I feel that we are seeing the beginnings of going for the jugular with Feingold on censure and Murtha on Iraq. Are there enough Democrats in Congress with the courage and wisdom to go for the jugular? Are there enough new Dems running for office with those qualities? These are very big questions.

Tom

In 2004 the issue was the Iraq War and we Democrats blew it.  In 2006 and 2008 it will still be the issue. 

IRAQ NEVER WAS ABOUT DEFENSE.

We would be a whole lot better off today if the Democratic Party had had the guts to go with Howard Dean.  

In this article Naomi Klein, a Canadian, gives  her analysis of how the Democrats lost the 2004 election.
http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/21099/

 
YOU CAN'T BE STRONG ON DEFENSE IF YOU USE THE MILITARY FOR  NON-DEFENSE PURPOSES.

We will not long have a country unless we get a handle on the Defense budget.   Read Chalmers Johnson; there are two parts:

http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=70243

I feel that we are seeing the beginnings of going for the jugular with Feingold on censure

...but only from Feingold & Conyers;  John Stewart had it right when he said that fellow Democrats are treating him like he's Jack Abramov! 

Jan Knaus

J. McCutchen "JmacSF"

San Francisco. CA

Thanks for the visit Mr. Phillips.  You rocked this place without much didn't ya!

Best.

J. McCutchen "JmacSF"

San Francisco. CA

And hou could I forget!

Instinct for the capillaries

I'll get some mileage out of that line. Where's Harold Ford? Anyone seen Ed Kilgore?

Thanks again!

Excellent post Brad. To build on it a bit, I'd add that one of the things Democrats must do is to make it politically safe again to talk about the good things government can and should do for its citizens. To do this, however, Democrats must convince the public that they can be fiscally responsible. The average American wants government to provide certain basic services, but also wants taxes to be low. When Democrats talk about expanding government programs, a lot of voters run, fearing excessive taxes and meager benefits. The Democrats need to establish their credentials as cost-cutters and promoters of efficiency. With those credentials established, they can go on to talk about universal health care, Social Security, and the other programs that people want, but only at an affordable cost.  

No re-branding is necessary. The public is already convinced that Democrats are the true conservative party.

Congratulations.

... but it's the Republicans who are being completely fiscally irresponsible.

1)Debt going up to 9 trillion

2) 400 billion dollar deficits

3) Cheney saying Reagan showed deficits don't matter

4) Cutting programs for the poor and middle class while approving pork and earmarks by the gazillions

5) Feeding the pig at the trough - the military industrial complex

6) cutting taxes on the really wealthy

7) trying to eliminate the inheritance tax

8) etc. ad nauseum

Tom

Yes, and that's a point the Democrats should be making too. The Republicans are no longer conservative or fiscally responsible. They are the biggest spending party ever and--worse--they've put the cost of their profligacy on the nation's credit card leaving the bill--with interest--to our children and grandchildren. How's that for "family values?" 

Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.

People don't need another damned 10-point plan on how to bring down housing oil costs, or how to move 100,000 more kids onto Medicaid, or anything else.  Everyone knows the Democrats can put together plans to address the issues. They know we have solutions.

What no one believes is that these solutions are anything but hot air.  Right now the Democratic party is the political equivalent of the stoner dude who lives in his parents' garage, who tells you all the time what a kickass guitarist he is and how his band is going to be bigger than Clapton, man, but, you know, he's not a success yet because, see, the guy who had the van had to quit the band to work at Shoe-town, and since then they can't get to any gigs, because, you know, no van.  And the new guy we just got, he's so kickass on base, but he doesn't have a van.  But man, once we get that van we're gonna be huge!  Bigger than Clapton!

It's time for us to say what the people are saying--enough is enough!  These guys need a leash, and we're going to put one on them!  And we dont' care if they call us names, we don't care if they say we're going to lose every single midterm--for all we matter right now, I don't see how losing all our seats would make anything a lick worse.  

We need to stop pretending that we have any ability whatsoever to choose the turf on which we're going to have this fight.  We have almost no ability to set the national agenda.  We control nothing.  We can't issue subpoenas.  We can't hold hearings.  We can't even get a decent room for our press conferences.  We cannot take on the Republicans on an issue of our choosing because the media will not listen to us when we want to discuss these other issues.   Look at the Dubai--Democrats have been bitching and moaning about the ports since, literally, December 2001; John Kerry made a HUGE issue of port security, but it wasn't until the right wing media took a hold of it and forced the Republicans to respond to it that it caught fire. 

