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.
