On Imus this morning James Carville, certainly a keen political observer, gave his prescription for Democrats winning at the national level: develop a convincing narrative. I think that he and I differ somewhat on this. While I believe that developing such a narrative is necessary, I don’t think it’s sufficient. I think some actual changes in the positions the party espouses are necessary as well. Not on the social side (although those are the positions most people are talking about these days) but on the foreign policy and defense side.
I think that Joe Katzman’s comment on a Winds of Change thread is a good start on such a narrative. Some other components of such a narrative that I believe in are
- We sincerely believe in harnessing the power of government to help the truly needy. Only the truly needy have such a call on the public purse.
While such a position seems to me to be eminently reasonable, it flies in the face of current Democratic orthodoxy. For example, means-testing Social Security or Medicare is currently strictly off limits.
- No one has a right to either goods or services that they neither purchased nor created.
This flies directly in the face of Mr. Kerry’s claiming of health care as a right. Now I don’t have any problem with bestowing goods and services as benefits on the truly needy but I do have a problem with claiming that they are rights. If such a claim has any meaning it would seem to mean that they should be available freely to all. That in turn either means that the government must pay the market cost for such goods and services however high they may become which is impractical or that the producers of the goods and services must provide them for less than the legitimate market value which is tyranny.
Frankly, I don’t see either of these ideas being adopted any time soon.
I also believe that certain aspects of the currently prevailing Democratic narrative have to be abandoned. That’s part of what I meant by “getting the crazy people off the front porch”. The prevailing narrative is no secret; just look in at any left-leaning blog and it’s emblazoned in bold type: Republicans are evil. Whether it’s the “Selected not elected” bit from 2000 which some Dems are holding onto for dear life like a liferaft or its current descendant in the form of baseless claims of widespread vote fraud, it still boils down to “Republicans are evil”. And there are two problems with that narrative. The first is that’s it’s not true and the second is that it’s unproductive.
It’s untrue and it’s obviously untrue. My mother is a Republican and my wife is a Republican (none of my sisters or brothers-in-law are). Not only are they two of the best people I know but they embody the very virtues which are presumably part of the Democratic Party’s key messages: tolerance, love of peace, and help for the needy. I suspect that there are enough Democrats who actually know a Republican or two who aren’t evil that they can’t even hear such things without the speaker seeming ridiculous.
That’s one of the reasons it’s unproductive. When you hear someone say something that obviously, ridiculously, outrageously untrue, it makes you wonder what else they’re telling you that’s untrue. It undermines the true statements.
The other reason it’s unproductive is that you don’t convert people by telling them that they’re evil. You convert them by telling them how good they can be.
