Tag: messaging

I think every one of these Republican candidates running for the House is going to have a Democratic opponent who’s going to run an ad you can write today. It’s going to start [with] “even conservative Newt Gingrich, the former leader of the Republicans in the House, says ‘It’s radical, it’s social engineering.’”

[…]

Reagan had the 11th commandment, ‘Thou shalt not attack fellow Republicans.’ This is a capital offense against the 11th commandment. He won’t recover.

Charles Krauthammer, making some sense on disgraced former Speaker Newt Gingrich. Broken clock, blind pig, and etc…
Disgraced former Speaker Gingrich never had much of a chance to begin with, but taking at least four positions on the individual mandate and the Ryan plan, many of those positions within one day and all easily available on the television would seem to cap it.
However, I don’t believe for one second that The Democrat would actually use disgraced former Speaker Gingrich in this way for messaging purposes. Shrill. Better to assume that voters know all about the GOP plan to destroy Medicare and but also leave a program in existence called Medicare. Talking about that sort of thing is just rank demagoguery. Any Serious Person will tell you so.

If you replace a system that actually pays seniors’ medical bills with an entirely different system, one that gives seniors vouchers that won’t be enough to buy adequate insurance, you’ve ended Medicare. Calling the new program “Medicare” doesn’t change that fact.

Paul Krugman, reflecting on the Village Edict that Democratic claims that the GOP plans to “end” Medicare are misleading.
The stupidity of our discourse truly knows no bounds. Yes, a program called Medicare exists in the Ryan Plan. But that is where the similarities end. That realizing this requires reading even an executive brief of said Ryan Plan is why the Village will never, ever come to know this.

It is important to make sure that very graphic photos of [bin Laden] who was shot in the head are not floating around as an incitement to additional violence or as a propaganda tool.

[…]

We don’t trot out this stuff as trophies. The fact of the matter is, this is somebody who was deserving of the justice that he received.

[…]

…we [are] monitoring worldwide reaction. There is no doubt that Osama bin Laden is dead. Certainly there is no doubt among al Qaeda members that he is dead. So we don’t think that a photograph in and of itself is going to make any difference. There are going to be some folks who deny it. The fact of the matter is, you will not see bin Laden walking on this earth again.

President Barack Obama, in remarks to Steve Kroft for an upcoming 60 Minutes.
I agree, and I find that bit about al Qaeda members lack of doubt to be particularly interesting, but I still think this course of action only invites a whole new wave of “Deathers.” Not that they’d believe anything up to and including bin Laden’s head on a pike in the middle of a DC roundabout (he was dead ages ago and kept on ice; this is an elaborate biological replicate of what appears to be his head; where’s the body!?!). Still, something has got to be put out there such that this crap is mostly shut down. The nonsense with the birth certificate fairly proves that it will never, ever go away until the MSM and specifically FOXnews is just too embarrassed to mention it anymore.
Why not video of the raid up to the frame before he is shot? Surely this would be proof positive and seems likely to exist. Assuming that’s not forthcoming, I’d say it’s only days before House and Senate Republicans start in with the “well, I take him at his word but…” crap.

Yelling at Congresspeople

squashed:

The summer before last, Republican groups made huge political gains by showing up at Townhall meetings and acting atrociously. Now Democrats want to do the same thing.

They shouldn’t.

When I saw that MoveOn.org was organizing the same sort of events to target Republicans, I initially felt a certain glee. This will go well for the left. Then I remembered the August 2009 town halls meeting I attended. I am wholly in favor of constituents challenging their representatives—even if it makes the representatives uncomfortable. I have little use for any sense of propriety that gets in the way of a robust and honest political dialog—but what happened at that townhall meeting wasn’t political discourse.

It was base. It was incoherently mean, screamingly ugly. The same hateful energy responsible for every crime ever committed by a mob was on display. It was the sort of event that makes you wonder whether humanity was a mistake.

Now MoveOn.org will unleash the same sort of nastiness at the Republicans. It will capture a media narrative. It will be good for the Democrats in 2012. But it will be bad for the country. They shouldn’t do it.

Presumably it all depends on how it’s done. The reason the Tea Klan stuff was so ugly (to me, anyway) was the pure low-information spectacle of it all; the purest example of this being stuff like “keep your guvmint claws off my Medicare” and the like. If MoveOn shows up and just screams people attending and the House member running the thing down: then Squashed and I are in complete agreement, it will have been a bad idea and bad for long-term political discussion in the country.

But, if MoveOn shows up and states the case, calmly and upon a foundation of facts-based disagreement (e.g. the GOP plans to end Medicare in every meaningful way; however, a program called Medicare will still be there and here is a partial list of the reasons that move will be very, very bad deal for the elderly and infirmed…): then it is all for the good.

I think if you have mandatory carbon caps combined with a trading system, much like we did with sulfur, and if you have a tax-incentive program for investing in the solutions, that there’s a package there that’s very, very good. And frankly, it’s something I would strongly support.

