Clinton got a ton of mileage out of identifying us as the party for people who “work hard and play by the rules”. We’ve just had eight years of governance by those who not only have zero respect for people who work hard and play by the rules – but who sat on their lazy behinds while an American city drowned, who make up the rules to suit them as they go along when they aren’t busy breaking every rule in sight.

So resurrect Clinton’s formulation.

Or go back further, to Ben Franklin. We’re the party of “We must all hang together, or assuredly we will hang separately.” (I’d go further and say, “We must all hang the party that’s devoted itself to hanging us separately,” but then I’m among the 35% paying attention.)

And if we’re going to resurrect FDR, of which I am all in favor, let’s truthfully say that Republican governance has been stacking the deck against ordinary Americans for thirty years. To unstack it, we need a Re-deal.

Finally, part of harking back to FDR should be a matter of taking a leaf from Ronald Reagan’s book. He surrounded himself with FDR imagery in order to appear more progressive and bi-partisan than he was. That was a trick, but we can legitimately claim to be the proper heirs of both Lincoln and TR, whose ideals have been abandoned and pilloried as the Republican party got hijacked.

But I don’t believe they HAVE to do a lot.

In fact, what CAN they do that won’t be releasing bush and the GOP’s balls from the bench vise, and inserting their own?

Because EVERY single time we bashe them, for not waving the magic wand, we are saying:

“I believe that the result of pulling the troops out will be so inconsequential; even beneficial (for shit’s sake!) that Pelosi and Co. can do it by themselves, and then, “X” number of months later, receive the grateful plaudits of the voters, who will be totally uninfluenced by:

A: The exponential jump in the mayhem…

B: A “blame-assignment” campaign by Rove, etc, that would give Joseph Goebbels a hard-on that a cat couldn’t scratch.

I swear to you, if the funding plug IS pulled, and the only fingerprints on it belong to Pelosi and the dems, it will be worth at LEAST 20 percentage points to the republicans in the 2008 election.

We can call that “cynicism” or playing the blame game, or anything we want, but it’s also the stone fucking truth.

We don’t have a veto-proof majority. We’re not part of the party that drank the damn koolaid like it was their mother’s milk.

WE DIDN’T CREATE THIS HAMALAYAN SIZED FUCKUP OF A MOUNTAIN, made up of blood, bullshit, and bodyparts.

George Bush and the republicans did that. Yet for some reason, we are, collectively, screaming at the democrats as if THEY had paid Ahmed Chalabi $40 million dollars to let THEM give him a blowjob, instead of the GOP.

Arrrrghhh…

…Gore Vidal: The US is governed by the Party of Property, which has two Right wings, a Right Wing and a FAR-Right Wing.

Vidal wrote well, with appropriate snarkiness, but he didn’t have all the answers. Sure, Americans of all stripes love their property. And, a small number have a lot more of it.

But, if we elect people to the right of Vidal it’s because Americans ARE to the right of Vidal. That doesn’t mean we’re all evil or stupid. It means Vidal was out of step with Americans. Perhaps it was because he lived in Italy a very long time.

Where I would agree with him is that even our Left tends to respond too narrowly to the interests of the very wealthy. If we would work for a nation where everyone benefits with at least opportunity, then it would be much harder for anyone to differ.

Dismissing Bush as an aberration, we certainly can’t afford to move further to the Right. Clinton or a Nixon (soley in terms of governance), IMO, is as far to the right as we should ever go. But, we can’t afford to move too far to the left either. We must remain true to our core American beliefs in Liberty, Freedom of Religious Belief and Practice, Freedom of Thought and Speech and (more recently learned) the Right to Privacy. [ I may be overlooking one or two. ] In short, we want to be Free and Safe and Prosperous.

In early days the Free was focused on rather a lot. Later, Safe and Prosperous grew in our minds. Of late (1950s-), Republicans have been focusing on renewing our fears, so we’ll be unable to apply Liberal ideas to the Prosperity issue. Instead they want us to relive the Civil War, World War II and the Cold War. Perhaps it’s partly sentimentality, but I think it’s a calculated tactic to distract us with Fear.

I think FDR introduced some amazing economic ideas during a time of great fear and he succeeded. But, I don’t think that was a concerted plan based on Idealism. It was just forced motion during a crisis. Of course, today you’d never catch even a Republican arguing that government should never do anything to interfere in or to help business in America. Instead, it’s their bread and butter.

