Dems Need To FINALLY Go For The Jugular...

[eniwetok]

I'm sick and tired of Dems pulling their punches. It's been 35 years since the GOP implemented their Starve The Beast strategy... to create massive deficits and debt and then use that debt as a pretense to weaken of dismantle New Deal or Great Society programs the far right has always loathed. Yet despite being beat up as tax and spenders... the Dems never made a concerted effort to call the GOP motives into question... even if Starve The Beast poses an existential threat to Dem legacy programs.

And just WHY did the GOP go from 80% of GOP senators co-sponsoring health care reform bills with individual mandates back in 1993... to do a 180 and since then only propose heath savings accounts, tort reforms, and more interstate "competition"? Why was the GOP so adamant against the ACA even if it essentially was the GOP approach? Why aren't the Dems saying the GOP would rather let people die than give Obama credit? Or that they are so concerned about their "brand" they'd rather let people die than let government work for the American People?

And WHY didn't Hillary try to educate the people on how justices like Scalia were undermining the Constitution for political purposes? The Right loved this clown because he was undermining the key protection of individual rights... the Ninth Amendment. Once Scalia negated the Ninth, the right could turn our system into one where government automatically had the power to limit rights the social conservatives disapproved of... while saying people then had to create those rights legislatively. THAT'S NOT IN THE CONSTITUTION! SO why FT have Dems never said this over and over and over the past 35 years?

Dems need to put some teeth into their arguments, take their gloves off, and go for the jugular.

[benld74]

1. ALL valid points imhop

[bpositive]

2. Enough pussyfooting around

We need a tougher strategy or face extinction

[eniwetok]

3. There are more arguments... but...

I can think of more arguments but they've been undermined by Dems. For example... those irresponsible GOP tax cuts are really "funded" with money stolen from future taxpayers. The GOP has created the Free Lunch Right... dimwits who actually believe these tax cuts paid for themselves and created massive revenue booms. In reality this was the deliberate sabotage of the fiscal health of the nation... where hundreds of billions were being pissed away on interest instead of buying something of value for the American People... and it threatens our ability to respond to emergencies. But then Obama took that argument away when he made permanent most of Bush's irresponsible tax cuts.

[Me.]

4. Totally

That's the reaL lesson learned

[JudyM]

5. Maybe we should have an ideas-discussion only group to get our best and brightest potential

strategic solutions to deal with the muck of RW hardball, a soon to be expanded RW judiciary, pulling away from reliance on donors whose agendas conflict with Dem principles, etc. Every idea could be in the way of a poll. Just some way to get a concerted effort moving. We have a lot of creative thinkers on DU.

[eniwetok]

6. years ago

It's always bothered me that these forums produce a lot of content... and yet since there's no focus, there's never a product. It's just endless churn, often re-discussing what's been re-discussed 10 times before.

Back in 04 I proposed at the John Kerry forum that there should be an on line think tank to develop what were the ideal principles progressives stood for if they had their wish list where to take this nation in 20-50-100 years, and then a strategy to get there. Some at that forum liked the idea and created a wiki site

http://web.archive.org/web/20050215000000*/http://www.rootstalk.org

but while I wanted that vision to build a strategy on, they wanted what could be used in the next election. I wanted to look at core reforms to the electoral and political systems. Like most timid libs... they didn't want to touch those subjects. So we parted ways. So I proposed the same idea here. Skinner and I didn't see eye to eye. MoveOn tried something along what you're suggesting, but they sabotaged their own forum. Early on they had forums set up for specific projects... and when the decision was made, the forum was closed. They turned it into a Great Ideas forum which ended up with thousands of posts. Where those small project forums were the membership telling MO what they wanted, the single forum gave those who ran MO a chance to ignore their own members since there was no "decision" made they could be held to. There was a rebellion and MO closed their forum proving they really didn't want to be held responsible to their membership.

[JudyM]

7. Yeah, more linear, productive ongoing idea generation would be great.