Over the last year in our email days, Boo repeatedly rebuffed one of my suggestions for the Democrats to weaken the republican lock on things as of late. I think its the key to democrat victory in 2008. But once Boo got the site up and running here, I dropped the subject all together.
So, tonight I was reading some of the stuff I peruse occasionally and I get reminded of my own suggestion from a lefty over at antiwar.com.
Basically, what I’ve been telling Booskie is that the Dem coalition is losing its appeal and that it needs to go on the offensive the to fractionalize the current republican coalition that has pulled away many fence sitters from the D party for reasons I’ll not elaborate on now.
Here is my suggestion: Don’t sink all your cash into another “I’ll fight the war smarter because I have a plan” democrat. Instead, sink serious money into the Libertarian party so they can get out of their canyon of anonymity with some serious advertising that would chip away at the fiscally conservative vote that the R power structure pisses on every time it is in power.
A solid 15-20% of the Republican Party is not the whack jobs you guys lump them into being. They are, however, fiscal conservatives and small government advocates. They will NEVER vote democrat because you guys think Teddy Kennedy makes sense, you generally have never met a tax you don’t like, or a collectivist redistributionist program you didn’t think would solve the countries problem…and you have really no respect for private property. They hate FDR and Johnson precisely for bringing socialism to the US and cloaking it in the flag, and pawning it off as “the American Way” (as if)
Ok… The point is not to debate the pros or cons of their assessment of you. It is to take advantage of it, right? How? Republican spending is out of control, making them long for Clinton – Imagine!. Plus Iraq was a lie, and now a growing quagmire…
You see, this group votes republican only because they don’t think they have a choice. They don’t want to waste their vote, but just the same they are holding their nose each election thinking, if I don’t do this.. then the democrats will win, and it’ll be worse.
So your job as democrats is to convince them to vote third party. Convince them that libertarians are serious about being fiscally responsible and would never take their vote for granted. Convince them that if they keep on voting republican instead of Libertarian, they will get pissed on again and again.. That the republican think of them as fringe with no other choice, and will always take them for granted – as they did under Bush I and Bush II…Convince them that they better start now because it will just keep getting worse.
In the long run you need a functioning third party that hurts their core but not yours. Let’s face it, your core is getting you in trouble with patriotic Nascar fence sitters whose Pabst blew through their noses when they heard John Kerry confess, “who amongst us does not care for NASCAR.” You will not lose votes to the libertarians… Republicans will because they are fiscal hypocrites and the veneer is thin / easy to expose.
So there it is… The key to the next election: start writing checks to libertarian fund raisers. It’s a bit of a deal with the devil, I’ll agree. But as I said first off in my piece, I was reminded to post this up by a lefty with whom I agree. To break this coalition of the NeoConned, anti interventionists / anti empire building types need to bond together pronto before this madness creeps into Iran and Syria, and who knows where else.
As for the lefty, its Robert Paul Wolf, who posted up on AntiWar.com the following:
Some while ago, a fellow leftie put me on to Antiwar.com. I took a look at the site, bookmarked it, and have ever since been a regular visitor, sometimes clicking on it two or three times in a day. I have even on occasion donated money to keep it afloat. I find there a broad array of factual reports and opinions consonant with my distressed and outraged view of an America seemingly gone mad with imperial hubris and pathological self-delusion.
Being somewhat dim about such things, I did not at first notice that the site is hosted and sustained by right-wing libertarians whose position on the conventional political spectrum is as far from my own as it is possible to get without falling off the other edge of the world from my own. Whereas I look to Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky, and Edward Said for intellectual simulation and solace, reaching back, when I desire some historical perspective, to Karl Marx, the managers of antiwar.com are more likely to reach out to Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, and Milton Friedman, with obligatory obeisances to the authors of the Federalist Papers. [Read it all here]
Anyway, you should read his entire comments. I think the era of the necessity for three major parties has arrived. Lord knows; our economy sure could use the sobriety it might bring.
if you find me a candidate that is willing to and capable of going on Newtwork TV and calling BushCo a drug-pushing syndicate, that wants to disrupt his daughter’s wedding, then the check is in the mail.
But until you find someone that is kooky and honest enought to push 10% of the vote, I’m not giving shit to the libertarians.