[…] 

What we ought to be doing is inventing a whole series of breakthrough mechanisms that create incentives for people to have a better environmental outcome in an economically positive way, to accelerate the transition to better and cleaner technologies.

Disgraced former Speaker Newt Gingrich, speaking in 2007.
Source: Washington Post

When Republicans reached basic consensus about what they wanted to do [relative to Ryan’s plan], they then delegated the details to a small group of people who fleshed out the plan, it was then presented to the caucus and within a week they had the vote. Democrats, by contrast, put their health reform plans through an agonizing months-long process of public intra-party disputes. That gave people who didn’t care about the details tons and tons of time to organize a backlash while tending to signal to low-information voters that Democrats were doing something controversial even among their own partisans. The backlash against Medicare privatization is overwhelmingly likely to grow over time, but it’s also the case that between today and November 2012 other events will intervene and crowd the agenda space possibly letting members off the hook for an unpopular vote.

Matt Yglesias on the key differences between how the GOP and Democratic Caucuses operate.

The Shinning

In which Matt Miller channels The Shining:

The House Republican budget adds $6 trillion to the debt in the next decade yet the GOP is balking at raising the debt limit. The House Republican budget adds $6 trillion to the debt in the next decade yet the GOP is balking at raising the debt limit.

[…]

“The spending spree is over,” Ryan said the other day, after the House passed his blueprint. “We cannot keep spending money we don’t have.” Except that by his own reckoning Ryan is planning to spend $6 trillion we don’t have in the next decade alone.

[…]

If I were Barack Obama, my mantra on this week’s debt tour and in the months ahead would be that we should lift the debt limit only by as much debt as is needed to accommodate Paul Ryan’s budget.

The Shinning

Confessions of a Climate Convert

Forget all the road to Damascus stuff in the piece, this is what I find important:

I’d argue that conservatives and libertarians should strongly support regulation to reduce carbon pollution, since pollution by one entity invariably infringes upon the rights of others (including property rights), and no entity has a constitutional right to pollute. It does not put America on the road to serfdom to suggest that the federal government has a compelling interest in protecting the country from ecological damage. If anything, it puts America on the road to common sense.

Exactly right. This is how Democrats should be messaging on this issue. It removes the ever-present and undeniable impulse in the MSM to punch the dirty fucking hippies whenever possible, the nigh irresistible impulse to note that it “snowed today,” and the much beloved “well, Al Gore sure is fat” gambit and frames the debate in terms even libertarians can understand.

Part Two of said strategy needs to incorporate the notion that even if we’re 100% wrong these measures will be good for the country and likely even of existential importance relative to our industrial and economic standing in the world. Getting off our oil addiction is, plain and simple, a good idea, no matter what you think the output carbon of our oil economy is doing. We’re going to be getting off of oil sooner or later, may as well start now and be the arbiter or at least one of the arbiters of the post-oil economy. Furthermore, if you want America “making things” again, the most likely and highest value target for said industry is in the post-oil transition. Not only can you sell such technology to the developed world, the whole of the developing world will be knocking at your door as well.
There is not enough reserve oil in American hands to measurably move the global market, even if we could extract it all tonight. There just isn’t. We wouldn’t even make an appreciable impact on our own rate of import were we to employ all of our oil; even that small but measurable impact would only last for a year or two. We may hold 1-2% of proven world reserves. Period. We cannot and will not ever produce our way off of foreign oil. It is simply not possible given current or projected usage. And, oh by the way, there isn’t enough global capacity either, though only the US military seems willing to admit it publicly.
The time to start dealing with both the implicit misconception (Drill baby drill!) and the overriding and much more important harsh reality is right now, not 20 years from now when our oil addiction and its impacts is both (still) utterly undeniable and but it is also too late to do anything about it.

Confessions of a Climate Convert

You want to repeal health care? Go at it. We’ll have that debate. You’re not going to be able to do that by nickel-and-diming me in the budget. You think we’re stupid?

[…]

Put [measures like defunding Planned Parenthood] in a separate bill. We’ll call it up. And if you think you can overturn my veto, try it. But don’t try to sneak this through.

[…]

When Paul Ryan says his priority is to make sure, he’s just being America’s accountant … This is the same guy that voted for two wars that were unpaid for, voted for the Bush tax cuts that were unpaid for, voted for the prescription drug bill that cost as much as my health care bill – but wasn’t paid for. So it’s not on the level.

President Obama in semi-private remarks to “supporters” as reported here.
I, for one, welcome the arrival of feisty candidate mode Obama. Next thing you know he’ll grow a beard. An action beard.
Plain and simple truths. America craves them. This urge to “look forward” is a self defeating one. You should have been and still need to be to opening every speech with the details of GOP-lead bed shitting from 2000-2008. Even use a chart or two. It’s the only way America will ever learn about what happened and why.