Today we understand the Values discussion much better and we know the general direction we want to move. What we have to decide on, and this can probably only be decided in the framework of a political campaign and in Congress, is the specific tactics or techniques to use. I don’t believe any of us believes our current economy, however successful in toto, is the answer. It’s just a great start. We need to recall JFK’s argument that America is great in large part because the rising tide lifts all boats. We should recall that and the great speeches RFK made as inspiration. Then we can recall it was Carter who deregulated the trucking, airlines and communications industries and it was Clinton who got the budgets balanced again during the biggest Wall Street bull market in history. We can move in the right direction if we can gain the political power. We just need to remind people what we want to do and why.

…
Rayne, talking about JFK, and hope – it wasn’t JFK who turned me into the liberal I am today. It was Robert Kennedy – that man of privilege who saw poverty and injustice as the MORAL issues they are, and wanted to end them.

… Because we’re only as strong as the weakest among us?

We have to find a way to remind this country how great it is. We need another “go to the moon”,…

We need leadership.

Gotta go read some RFK speeches.

I believe RFK, whether through accident or plan, formed a natural bridge between the Civil Rights Movement, which hadn’t come close to completing it’s work, to the next major Democratic Party movement in the area of Economics and Commerce. And, I think Jimmy Carter did a fair job of taking up that motion.

But, today, despite the very real need to continue in that direction, we need to solve a lot of different problems. There’s the war, of course. There’s Global Warming, no small thing as our very existence is involved. There’s medicine and our dramatically shifting demographics. There’s World relations and trade. There is, with Bush in power, the very existence and practice of our nation’s Constitution.

We have to make America work for everyone and there’s a lot to do. It might not look like a moral or Liberal crusade, but there’s probably a large majority in America who would favor fixing this larger set of problems.

What’s the common denominator? What’s the slogan? Well, as said above, it sure isn’t “Together we can do better!” Nope, that isn’t it.

Fix the election system.
Get rid of Bush&Co.
Take government.
Solve problems.

Don’t be afraid of working with willing Repubs to make progress. Don’t make the perfect the enemy of the good.

I just saw this linked at Buzzflash and thought that “HOPE” is a biggie I would never associate with a ‘puke. Never.

http://pundits.thehill.com/200…..-optimism/

” YOU are the people. “

ths brand includes : a) don’t be sheep, b) pro-union, c) pro little-guy, d) less secretiveness, etc…

Lewis Rothschild: You have a deeper love of this country than any man I’ve ever known. And I want to know what it says to you that in the past seven weeks, 59% of Americans have begun to question your patriotism.

President Andrew Shepherd: Look, if the people want to listen to-…

Lewis Rothschild: They don’t have a choice! Bob Rumson is the only one doing the talking! People want leadership, Mr. President, and in the absence of genuine leadership, they’ll listen to anyone who steps up to the microphone. They want leadership. They’re so thirsty for it they’ll crawl through the desert toward a mirage, and when they discover there’s no water, they’ll drink the sand.

President Andrew Shepherd: Lewis, we’ve had presidents who were beloved, who couldn’t find a coherent sentence with two hands and a flashlight. People don’t drink the sand because they’re thirsty. They drink the sand because they don’t know the difference.

Emphasis mine.

This sound pretty accurate to me — but why is it the American people “don’t know the difference”?

Their media tells them only one side of the story, ad nauseum. Sure, the public could do a better job of validating this (and spend less time on freaking reality shows and American Idol), but what if the entirety of American culture reinforces NOT spending the time to validate anything? I look at my spouse, an educated man who should know better, and I see somebody running on the treadmill as hard as he can every day, all day long, and finally having to rely on arguments with me to round out those 30-second snippets he gets for news. What if people like my spouse don’t have someone like me, and spend their lives running so damned hard to pay the bills, take care of their kids, keep body and soul together and never hear the truth?

I think this is where we have to work simultaneously on multiple fronts, one of which is restoring fairness to broadcast media. We have to find ways to protect workers so that they don’t end up having to work multiple dead-end, crappy paying jobs with little down time (and I believe FDL does a great job chipping away at this, particularly with Tula’s posts). And we have to continue to build a brand that is so solid it cannot be hacked apart by the opposition.

Of course, what will also help is upending the misconception that Republicans can govern — and again, FDL does a damned fine job of this, although the Republicans have done an awful lot of heavy lifting what with screwing up every thing they’ve touched.

Maybe what’s missing is a comprehensive, easily digested road map, not unlike the 50-State Strategy. Something asymmetrical, too, that can’t be readily undermined by the wingers, not unlike Al Gore’s non-traditional campaign.

(p.s. and I’ll be adding Wizard’s First Rule to my reading list, thanks.)