That might be gratifying on one level, but its not really a good strategy. The weakness of the R’s is the fiscally conservative / more libertarian wing that sees the reckless spending for what it is, and is not comfortable with empire — especially once the WMD BS was exposed. When inflation takes off, the dollar gets weaker, and their retirement savings drop in value, they need to connect those dots directly to BushCo — they are pretty much there.
Kooky does not seem to be in short supply with Libertarian candidates. But in many ways, this is a chicken and egg problem. When L candidates are refused a platform compete in the debate of ideas — and that is hardwired into the electoral system by both D’s and R’s for their own power hold, well… you need lots of cash. I really think the D’s would have benefited by having a L candidate on stage during the debates between Bush and “I Have a Smarter Plan”. The L would have gone balls out to poke holes in the fiscally conservative republican charade. A D can never go after that — you guys still believe in the baseline accounting. Really, as close as these elections are, you only need 2-3% of the vote to peel off.
Just don’t do something really stupid like nominate Hillary. That’ll galvanize the largest vote turnout in modern times and provide the D’s with a Reagan vs Mondale trouncing.
deciding if this is their assessment – or yours
Generalize much? Are all Libertarians living in compounds in Montana, collecting guns and waiting for the Black Helicopters to come? No.
While I see a need for third parties, I think I’ll skip funding the Libertarians right now and focus on the Democratic party getting good candidates. Thanks anyway.
Gotta go destroy someones private property now . . . cause, as you know, I don’t have any respect for it.
Oh boy.
The point IS the fact such generalizations exist. You will not get those votes even with the Democrats getting “good candidates” any more than you would like to see Justice Brown get approved re her comments on private property. I’m just suggesting you use a little sun tzu and avoid a frontal assault / use that perception to your benefit to peel away votes from the republicans.
and need little help from us. Witness what’s going on in Florida Frederick Clarkson’s Diary today on the BooTrib.
I don’t buy it. As an outsider to both major parties, I’d say the Dem’s have more of that problem at the moment if the past two elections are any indication.
But not one I think would work in any big way. For one thing, relatively few Libertarians seem actually serious about being one. It’s more of a fad type thing… “I’m not a Republican, I’m a (L)libertarian” (small or big L, depending on which fad they follow). Thus they nominate really, really boring people who couldn’t make a splash in a puddle, let alone in national politics, precisely because they don’t want to be too attractive to people and draw from the Republicans (is my opinion). And then they vote for the Republicans — except for a few true believers who vote for the Libertarian or don’t vote at all.
There is enough money floating around Libertarian think tanks, and people who call themselves Libertarians, that if they actually wanted an effective national party they would have one. Instead, the think tanks and organizations funnel money and people into the Republican Party, so even if Democrats did dump a bunch of money on them all we’d be doing is helping the Republicans, in essence.
Much better to spend money building up our own candidates and infrastructure, I think. But thanks for the advice :).
That’s not been my experience. Sure, some folks dabble with it, or like it because it would allow them to smoke pot. Most who truly understand it and accept it, though, don’t go back. If anything I’ve seen, they are more prone to go classical anarchist (vs. the current bunch).
True, but that is a function of it being primarily an intellectual movement… The lack of splash, though, is also a self-fulfilling process. Anyone can make a splash by telling one group they’ll get something for nothing, paid for mostly by someone else. That’s most of politics these days, and L’s are showing up without currency to trade.
Actually, that’s not the case, at least with the party movement (and not the think tanks). The party is constantly frustrated by folks telling them they don’t want to waste their vote. Currently the power L’s have tends to be as spoiler, mostly at the expense of R’s. A few thousand votes here or there has cost a few fiscally irresponsible R’s to lose to D’s. That’s the movement you guys should focus on promoting.
Nope. Actually, if anything, they believe the stranglehold the d’s and R’s have is insurmountable. You guys, for example, had better funding for House races than the L’s had for their presidential candidate. The media tends to also black out 3rd parties, and the election commission is in collusion to prevent them from having a stage in debates… And the election system is such that the hurdles for 3rd parties make it dramatically more difficult to even get on the ballot…
Fund you own ads and control your own message, pointing out that the republicans are fiscal hypocrites, and bigger spenders than democrats half the time. Send the message (knowing fully well that those folks won’t vote D) that the only option is to send a message to the Rs who are running the nation into the fiscal abyss is to start voting L.