Democratic Elevator Pitches

TheJew guesting over at Ezra's Place put together an elevator pitch inspired by the Republican one. I think it's a good idea, but I'd like to try a few pitches out myself.

I think the three biggest principles governing Democratic (and democratic) values are: Liberty (covers privacy, protective rights, freedoms from government control), Justice ( covers security, remediation, government oversight of things deserving oversight, as well as protecting minorities ), and Opportunity ( also covers protecting minorities of race, color or creed, and insuring that every citizen can be a part of the American society).

So. Liberty, Justice, and Opportunity, sounds more like a slogan than an elevator pitch. So let's tease it up a bit into policy principles.

I suggested that the democratic commitment to protecting minorities of various stripes from systematic exclusion could be expressed as 'Freedom of conscience.' That's good for talking about gay or freak rights, but bad for talking about racial minorities. I think opportunity picks that up better. So "Opportunity for all Americans"

How about this formulation:
Government of all Americans, for all Americans. Liberty and Justice for all. America needs to continue to be the land of opportunity. And American foreign policy should reflect America's values.


If you want a policy breakdown for that:
1- Don't marginalize minorities, protect all minority rights, keep the door open for everyone to enter public service.
2- Laws that value freedom as it's own good.
3- A Justice system that protects people from being taken advantage of by unscrupulous people or corporations or government agencies.
4- Good education system, help those who are ready to go to college to go to college. Punish prejudicial hiring practices that perpetuate racial or ethnic exclusion.
5- No stupid foreign wars. If we go in, we do it in a way that we can explain our reasons to ourselves and to the world. No torture. No 'disappearing' people. No plundering of foreign economies.

Texas Taliban

This is why whenever so called "centrist democrats" and pundits call for the Dems to distance themselves from the women's movement or that part devoted to abortion rights, they need to be horsewhipped.

Tom Ridge is off the reservation. Fascinating. For months during the election speculation was heavy that the terror alert level was being raised for partisan political purposes. Asked that very question on the Daily Show, Ridge denied that there was any such influence, but openly described the terror alert elevation as being the result of a group. I seem to recall he said that Cheney was also on that council. Here's the USA today partial list:

Among those on the council with Ridge were Attorney General John Ashcroft, FBI chief Robert Mueller, CIA director George Tenet, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell.

Now he's admitting that he was overruled on spurious intelligence or threats of spurious significance. Which lends some concrete support at last to the idea that Rumsfeld, Ashcroft and other partisans may well have pushed for alerts to manipulate the electorate and the news cycle.

It's been a while since I posted, and I thought maybe I ought to blog more about the everyday than to wait for something upsetting enough to make me need to rant online.

Let's see. Playing Vampire Bloodlines at the moment. Pretty good game, although the physics engine seems gimpy after playing Halflife 2 (note to self, still need to finish that game). I like the interface, the combat, the detail and the story. Voice acting in middling. The stuff on the game is genuinely creepy, when I was in the haunted house I got goosepimples. Some of the storylines that could have been good (I'm looking at you Gargoyle quest) were just obnoxiously lame. I'm about to hit Hollywood so I should be wrapping it up soon.

I think Jade Empire is next. Bioware doesn't seem to know how to make a bad game. Noone let anyone there play anything from Dreamcatcher. They couldn't make a good game to save the earth from destruction.

More on my mage campaign later.

Bull-shit Moose

In my agitation over John Chait's back of hand swipe at liberals online, I missed the nuance that Bull Moose Blog had stepped from praising Lieberman's rhetoric while ignoring his weasally voting record on the bankruptcy bill. It turns out that he spent another post keeping the topic alive by blasting the bloggers who called him on his support of weasalling. But he raises the point discussed below that supposedly leftist policies disabled the political influence of the Dems despite the fact that our most painful legislative losses came when DLC positions were given national spotlight by Clinton.

Nevermind that. The cheerful thing is to know that the Bull Moose takes a stand with Bullshit artists like Lieberman who is trying to have his cake and eat it too by shutting down debate on the bankruptcy bill and then patting himself on the back for having cast a meaningless vote against it.

The Prolix Prose blog recognizes that while blogs are not monitored by the FDA and that the Bull Moose has voluntarily chosen to include an ingrediants list in his head image: 'More Moose, Less Bull'. Prolix Prose feels that truth in advertising demands that when Lieberman related notes appear on his site they ought to come with additional labelling indicating 'now with more BULL'. Don't get Prolix Prose wrong, there is much of value in pandering to one's financial backers and trying not to take a hit with voters. But far to many self congratulatory blowhards set themselves up as infalible and then dig their heels in when faced with criticism that they've misrepresented the evidence. Or worse, Prolix Prose notes, they lash out with personal attacks on the maturity and/or intelligence of their critics without responding substantively to thier criticism.

When you're criticising other people's grasp of political realities, it's best not to start by pretending not to understand them yourself.

Left Bashing and the Constituency of the Strident

Recently John Chait took temporary reins of Joshua Marshall's excellent Talking Points Memo website which has spent most of the last few months documenting and opposing the attempts by Republicans to undermine Social Security. Given his apparent sensitivity to criticisms of his previous positions by the opinionated of the internet (I'm not sure there are any other kind), he spent his introductory post illustrating the slurs and insults he expected to be hurled his way by the readership.

