Winning In 2006: Let's Run Our Own Referenda
Mon May 02, 2005 at 05:57:32 PM PDT
I cannot commend more highly to you Tom Frank's essay
What's The Matter With Liberals in the current New York Review of Books.
With his usual insightful analysis, Frank examines how Republicans were yet again able in 2004 to use the language of cultural backlash to portray themselves as the representatives of the working class against elitist liberals trying to hold them down:
The hallmark of a "backlash conservative" is that he or she approaches politics not as a defender of the existing order or as a genteel aristocrat but as an average working person offended by the arrogance of the (liberal) upper class. The sensibility was perfectly caught during the campaign by onetime Republican presidential candidate Gary Bauer, who explained it to The New York Times like this: "Joe Six-Pack doesn't understand why the world and his culture are changing and why he doesn't have a say in it." These are powerful words, the sort of phrase that could once have been a slogan of the fighting, egalitarian left. Today, though, it was conservatives who claimed to be fighting for the little guy, assailing the powerful, and shrieking in outrage at the direction in which the world is irresistibly sliding.
I want to focus on one thing Frank says (and then, later this week, I may spawn off 3-5 more diaries off this essay; it's that good):
The only centrism to be seen on the Republican side was the parade of GOP moderates across the stage of Madison Square Garden, an exercise clearly intended more to pacify and reassure the press than to win over actual voters. When the cameras were off, it was a completely different affair: what Karl Rove called a "mobilization election" in which victory would go to the party that best rallied its faithful. What this meant in practice was backlash all the way: an appeal to class resentment and cultural dread that was unprecedented in its breadth; ingenious state-level ballot initiatives on "values" questions that would energize voters; massive church-based get-out-the-vote efforts; and paranoid suggestions from all sides inviting voters to believe the worst about those tyrannical liberal snobs.
We can do the reverse in 2006, and let's start brainstorming now:
What are the ballot initiatives that we can make 2006 issues that will bring moderate/swing voters to our side and paint Republicans as the heartless bastards we know they are?
A few ideas come to mind for me:
- state funding of stem cell research (as was done in CA)
- Reid's "Prevention First" agenda
- ending legacy admissions at all schools receiving state funding
- raise the state minimum wage
- medical marijuana (if we win the Raich case before the SCT)
- increased student loan funding or other increases in educational spending. I particularly like one with an outsourcing focus: scholarships for in-state students interested in pursuing math, science and engineering in college and grad school
- mandate health insurance equity for mental health treatment
Good ideas? I'm sure you can think of more. Is this a direction we should be going?
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