A spokesman for the Tea Party Patriots, 2,300 of whom convened in Phoenix, Arizona last weekend, said that "[Democrats] can’t win if we’re focused on issues."
That's both a profoundly true and a deeply flawed contention. To be sure, it'sexceptionally difficult to beat a party or movement that regards a "focus" on issues as a bundle of pithy slogans with enormous emotional appeal, backed by mounds of propagandistic cash. The current "debate" on government's size and spending is exemplary.
Which is easier to sell to a mass electorate? "Government's too big" and "We're drowning in debt" ...
or ... "The size of the federal government and the spending it does is less important than its effectiveness; take, for instance, those funds allocated to the Securities and Exchange Commission, which tea partying machete-accountants insist on slashing -- Do you, Mr. and Mrs. Voter, care to save a few bucks now, only to grease the skids for another catastrophic collapse down the road, caused by fewer financial watchdogs and far less oversight?"
And that's the short version.
What's more, Democrats would need to apply a similar but pointedly tuned argument against the vastly imprudent slashing of hundreds of wide-ranging social programs in each and every specific case. Head Start? There goes an hour or two, comparing this decisive data with that. Planned Parenthood? Another hour, minimum.
And as Democrats were wrapping up their plodding, hundred-hour national seminar on the whys and wherefores and impeccably logical justifications of federal spending, they'd look around the room and notice its emptiness, the audience having long since evacuated with the reactionary hucksters chanting, "We're drowning in debt."
I'm grossly simplifying and generalizing the electorate, of course. I dismiss not that large swath of responsible voters who understand perfectly well why government spends what it spends and are just as perfectly happy to help pay for it. Then there's that other large swath, the one that also understands perfectly well why government spends what it spends, but is ideologically opposed to the spending -- its benefits, real or potential, be damned. It is, though, that crucial third audience in between these two -- the ballyhooed independents -- who are perniciously susceptible to the hustle of sonorous simplicity -- "We're drowning in debt" or any other catchy slogan of the day -- and who so often decide the outcome of elections.
If Democrats had this audience's ear, and as important, its time, the Tea Party Patriots spokesman would be but conversely accurate. Yet Dems have yet to find a way to "focus" on issues without losing their audience to indifferent and distracted yawns.
That much seems clear enough, to virtually everyone. How Democrats can ever crawl out of this educational hole remains one of politics' enduring challenges. But this much seems equally clear: The American electorate's historical memory at large could use a determined makeover. Which is to say, so many Americans -- I'd venture most -- have no clue as to why government ever grew, as it did; they've no sense of the social carnage of the Gilded Age or of the vast disparities of wealth in the 1920s or the vicious official assaults on organizing labor or the atrocities of child labor or the repulsive depths of elderly poverty or ... None of which Hoover's pathetic "volunteerism" and limited government for ideology's sake could help when it all inexorably came crashing down.
And would have again, to the selfsame severe proportions, had it not been for lessons learned -- now being forgotten.