happen anytime soon.


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That's where the archetype of Tom Tomorrow's bearded and sweatered liberal comes from, in fact -- this notion of the liberal intellectual who is well prepared for debate on any topic you can throw at him armed with facts, logic, statistics -- but is instead is reduced to comical ineffectiveness because that's not how the game is currently played.

The way the game is currently played is that you, the Democrat, suggest some new policy; I, the Republican, then hit you with a cinder block, take your wallet, and declare victory. See in the absurd pronouncements of lobbyist-funded "think tanks", or watch it live and up-close on Hannity & Colmes, or explore it at length in the new Calvinballesque rules of Congress -- it's all the same strategy, if "strategy" can really be applied to such a thing.

So, fine. As a point of carefully considered Democratic strategy, I say it's time to stock up on cinder blocks.

That means, for example, making the exposure of the multi-headed DeLay chain of corruption a primary goal of Democratic strategists -- and more importantly, it means following the money trail back to every single one of the House members that have been sucking at that trough. It means embracing the politics of personal destruction, until such point as it loses its Rovian charms for the other side. It means following the continuing fiasco of far-right religious conservatives demonizing everyone around them in a Taliban-like insistence that the religions you, and I, and most of America share are Wrong, and theirs -- only theirs -- is Right. And yes, it means filibustering, or preparing the bunkers for the Republicans to invoke the "nuclear option". Stopping the Senate, and stopping it cold until Republicans agree that maybe the rules that apply to us should apply to them as well, and wouldn't it maybe be better to send the longtime political adults back in and start thinking about a truce?

None of this is to say that there isn't a place for actual policy-crafting. The various crises of the world -- ballooning deficits, a health care system being held together with paperclips, a looming oil crunch -- aren't going to wait. But right now -- this moment -- the stage needs to be set for those discussions to even take place. And setting that stage means tearing down the false constructs that the Republicans have piled on top of it, and preparing to start over. George W. Bush isn't an English king, and shouldn't be treated as such. Tom DeLay's personal fiefdoms are not more important than the enshrined laws and ethical standards of the nation. The judicial system that has evolved over the last two centuries of American history isn't to be flushed down the toilet because some fringe political or religious Ozymandias demands unending reign.

So be reactive, and be personal, and be tuned to respond to each outrage en masse. Maybe, after a year or two or three in which the Democrats prove themselves to be capable of the same kinds of warfare as the Republicans, the moderates in this world can spank the children, send them home, and start governing like adults again.

Thoughts?

Here are my thoughts:
Hunter is spot on relative to the issue of the irrelevance of policy pronouncements. When the lunatic radical religious right has highjacked the language of politics, to make proposals a la John Kerry about every specific issue that may or may not confront the nation is meaningless. Because the Republicans are ruling from a point of view of defining the Other, not defining any solutions, to talk about solutions is peripheral and counter productive. We on the left have to show that the people running our country are the wrong people because of what they think and what they do and the consequences of that for the rest of us. Right on Hunter.