We control nothing.  We cannot pick which issue we want to fight Bush on and then go at him on it, no matter how important an issue it is to the American people.  No one will listen to us.  Republicans will choose the turf we fight this thing on, not us.  They control the agenda.  Accept it. 

That's why this Feingold thing is pure gold (no pun intended).  Whatever you thought of Feingold's resolution before, Republicans reacted andput it on the map, and now it's now out there, and it's got legs of its own.  Pundits and reporters are paying attention to where Democrats stand on it, and they're treating it like a referendum for "stand and fight" or "retreat." 

There's the battlefield.  We're almost certainly not going to get a better one than that.  We need to win there before we can pivot to social security, or healthcare, or housing, or any of ten thousand issues where we'll have the high ground.  But before we can do that, we need to win here.  

I think what Phillips means with his line about whether we comprehend the opportunity available to us is really simple -- are we going to play this so each faction of the Democratic Party plays to its own collection of hobby horses, or are we going to find frames and language that appeal to the now alienated Independent and Moderate Republican Bush voters from 2000-- 02 and 04?  No ten point plan is going to appeal -- nor is a heavy on specific policy issues going to do the trick -- we need to professionally ecute at the local level -- because this election will be won or lost in specific states and specific congressional districts -- so it is nationally unifying theme and then the elements in specific locations.  In the end Phillips is asking whether we can discipline ourselves enough to persue a strategy for winning -- or are we going to emphasize our internal differences. 

Why?  I said this back in 2004.  You look at the polls and where do you see trust?  Americans uniformly trust Democrats on just about every single domestic issue.

Where they have questions is on foreign policy.  It's a bad perception, but regardless, that's where it is.

Polls are not there to tell you what to do, they are there to act as a measurement as to how well your message is getting out.  If your polling behind on an issue, that means you need to address it better.

Think outside the box.

 Quit thinking in terms of single-payer.  Think of other solutions which work towards the end-goal.  I thought Kerry's re-insurance plan was a masterpiece if he'd gone out there and explained it.

"If that leads to failure in 2006, there will be a majorprice to pay, not just for theUnited States but in terms of the credibility of your party and movement."

This sentiment is fundamentally backwards.  The price the country has paid for this clown show utterly trivializes the damage to Democrats or the progressive movement.

We were warned that 2004 was the most important election in the modern history of the republic.  Those warnings were insufficient, and the country bleeds for it.

The problems this presents to the progressive movement are akin to the pedicure needs of a cancer patient. 

They are a bit besides the point.

Re: The very first law the Republicans  passed after getting power in all branches of government was to pass the bankruptcy law.

Problem with this statement is that the Democrats joined in quite gleefully in passing that bankruptcy law. It was a very bipartisan screwing of the citizenry for the sake of a deep-pocketed special interest.

One more thing that would help here would be to explain the budget in clear terms:

The Republican party stole your charge card, and chages about $4,000 for each household *every year*.  Some of that money, perhaps $800 each year, is going directly to Iraq.  They send perhaps $600 to the typical family as tax breaks.  But thousands of it have gone as huge tax breaks to the very richest of the rich.  And of course, you have to pay back the entire $4,000 eventually.

 

You can't see the cost now, because the US government has an incredibly high credit limit, and they can spend your money without you signing anything.  But the spending is real, as is the US's obligation to pay interest on that debt, and pay the balance off eventually.

 

I've never heard the budget described that clearly, but it is accurate (there are about 100M taxpaying households in the US).

We should also show in simple pie charts the difference in marginal tax rates for people getting dividends (0% taxes), capital gains (15% taxes) and someone who works for a living (>30% taxes).  And we should promise to undo it.  I suspect that we can double the tax cuts seen by most people while still reducing the deficit, by treatiing dividends as regular income again, cranking capital gains taxes up marginally to 20%, say, and re-establishing the estate tax.  (Yes,  I need to check the #s)

There's no justification for 0% dividend taxes: why would you want to encourage companies to pay out their profits instead of reinvesting them in the company's growth?

We definitely need a Democratic pro-growth platform.  This would include lower taxes for most people, and a single payer health care (also helps job growth, because the marginal cost for adding an employee goes down significantly).