A LETTER FROM A FARMER IN PENNSYLVANIA


BELOW IS AN ESSAY SENT BY A FRIEND AND REFERENCE TO THE SUBJECT THAT PRECIPITATED IT.-BH


you provoke me.

after our most recent e-mail "discussion" i jumped up from my chair, stormed past susan, spitting "nothing!" to her question, "what's wrong?", pushed open the screen door and stormed outside.

one of j.d.'s baseball bats was lying on the ground and in a flash i grabbed it and hit the apple tree with it.

the aluminum bat did not break, nor did the tree and so the energy of the blow could not be dissipated and was displaced back into me. my hands went numb, i got stingers in my elbows and shoulders and i strained my rib cage muscles.

dropping the bat, macintosh falling around me, and my wife at the door, hands on hips, glaring, a calm came over me and i had a political epiphany.

the democrats need spokespeople or candidates who are me mean, partisan, attack-dog provacateurs. assholes. in other words, people like you, benjamin. i went back to the computer and began to write.

having decided on the democrats tactical approach i started thinking strategically about what we could bash the republicans on, and happily there was no shortage of material.

finally i started thinking thematically, about what message a democratic uber-candidate could craft together and how it could be presented and packaged for maximum electoral appeal.

maybe this can provide some common ground between us.

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the democratic liability on foreign policy is undeniable. for 30+ years public opinion polls have shown that the voters overwhelmingly trust the republicans more than the democrats on the issue. but i think there are 3 aspects to this issue with different electoral consequences for the demos.

you are right that when the country is engaged abroad it is electorally unhelpful for democrats to oppose the engagement. that is bad manners at the least, and in the democrats particular case, raises again all the public doubt about our spine and so forth.

it is NOT unwise politically however to criticize a foreign adventure that is going or has gone bad PROVIDING that you don't get too far out in front of the electorate on it. i agree that we are not there on iraq nor may we ever be there and hence making opposition to the war the centerpiece of your campaign, as howard dean has done, or making questions about the stated justification for the war preeminent, as bob graham has done, are unwise and recreate negative stereotypes of the democrats in the public's eye.

however i DON'T think a democrat has to have at the ready a list of countries he wants to invade to avoid the stereotype. americans don't WANT war and a democrat doesn't have to prove his manhood with the voters by saying, "syria is next," or "iran is next."

if we are not in a shooting war, then the only time a democratic candidate needesan aggressive foreign policy platform is when the country sees a clear and present danger, as it did with the soviet union and it was wrong politically for the democrats to have pooh-poohed that threat in the '60's and 70's.

YOU however are out of step in the current context. the public does not believe that we are at war with all of islam and would in fact reject as alarmist any candidate that said so, and therefore i think a democratic candidate who didn't criticize the iraqi war and just said normal tough stuff about fighting terrorism would pass muster with the public. kerry, liberman and edwards would fit that bill.

we both agree that if we are engaged in a serious conflict abroad around the time of the election then the public will not change presidents unless they are decisively against
that action.

and that's all i'm going to say about foreign policy.


in thinking about ann coulter's treason charge, there were several tactical ideas that came to mind.

first, the charge is so outrageous hat it holds no appeal to the electorate so it is substantively irrelevant.

second, she is not the only extremist in the gop and we should try to link all of them to bush and make him either guilty-by-association or force him to deny the charge and thus defuse the issue.

third, we need to attack as aggressively as the republicans do. clinton vowed never to let a political charge go unanswered for more than one news cycle. that is playing defense wisely but i think we should go on the offense more.

if it was fair game to ask bill clinton what, as a 20 year old, he did during the vietnam war, why was it not fair to ask george h.w. bush what he was doing during the civil rights war (answer: voting against the voting rights act while a congressman)?

the republicans were on the "treason" side of that war on issue after issue and those issues are not just of historical interest, as is vietnam, they are still important today.

we should not let them get away with even PRESUMING to speak about social issues that we are right on and always have been right on, and they are wrong on and always have been wrong on. tom delay's outrageous claim that republicans played a "pivotal role" in the civil rights struggle is like the kansas board of education saying that it played a pivotal in desegregating the public schools.

why do we let them get away with crap like that? maybe bush can decouple himself from ann coulter's views but delay is a leading politician in his own party!

press conference in my dreams:

ink-stained wretch: "mr. president majority whip tom delay recently said that
republicans played a 'pivotal role' in the civil rights struggle,
do you agree with that and if so could you tell us what that role was?"

