Lessons Learned [by the Democrats from the 2004 elections]

Great Debates
61

Actually, your comments are not productive within the context of this thread, which is aimed at strategic and tactical means the Dems could make to improve their chances at the box office. You’re just focusing on stereotypes about Dems. What we need are places where our techniques were wrong, or where our goals could not be reached due to internal contradictions, that sort of thing.

In any event, in the last couple of decades it’s been the Dems that are demonstrably strong on economics. Clinton had the dotcom bubble driving his economy, but he didn’t fuck it up, which makes him a font of wisdom compared to your average Republican president.

Your post does demonstrate, however, that the message about Democratic fiscal responsibility hasn’t gotten out. This adds urgency to the notion that we need to get the message out on this point.

Your other point about reforming health care is fair except that it only addresses the problem from the Dem side. The Republican solution of cutting benefits is going to be extremely unpopular with seniors. Of course, there’s this whole ‘privitization’ thing, but I don’t know if it will fly – I’m sure there are a lot of seniors out there with vivid memories of what happened to their wonderful, privatized retirement accounts when the dotcom bubble burst and the stock market went south. I’m sure they’ll tell their brethren.

Still, the AARP may betray their membership on this one – they’ve done it before, and seniors are only marginally less stupid than younger voters, and as the last election has shown, it’s deadly dangerous to underestimate the stupidity of the American voter.

62

Perfect example – this is exactly what the Democrats have to do – endlessly repeat talking points regardless of the truth of the matter.

63

You just answered your own question.

You describe southern conservative thought as racist, sexist, anti-intellectual, etc.

Are there racists, sexists, etc. in the south? Sure. Are they the majority? No. But as you’ve indicated, it’s easier just to write off the south at this point. Don’t try to understand people there, they’re all hicks anyway.

And the thing you said about “educating” the south. Could you be any more condescending? “Those southerners just don’t know any better, they haven’t been taught.”

The problem with liberals is that they automatically assume that they are the enlightened ones and anyone who disagrees is a backwards thinker. There is NO thought given to the possiblility that maybe … just maybe the other side might be right about a thing or two.

Policy changes aren’t going to matter a bit until liberals stop acting as if the part of US between New England and the Pacific coast doesn’t exist.

64

You don’t get it. I’m living in Georgia right now, have lived here all my adult life. The majority of southerners I have encountered are racist, sexist and anti-intellectual. I’m not talking about some hypothetical group out in the hinterlands, I’m talking about people I’ve worked with, socialized with and been related to all my life. We have HUGELY different perceptions of southerners.

Now, when I say racist, I don’t mean people who wear white sheets and hoods on Saturday nights for the cross-burning. I mean the sort of people who have said to me, on so many occasion, “Them niggers are all right, but they need to be kept in their place.” And the ones too smart to actually say such a thing but who silently agree.

And when I say racist, I don’t mean people who think women should not be allowed to work. I mean people who think women are lesser creatures than men, whose jobs and worldly concerns aren’t so real as men’s because their real life centers around children, even if they are working.

I think such folks CAN be educated and SHOULD be educated and NEED to be educated, and no amount of bluster about how southern racism and sexism is a yankee stereotype will change my mind, because I’ve BEEN there, right in the trenches, and I KNOW what the deal is.

Maybe you should rethink YOUR certainties.

65

Maybe you live in a different kind of south than the one I grew up in. People like the ones you’ve described are in the vast minority here in WV, and were where I grew up in KY as well.

I mean the sort of people who have said to me, on so many occasion, “Them niggers are all right, but they need to be kept in their place.” And the ones too smart to actually say such a thing but who silently agree.

That there are people out there who say the former is a given. What I’m wondering is how you know if someone is silently agreeing.

66

[QUOTE=laigle]
Voters are just super-evolved chimps, they are going to lean towards the dominant individual.

[QUOTE]

Big old Word to your whole post laigle. I, for one, think the presidential debates would have been greatly improved with chest-beating and poo-flinging.

67

Just half-listening to liberal vs conservative rhetoric, you will notice that liberals use the word “rights” (which they have made, as Liberalpointed out, a dirty word), and conservatives use the word “freedom.”

But surely you see that they don’t think of what they are doing as a denial of freedom. Censors never call themselves censors. They are preserving their religious freedom to define marriage. They are protecting the rights of the unborn. They are passionately interested in freedom, just not your definition of it.

