Pushing Back, Kicking Up

So I'm headed into work today and I'm turning over in my head the questions Bob Somerby has been pounding away at for a couple of weeks, in response to the unfolding fiasco that is the health care "debate":

Why do Democrats suck so bad at messaging?  Why are Republicans so much better at it?  Why do we keep getting our asses handed to us by conservative elites spouting the same old lies and distortions they've been using for years?

In particular, I was thinking about what The Incomparable One identifies as the core messages of movement conservatism, from which and back to which all the particular, very effective lies and distortions flow.  According to Somerby, there are just two of these core messages:

Big government never did anything right.
Liberal elites think they're better than you.

And as I was contemplating these things, I was also trying to keep in mind Somerby's very perceptive observations about them, namely, that the first one, however false as a generalization, has at least some grounding in both American political tradition and lived experience, while the second is all-too-often validated by the evident contempt that many liberal elites do in fact have for working-class people.

And so I was asking myself:  What is the Democratic message that is as clear, concise and forceful as these movement conservative messages, but that bolsters liberal/progressive goals like universal health care, rather than tearing them down, and that can take the conservative messages head-on and defeat them, not in a scholarly debate, but in the rough-and-tumble of mass public opinion?

Then suddenly it hit me:  There can only be one answer to this question.  If the Democratic party stands for anything at all, it must stand, first last and always, for the interests of the people--the broad majority of ordinary working stiffs--and against all those who would use their wealth and power to do the people harm.  For if the Democratic party is not for the common people, then who is?  And if the common people are not for the Democrats, then just who the hell are the Democrats?  We don't, after all, need two parties who are both primarly conerned with mollifying the Power Elite, albeit different sections thereof and therefore in slightly different ways.  

And I thought to myself:  It really is as simple as that, isn't it?  The Democrats have no choice about this.  If they want a powerful, coherent message, it has to be an egalitarian message.  None other is available to them, that is capable of matching and besting the popular appeal of the government-sucks-liberals-hate-you conservative message.  The Democrats can only win these message wars with conservatives if ordinary, modestly educated, economically hard-pressed, and mostly not very politically conscious working people once again come to expect that the Democrats will be unambiguously on their side, in any given fight with the rich and powerful. 

Only if this assocation between the Democratic party and the interests of plain working people becomes once again, as it formerly was, the natural expectation--something so automatic that one does not even need to think about it--will the Democrats have a chance of beating back the conservative messaging.  Against the narrative of bad government and contemptous liberal elites the only narrative that can compete on a mass scale is one of government fighting for the interests of ordinary people against the unjust dealings of the rich and powerful.  For the Democrats, this is the only game in town, or at least the only one they can hope to win.

At that point, I thought immediately of Al Gore's very effective acceptance speech at the 2000 convention, with it's refrain "they're for the powerful, we're for the people".  And then I thought of how viscously ridiculed Gore was for the message of that speech, in particular by the So-Called Liberal Media, of how transparently afraid they were of that message--not of the prospect that it would fail, but precisely of the prospect that it would succeed--and of how assiduously they worked to make sure that would not happen. 

And then I thought of how, this time, the Democratic leadership was facing a significant defeat without even having brought their party's core egalitarian message forward at all--how the core message was being strangled, so to speak, this time, in the crib.  This then led to one of those strange episodes of political vertigo that have been happening more and more to me lately, when the political present, seemingly so full of opportunity, is telescoped back into a political past in which the odds were far more heavily against us, while the great battles of the past come forward to haunt the present, not because they are still being fought, but precisely because we have stopped fighting them.

So with all of this I arrived at work thinking:  "Hey, I solved the riddle of failed Democratic messaging before Somerby did!"  And then I took a look at today's Howler (one of the most important you are ever likely to read) and realized that Somerby had beat me to it--as did FDR biographer Jean Edward Smith, in this wonderful NYTime OpEd, and Micheal Lind, in an absolutely billiant Salon article, both of which Somerby had already linked to.

And despite having my words come back to me with some of that old alienated majesty that Emerson talks about, I was inordinately cheerful for the rest of the work day because, though our online numbers, at least, may be few (we Democrats Without Apology), our doctrine is blessedly clear!

And then I came home, and started this blog.