bush: "#%hg&*(*^h*&%"

wretch: "if i could follow up, you have said that you have always been committed
to civil rights, what did you do to advance civil rights, for example, when
you were at yale during the height of the struggle?

bush: "well, when i was cheerleader i cheered for our negro athletes, i uh, used
colored tennis balls very early on, i mean..."

what is he going to say? we should force him and the republicans to account for their ugly past just as they make us accountable over vietnam.

they call themselves the party of lincoln which only proves that a muddy river can have snow at its source. the fact is they haven't had an original idea since they opposed slavery. they bitterly fought every single piece of new deal legislation--social security, unemployment compensation, progressive taxation, the minimum wage, the right to unionize, the 40 hour work week, the abolition of child labor.

they fought every aspect of the great society--desegregation, anti-discrimination, black voting rights--and later equal rights for women and equal access for the handicapped.

and yet we have let them get away with selling their tepid, post-hoc me-tooism as strong consistent support! their vulnerability doesn't end with their past. on every current domestic issue that is meaningful to voters--the enviornment, gun control, abortion--they are on the treason side. what's the matter with us? attack! attack! attack!

second, we need to preempt any attempts to link us to our coulters and delays. sharpton is the obvious example today. the conventional wisdom is to avoid a row with a figure who represents a major part of your base in the primary and then distance yourself in the general.

first, that presumes sharpton is representative of anything other than sharpton which i would vigorously dispute. i also think it would actually be beneficial to a primary candidate to do it early, it would set him or her apart as a courageous non-panderer. to hear kerry refer to tawana brawley's spokesman as "rev. al" makes me nauseous. but whenever it's done, the distancing must be done and done forcefully.

clinton was brilliant, one hesitates in calling him courageous or principled in anything, in his criticism of sister soljah in the '92(?) election. it conferred the patina of independence and courage AND, inoculated him from any insinuation of pandering to a constituency no matter how outrageous a member of that constituency is.

negative campaigning has always been shown to be the most effective with voters even as they say they don't like it. humor can take the edge off of negative campaigning while not blunting the substance of the attack. humor is the canary in the coal mine in american politics. a candidate is in trouble to a metaphysical certainty if he becomes the subject of jokes on the late-night talk shows.

the brilliance of humor is that it is demeaning without being mean. it is particularly effective in politics because to win a candidate has to be taken seriously but humor is the antithesis of serious and someone who is the butt of a joke is being laughed at, not taken seriously.

it's also disarming. if the object of the joke responds seriously he appears petulant. "what, you can't take a joke?" if he doesn't, the underlying attack goes unrebutted.

everyone loves to laugh so humor is popular and more memorable than a serious attack ad. because we like it, it sticks in our minds longer. because we know other people like it, we repeat it and so give it more exposure.

"where's the beef," crystallized the vague discomfort the electorate had with the guarded man born gary hartpence and ended his candidacy.

"there you go again," revealed reagan at his most affable, de-demonizing him and making carter look dour and stale.

humor is "positive negativity"

the other, related, tactical thought i had was the need for the democrats to stay positive. i guess it's hard to resist being negative when you're in opposition but being negative doesn't mean being sour and grumpy. humor can avoid that.

joe klein wrote a perceptive piece in the times recently where he made the "democrats as grumps" point. he recaled an anecdote from the 1988 campaign and reagan's "morning in america" theme. now that certainly was a syrupy bit of nothingness but the point klein made was, it was positive and uplifting at a time when voters needed a psychological break from the economy, and the severe hangovers of vietnam, watergate and gas lines.

dick gephardt was running for president that year and his response to reagan's theme was, "it's not morning in america. it's closer to midnight."

goodness gracious, who was gephardt's speech writer, soren kirkegaard? what a bleak view of the country for a wannabe president to have. who wants to hear that? what constituency was gephardt aiming at besides those who have the suicide hotline on their speed dial?

even during the great depression fdr's campaign song was "happy days are here again." gephardt should have used humor to respond, to ridicule "morning in america" with something that pointed out how out of touch the republicans were but you have to stay positive "high hopes," that was jfk's campaign song; "don't stop thinking about tomorrow," was clinton's.

IF there is no foreign policy crisis, IF we stay on the offensive and IF we stick to our issues and not get "off message" we can then maximize our chance for success, if there is a chance. but we also need a theme, a mneumonic that will remind voters of what we stand for and how we are distinguished from the gop.

-john dickinson

I WILL BREAK UP JOHN'S ESSAY AT THIS POINT AND POST HIS THOUGHTS ON THEME LATER--BH