I’m sure someone smarter than me can figure out a way to counter this attitude, but the first step is (as has already been noted) to learn and use the ‘right’ language.

68

FWIW -
[ol][li]“We didn’t get our message out”. Sure you did, and you had 60 Minutes, NBC, Moore, MoveOn, and George Soros to help you do it. Unfortunately, the message was, “We’re not Bush”, and it wasn’t enough. []There’s a war on. If you can’t field a candidate with a strong and believable record on defense, you will lose in war time. It didn’t matter that he was a war hero. It mattered that he voted against the first Gulf War, tried to run away from his vote on the Iraq invasion, and accused veterans of being war criminals in his testimony before Congress. []The economy is not doing badly at all, and you lose credibility every time you say so. (You also run the risk that John Corrado pointed out of seeming to rejoice in the misfortunes of America, but you run that risk whenever the economy is an issue, unless it really is in the toilet. Advance at your own risk.) []This kind of thing - [/li][quote]
If you look at what the Pubbies did to Clinton during his Presidency and all the negative ads, hate speech works very, very very well whether you like it or not. I think the Dems need to move heavily into hate speech – we need to do the same thing to Bush that the Pubbies did to Clinton. We need to publicly call him a reformed coke addict, a cowardly sneak who glories in sending the children of poor people off to be killed and maimed in a war he would have run from like a cowardly cur as a young man.
[/quote]
As Khadaji points out, Clinton won two elections, and now so has Bush. So, how’s that working out for ya?[li]You need a better candidate. How you are going to bring that off, considering that you lost a couple more governorships is beyond me, but JFK is the last guy who went from the Senate to the White House. And it was a different JFK. []What Liberal said about “rights”. You can’t have whatever you want just by defining it as a “right”. [/ol][/li]Do you seriously want to win the White House? OK -

Run a candidate who is fiscally conservative. Really fiscally conservative, not more of this “let me soak the rich and you all can share the goodies” Robin Hood shit, real fiscal conservatism. We didn’t get much of this in this election, from either side. If either side had genuinely embraced the idea, it could have been a landslide.

Run a candidate who is strong on defense. That means consistently strong, none of this election-eve conversion stuff. You liberals have to get over the idea that the military is either a bunch of knuckle-dragging Neanderthals, or your personal piggy bank. And this fear-mongering about the draft was just shameful.

Run a candidate who is socially libertarian. You are not gonna get gay marriage by having the Supreme Court impose it by fiat. That train left the station with the losses of 2004. Bush is going to pick the next two to four Justices, and his margin in the Senate means he can get some believers in strict constructionism. So, for the next four years at least, and probably longer, if states want gay marriage, they are going to have to do the heavy lifting of convincing the voters of that state, not five old farts in black bathrobes.

Run a candidate who is not afraid to talk about God. If you fall to the floor in a dead faint over SoCaS every time someone shows they genuinely believe, you are going to lose ground to the large majority of voters, who mostly believe themselves.

And try not to look down your noses at the voters, m’kay? People tend to resent being condescended to. And shit like this -

is practically a gilt-edged guarantee of a Republican in the White House for decades.

Or just reject everything I - and Jodi, and Abbie Carmichael, and Evil One - AND THE VOTERS - have said, as “Republican Lite”. And see where that gets you.

After all, what the hell do we know? Except how to win elections.

Regards,
Shodan

69

Here’s a lesson Democrats should learn but probably haven’t. If you want to win an election, focus on voters not non-voters.

If ever there was proof, the Dean results in the Iowa primary SHOULD HAVE been a lesson. Depending on new or young voters requires not lots of hard work, but a supernatural level of effort.

Even back when young men were being drafted for Vietnam, the percentage who voted were much smaller than older groups. If one won’t even vote where your life might literally be at stake, why would one think now would be better.

70

Easy. YOu look at their faces while the others say the words.

71

Yep- that’s why Clinton lost both times he ran; people preferred Republican negativity to Clinton’s optimist.

No, no, wait- he won didn’t he?

First: The American people will nearly always vote for an optimist with a “can do” atittude over someone who seems to be constantly complaining. Look at the sunny FDR vs. the dour Hoover. Positive warrior Truman over dull Dewey. Optimist Eisenhower vs. analytical and cynical Stevenson. Forward-looking JFK over dour Nixon. Sunny Reagan over ‘malaise’ Carter. Upbeat Clinton vs. grumpy Bush and grumpy Dole.

