Democrat's Core Choice: MONEY OR MESSAGE?
Some here believe that Dems MUST go after big corporate money or Dems will forever be at a perpetual political disadvantage. They complain that to concentrate on messaging is to put purity over winning. I have problems with the first approach for several reasons.
1: The GOP can spend 100 billion in an election and the Dem's zero I think it's safe to say no one here would be swayed by all that spending. Therefore the effort must be to inoculate Dems that might be swayed by diversionary issues (guns, immigration, god & flag etc) and middle of the roaders to see through the GOP game and to see that their true interests are with the Dems.
2: No corporation is going to give money to Dems unless as self-centered entities, there's something in it for them.
3: To go after corporate money, therefore, will tend to ultimately corrupt any message and in an economy that's largely a zero sum game, to help corporations is to shaft labor. It undermines any attempt to inoculate voters in #1 at which point the party's positions and voters move to the Right. We don't need two GOP parties... a liberal and a far right one.
So how do we inoculate voters? Part of that is to understand how a successful belief system, even a dysfunctional one, take root. I've long speculated that it really just needs a few variables... to convince people the system/narrative is moral, to have a plausible answer for everything, and to demonize the other side so the True Believer distrusts their motives and therefore blocks out their message. The Right is very good at this. Once a person is locked into a belief system they then selectively seek information that supports it, and instinctively block out anything that threatens it. They deprive themselves of the intellectual tools to disprove the system.
The first part is to have clear positive vision of where Dems want to take this nation in 25-50 years. Without a vision, there will be no strategy on how to get there... and without a vision and a strategy Dems will have no consistent message and in politics if one's not constantly on the offensive, one is losing ground. Dems need a strategic and sustained counterattack against ALL the strategic attacks of the Right... something they've been involved in since the 70s... ideological framing from think tanks, a strong media presence, voter suppression, ALEC, using the courts as the judicial branch of the GOP, expanding corporate personhood, using money to buy elections, defunding the Dems by going after unions and trial lawyers, and starve the beast? The far Right has been so successful that even half of the Dems have moved to the right undercutting their own natural constituency.
This madness has to stop... but some here seem to believe that the Dems can sleep with corporations and protect progressive causes. Nope. All they do is water them down in a process so slow they don't even see it happening. Case in point. In election 2000 Dems saw through Bush's attempts to sabotage the Clinton Surplus with massive tax cuts. By 2008, Dems bought into Obama's call to make permanent most of Bush's irresponsible tax cuts. Gone from the discussion was ANY talk of paying down debt... and I'm talking PRE-crisis.
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I'm waiting for the people who just spent three days defending United Airlines to come here and start to try to tear this down. 
