Start The Hum

by digby

I wrote a post a while back that made a lot of people mad, called “learning to lose well.” It is a difficult argument to make and I failed at making it. I’m going to try again.

We are a minority party with almost no institutional power and a majority that sees no margin in bipartisanship, even as their president is failing quite dramatically. The port deal controversy was pretty much solely a Republican deal (although Shumer and some others were fairly high profile.) The intelligence commmittee, which was formed out of the atrocities uncovered by the Church investigation as a rare bi-partisan entity, has been taken over by an irresponsible partisan shill (who should be remembered by his fellow Kansans as the man who sold his balls and the constitution to that callow little man, George W. Bush.) This modern Republican party consciously governs by scant 51% majority by design, in order to ensure that no compromises with the opposition are required. (See Off Center by Hacker and Pierson.) Bipartisanship has been dead for almost a decade. Democrats failed to accept this and that failure left them floundering for a strategy.

It’s not impossible for an opposition party to function in that environment; it means that their only choice is accept that they are irrelevant to actual governance. That’s the simple reality in this quasi-parliamentary system the Republicans have rigged up. What that means is that you have to take every opportunity to make your argument clearly and concisely over and over again. You use whatever institutional levers you have at your disposal to put the other side off balance, expose their real agenda and get them on the record doing unpopular things. Everything is about setting up sharp distinctions and preparing the ground for the next election.

I’ll lay a little Sun Tzu on you for emphasis:

On hemmed-in ground, resort to stratagem. On desperate ground, fight.
-Sun Tzu

The Dems have been hemmed in since 2002. And at times they have been desperate. But since they failed to understand that they were in a partisan political war instead of a deliberative democratic body, they did not take advantage of their opportunities. The good news is that this system also made it impossible for the Democrats to impede Republican hubris (not that Joe Lieberman isn’t trying.)

To be fair, 9/11 was a traumatic experience and many people lost their heads. The Democrats, afraid of being tarred once again as soft on national security — and perhaps just afraid — failed to raise the kind of arguments early on that might have ripened before the 2004 election. In fact, they didn’t make them in time for them to have ripened even now, which was a mistake. We have seen such terrible foolishness as the Gang of 14 and the lackluster political skills of the intelligence committee. But it isn’t too late. The Republicans are in free fall, but the Democrats need to step into the breach. Russ Feingold is doing that today.

Now, I think we all know that the Republican Senate is not going to censure their president. In fact, they are probably going to rise up like wounded animals and roar like mad. Here’s Bill Frist from yesterday:

George, what was interesting in listening to my good friend, Russ, is that he mentioned protecting the American people only one time, and although you went to politics a little bit later, I think it’s a crazy political move and I think it in part is a political move because here we are, the Republican Party, the leadership in the Congress, supporting the President of the United States as Commander in Chief, who is out there fighting al Qaeda and the Taliban and Osama bin Laden and the people who have sworn, have sworn to destroy Western civilization and all the families listening to us. And they’re out now attacking, at least today, through this proposed censure vote, out attacking our Commander in Chief. Doesn’t make sense.

Expect more of this hysteria. It might even bring their base back into the fold. (Which is an inevitability in any case.) But take a look at the poll numbers. Revitalizing the GOP base will only stop the bleeding from the jugular vein. From the Democracy Corps memo (pdf) called “Cracks In The Two Americas”

The most important shifts are taking place among the world of Republican loyalists, which will have big strategic consequences. It is reflected in the most recent Democracy Corps poll where defection of 2004 Bush voters to the Democrats is twice the level of defection of Kerry voters to the Republicans. Only 31 percent of voters in blue counties (those carried by Kerry) are voting Republican for Congress, but 41 percent of red county voters are supporting the Democratic candidate. The combined data set shows major shifts in the Deep South and rural areas (even before the most recent controversies), blue-collar white men, and the best educated married men with high incomes….

But this problem is where the action is:

The other big shifts are taking place across the contested groups that form the swing blocs in the electorate. That is bringing big Democratic gains among older (over 50) non-college voters, the vulnerable women, practicing Catholics and the best-educated men. It is as if the entire center of the electorate shifted. This is why independents are breaking so heavily for the Democrats in each of our polls.

This is an election about throwing the bums out and Democrats need to make a clear statement of fundamental values, not policy differences. Some strategists insist that Democrats must adopt the religious code words that Republicans use to signal character and values to evangelical voters. I would suggest that all Americans, religious and secular alike, share a language that is full of words that describe character and values. How about we start using some plain English words like unethical, dishonest, unfair, untrustworthy, dishonorable and lies. I think everybody can understand what those mean.

E. J Dionne wrote the other day:

The stories about the Democrats are by no means flatly false — Democrats don’t yet have a fully worked-out alternative program — but they are based on a false premise, and they underestimate what I’ll call the positive power of negative thinking.

The false premise is that oppositions win midterm elections by offering a clear program, such as the Republicans’ 1994 Contract With America. I’ve been testing this idea with such architects of the 1994 “Republican revolution” as former representative Vin Weber and Tony Blankley, who was Newt Gingrich’s top communications adviser and now edits the Washington Times editorial page.

Both said the main contribution of the contract was to give inexperienced Republican candidates something to say once the political tide started moving the GOP’s way. But both insisted that it was disaffection with Bill Clinton, not the contract, that created the Republicans’ opportunity — something Bob Dole said at the time.

The Republicans worked very, very hard to stoke that disaffection with Bill Clinton. The consequence was that, except for a brief demoralizing period between 2001 and 2002, the Republicans have controlled both houses of congress for 12 years. They won because the tide was with them, Clinton had only won by a plurality, and the economy had not yet picked up steam. And they won mostly because from the moment he came into the White House the Republicans had relentlessly and mercilessly attacked his character.

It is past time for elected Democrats to begin laying out the case that the leader of the Republican party, the man to whom the congress has blindly followed at every turn for the past five years, is dishonorable. They must begin to create a low hum that reverberates throughout the body politic that says “the Republican party is unethical, untrustworthy, inept and dishonorable.” Make people hear it in their heads before they go to sleep each night.

Russ Feingold has just taken the first step to doing this. His censure motion will not pass, of course. But he’s started the hum. The press is listening. They are shocked, it can’t be, how can he say that? But Feingold is saying outloud, for the whole nation to hear, that the president defied the law and broke his oath to defend the constition.

As the magnificent helmeted Cokie Roberts once said, “it doesn’t matter if it’s true or not, it’s out there.” In this case, it’s true. And now it’s out there. Take a moment and hum this tune in your senators ears today. It’s time they get used to hearing it.

Go over to Firedoglake, where Jane and ReddHedd and the whole Firedog Brigade have all the information you need to make a couple of calls. Remember, we will lose it —- but we will “lose it well.” All that means is that sometimes losing a skirmish is in service to winning the longer war.

Update: CNN just reported that Bush’s numbers are down to 36% in the Gallup poll. Dems now have a 16 point lead in the generic ballot.

Update II: Ed Henry just reported that Frist is trying to move this vote up to tonight because he thinks he has around 85 Senators to vote against it. They still don’t get it. Bush just hit a new low in the Gallup Poll, they are 16 points ahead in the generic — it’s time to take a fucking risk. Voting for this motion will not hurt them in the fall but it changes the stakes. 15 Democrats is not good enough.

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