Clinton, Reagan, JFK, Truman, FDR- all of these people ran campaigns in which they critized the opposition party for their actions in power and for what that meant to the American people, while still being upbeat about America and what it could accomplish. Kerry did that at the convention… and then completely dropped it, focusing instead on cataloguing Bush’s mistakes. Not to mention that even a happy John Kerry still sounded depressed.

Second: The American people want ideas, not criticism. One of Kerry’s biggest problems was his tendency to say, “Well, Bush screwed up, and I’ll do better” without giving short but specific substance as to how he would do better.
If you want to win in '08, find a sunny optimist who talks about America’s can-do attitude, give him two big plans on what he wants to accomplish, and have him communicate those plans and not get bogged down in every little issue that comes to the forefront.

72

Oh geez am I ever sick of hearing this. When Kerry gave details, people said he was too “nuanced”. When he gave succint soundbites, people said he didn’t offer any details. When he attacked Bush, people said he should be positive. When he didn’t attack Bush, people said, “Why isn’t he attacking Bush?”:smack: There’s simply nothing he could have done that would have pleased everyone.

73

Exactly. But he, like many failed candidates, tried to please everyone, and therefore set himself up to lose. Going out and hunting in Ohio- how many people looked at that and said, “Well, maybe he’s not so pro-gun control and an elitey WASP after all.” compared to how many said, “Geez, will he do anything to get elected?”

Kerry needed to have plans that could be summed up in two sentences. “I will make sure we win in Iraq, with foreign help but not because of it.” Bingo- strong on Iraq, point up that you’ll be a better diplomat, defuse the charge that you expect France and Germany to bail us out.

“I will make sure that everyone in this country gets fair and equal access to health insurance.” Gets across what you want without bogging you down in details that can be countered.

“I will make sure that government is held to the same accountability that we now demand from corporations.” Remind people of Bush’s mistakes, Enron’s mistakes, and tie them together.

What Kerry had were plans that he wouldn’t or couldn’t describe in two sentences, so he either had to be long-winded and detailed, or short without conveying anything.

74

No one that was not a part of the left was saying this. I recently assigned 75 college freshman to watch the debates and analyze the candidate’s rhetoric. Probably 50 of them wrote that both candidates were too negative and just attacked each other.

My favorite quote: “If they can’t be polite, we should just not have an election.”

Stupid kids? Maybe. But they are also a natural constituancy for the dems, and the negativity was turning them off. Michael Moore had successful rally here … and then the kids fail to see any vision from the candidate and their enthusiasm withers.

75

Hold the phone, there, Shodan. How does simply restoring the top tax bracket to the level it was before Bush cut it constitute a “soaking”? Here’s reality: To reduce the defecit, you either have to spend less money, or take in more money. With the defecit where it is right now, it is IMPOSSIBLE to turn it around to a surplus without taking in more money, and most CERTAINLY impossible to turn it around by cutting taxes. Anyone who says they can do it is simply a liar.

On the other hand, I guess lying is what’s required to win an election these days. More’s the pity…

76

Seriously, though - and I’m asking you to be honest here: Do you really think Kerry would have done well at all if he had just run a campaign about what his plans were, had allowed Bush to attack him over and over without responding to any of the charges, and hadn’t pointed out any of Bush’s mistakes? I really don’t think that would have worked.

77

You mean like how Dubya won South Carolina by posing for photo ops with Bob Jones and launching push polls saying John McCain had an illegitimate black child? Southern voters accepted that because they didn’t think he was being condescending by treating them like inbred redneck bigoted puritans? Or they accepted it because they are?

78

I lived in the South when I attended Georgia Tech. That was an urban area with a diverse population. The vast, vast, really really vast majority of Southerners I met were racist inbred homophobic religious fanatics that made Osama bin Laden look like he’s on valium. And these were the cream of the crop, the best Georgia had to offer.

79

The same way Kerry voting for a tax cut smaller than what the Republicans wanted constitutes “voting to increase taxes.” :rolleyes:

80

Okay, so we have established that a lot of people in Georgia apparently suck.

How does this apply to the rest of the south?