Fine. A little candid self positioning to avoid misunderstandings later. Presumably the plan would be that he would keep in mind that the readership of Josh's blog were partisan, not liberal or centrist, not hawks or doves, but focused on social security. Since Josh had found the material for perhaps dozens of posts a week on the status of Social Security, the topic Chait was called in to pinch hit on, that he'd be able to get through at least a handful of posts before taking a shot at his least favored, the internet left.

Alas. It was not to be. In his fourth post on the site, he decided to establish that his non-ideological even handedness by taking the Bull Moose blog to task for Lieberman's recent bankruptcy bill related actions. A little off topic, perhaps, but then Josh did include a separate Bankruptcy bill mini-blog, and criticising the hypocracy of a self styled straight shooter trying to white-wash a blurry voting record is pretty bloggy.

But he couldn't help himself. He just couldn't. Maybe he didn't want to be mistaken for an Atrios or a Kossack while he bashed Joementum. He nestled this gem in his third paragraph:

I actually agree with Marshall and the DLC on the suicidal purity of the Democratic party’s left wing, embodied by the Howard Dean movement and its fanatical internet contingent, even if I disagree with his support for Lieberman in particular.

So. On a blog dedicated to issues which unite left and center and even right dems, and which has been painstaking in not taking a position on candidates' electoral compromises except where they get to core party issues, like social security, he decides to characterize the extremely popular (and in some cases extremely unpopular) leader of the DNC, and the majority of his supporters, probably a significant fraction of his borrowed readership as 'fanatical', and suggests that they represent a suicidal ideology.

If this were a factional blog, or had comments, I'd call Chait out to identify five, hell three, major positions in which there is a policy split between Dean and the DLC. Certainly Dean has been good at targetting rhetoric which excites the disaffected left of the party.

More troubling is his use of the words 'suicidal purity'. Normally in a political context purity is about purging the impure. If Dean and his supporters and ideological allies wanted 'purity', then the call would be for an elimination of centrist and right voices in the party. And possibly a decision to not seek their support or votes. Having frequently read, and only infrequently posted to, many of the bastions of suppoed 'left wing' moon battery (eschaton, kos) my impression is that the majority of voices in these places want to take away the DLCs /leadership/ not their voice. The DLC has not always been ideological forefront of the party, and it's presumptuous to assume that because a growing volume of voices disagrees with them means that they want them 'purged'.

I think a closer statement of what the left wants is that they be 'discredited'. That they lose the mantle of 'reasonable authority' and the ability to marginalize voices on the left out of being heard on topics ranging from whom and when to go to war and whom and how to conduct international trade and domestic labor laws. These have in the past been forefronts of democratic concern, and while the DLC likes to suggest that the resurgence of dems in presidential politics came from DLC moderation, the lefties quite legitimately suggest that the loss of democratic legislative influence may in part be because Dems stopped being loud and proud about such constituency policy glue.

In fact, it was a DLC voice that called for the purge of the left. It was a group of DLC congressmen who wrote to ask the Republicans to prioritize a matching House bankruptcy bill. Not every New Democrat seeks to undermine the democratic constituency or democratic social policy items, but enough, prominent ones have taken a stand for purges and against social security that it's the height of Bush style black-is-whitism to accuse the left of being 'purists'. The rising voices of the left aren't particularly extremist, but they are mad about the direction the government has gone.

The defensiveness of DLC supporters in response to suggestions of moral bankruptcy is evidence, I suspect, of the weakness of their position. I know what the left stands for: civil rights, liberties, justice, here and abroad; policies which encourage growth but still protect people; safe streets, effective law enforcement, and preferably crime prevention; social justice where it can be had, lessening of social ills where it cannot; and yes, thanks to Bill Clinton, balanced budgets and fiscal responsiblity. I know what Republicans stand for, tax cuts, state power where it helps conservatives; aggressive foreign policy, regardless of the risk/benefits; corporate interests protected at all costs.

I don't know what the DLC supports. I do know that they spend a lot of time speaking against their fellow democrats, and very little having a unique criticism of the republicans. Which raises the question (I'd say it begged it, but who needs that fight again), do they have a purpose OTHER than to undermine the left? They certainly remained painfully mute on the bankruptcy bill which was a solid blow against protection of individuals against predatory creditors. They oppose the growing revival of the grassroots, despite it's potential to reengerize state party apparatii which seem to have faded and withered during the time they occupied the peak of their Washington influence.

So what's their plan to make Democrats victorious again? Is that even something they want? Or do they only want it if they get to play King of the Hill?

It's been pointed out to me that I'm not updating my blog very often.

So let's update.

First: I am beginning to feel optimistic about my Mage campaign again. It's had a slow start, but the upcoming trip into the Umbra should let me get out of mundanities and into full on high concept fantasy elements.

It may take two sessions the way I'm not imagining it, but I'm thinking to spend a while introducing the Umbra's safer environs, the Vulgate, River of Language, A quick nip into the Library of Alexandria, and then a trip to the World Tree and down. When descending the World tree, everyone gets to meet their dead, and then they all get separated into three groups, one into the past, one into an alternate present, and a third into a future.

I think it should work well. I haven't worked out what the final culmination at the Abyss will be like, but honestly, I doubt I have to worry about getting there this session.