General Discussion

grasswire

(50,130 posts) Wed Nov 5, 2014, 03:55 AM Nov 2014

thoughtful words on how to WIN from Bill Curry at salon

Focus First on Policy

Policy precedes message. First, figure out what you think, then how to tell people about it. By conflating these two sequential steps, or skipping the first altogether, Democrats have come to the place in which they find themselves: clueless, rudderless, unable to win an argument even with a Republican Party being piloted by angry juveniles.

In their years spent cohabiting with Democrats, progressives picked up many of their bad habits. One is an obsession with storytelling. Obama persists in believing that if only he were better at it, all his troubles would be over. But every vision needs a blueprint. Democrats used to get their blueprints from progressives. That was before progressives joined them in their endless hunt for the perfect savior and the perfect slogan.

This rule implies another: No more impulse shopping. Sad to say, it’s the key lesson of the Obama experience. In our political ecosystem it’s the progressives’ role to hold Democrats to account. Engrossed as they are in picking winners, they do it poorly. They should stop acting like political consultants, which means no more tactical voting. I’ve a hunch John Kerry won those late 2004 primaries because liberals who didn’t like him looked at his résumé, his hair and his lantern jaw and thought someone else would. When the marketplace of ideas is consumed by second guessing, it becomes, like the stock market, just another casino.

When progressives do their homework they’ll know their bottom lines. Only then will they be able again to hold politicians’ feet to the fire. When Obama quietly dumped the public option it should have been a deal breaker. When he decided in his first term to maintain radio silence on global warming, it too should have been a deal breaker. Instead, progressives let political consultants lecture them on the politics of the possible, as if oblivious to the stark truth that nearly all Obama’s deepest wounds were self-inflicted in the name of pragmatism.

There’s work to do and choices to make. Or we can wait for policy scraps like dogs at a kitchen door. We yearn for a president to tell us the truth about current global chaos: that our security doctrines are defunct, that militarism and unilateralism can’t save us and that our safety lies in multilateral conflict resolution and the rule of law. It means reining in drone strikes, submitting with everyone else to international courts and fixing the U.N. Late in his life Ronald Reagan embraced elements of that agenda. There’s no reason Obama can’t, but he won’t if we won’t.