Campaign Memo

From the Beginning...

Things are going to get a little partisan around here from now until November, as the future seems to depend on breaking the reactionary Republican stranglehold on the US government by electing Democrats to Congress. Therefore, the first Campaign Memo...

This particular one has been frontpaged at E Pluribus Media and Political Cortex, and diary-rescued at Daily Kos.


It's crunch time. It's time to get the main messages out. With candidate speeches and blogs, big money ads and homemade video, with all the means there are. Because it's not going to be as easy as it sounds from the latest batch of predictions, each inflating the other. It's going to take work to close the deal.

It's time for Democrats to tell their story, and the first thing the party must recognize is that they need to tell it from the beginning. That's where most good stories start, but there are real world reasons for what I mean.

From the beginning means: don't assume. Don't assume voters know a lot. Don't be condescending or phony, but just deal with that fact. And understand the story they want to hear this election year.

Where is the beginning?

The documented lack of knowledge about government and politics extends to crucial matters. A 1996 study showed that younger voters could identify the town in which "The Simpsons" takes places more frequently than the identity of the party that controlled Congress.

That's the crucial fact: this is the beginning:

Republicans control Congress.

Republicans have used their absolute power to exclude Democrats from the process of making laws and calling the government to account for its actions. The Republicans have misued their power to create a "democracy free zone" in the U.S. Congress.

(The "democracy free zone" is a quote from Rep. Louise Slaughter. The Republicans' unprecedented misuse of power is documented by such political scientists as Norman Ornstein and Thomas E. Mann, and is summarized in Alan Wolfe's new book, "Does American Democracy Still Work?")

This is the beginning to the story of ACCOUNTABILITY. As Alan Wolfe writes, "...accountability, as its name implies, involves telling a story."

Accountability is giving an account of actions: why they are taken, what are the consequences, what went right and wrong, and why.

Democrats have two basic and very powerful stories to tell: Iraq and Katrina. A third story is the Republican misuse of power in Congress.

But the story behind the story is that Republicans are preventing us from fixing what is broken, from looking at the facts. They are preventing us from making things better.

The stories must show what's gone wrong, but also what Congress is supposed to do about it: 1. investigate, make the executive give an account of their actions. 2. Make better laws.

Why will this work?

Americans don't generally like one party to have absolute power. As Chris Bowers showed months ago, voters usually vote against the party they believe is in power.

That's generally because Americans don't pay much attention to politics, and they don't want to. They generally favor compromise, and they elect people they trust, and expect them to do what's best without voters watching them closely. But since they don't trust politicians in general, they feel safer if power is divided.

This year they have extra motivation for electing Democrats, which can carry over to 08. But the presidency and the executive aren't on the ballot this year. Democrats must take advantage of Bush's unpopularity by showing how electing Democrats to CONGRESS will help change things.

So Chris Bowers is right: the message is that Republicans control Congress. But the message is only the beginning, the beginning of the story--of every story--that Democrats tell to win this election.