Why Democrats Can't Win

The 2012 election for the Democratic Party and democracy itself is in grave peril.

Despite strong indications that Democratic candidates from President Barack Obama down the ticket should win in a majority of jurisdictions across the country, they have an almost impossibly steep uphill slog. The reason has little to do with policies, plans, campaign rally turnout or gaffs and everything to do with a long-term annihilation strategy that has been in development for the past several decades and got two huge gooses two years ago.

One was the U.S. Supreme Court Citizens United ruling, which completed the groundwork of transforming elections into sales that was laid by the 1976 Buckley vs. Valeo Supreme Court ruling. That ruling, in essence decreed that money is speech. Citizens United, in essence, says that corporations are persons and thus have the same speech rights as individuals.

The second was the emergence of the Tea Party, which, despite the protestations of some of the ostensible TP founders, became the tool of and ground troops for plutocratic interests, redirected the Republican Party toward a right-wing cliff, and turned political discourse and elected officials' town halls into uncivil, hate-filled, vitriolic screeds.

Those two factors have capped decades of right-wing think tanks perfecting effective messaging, infiltration of academia, use of wedge issues, and the disingenuous and exploitative partnering with religion -- particularly fundamentalist and evangelically leaning sects.

That has set the stage for finishing the competition off.

Here are the winning tactics that will lead to Republican victories in this election:

• Employer intimidation -- Pressuring their employees to vote for candidates they support, or their jobs could be at stake.Can you imagine workers, who already have the jitters about their jobs, running the risk of losing them if they don't vote like the boss says?
• Church indoctrination -- Pastors using their pulpits to influence how congregants should vote, and at least one Catholic bishop instructing priests in his domain to preach anti-Obama sermons at Mass.
• Voting machines -- The Romney family owns substantial stock in the company that makes a large number of electronic voting machines that are being used in this election. And it has been demonstrated again and again how easy it is to manipulate and hack these machines.
• Conservative media -- Pervasive right-wing take-over of the mass media, from Fox TV, to Limbaugh and other right-wing radio programming, to corporate ownership of newspapers including the Wall Street Journal, to growing and increasingly influential Internet sites, such as The Drudge Report, Breitbart.com news syndicate and Journal Communications' new right-wing multi-platform group headed by a Milwaukee WI conservative radio personality, to billboards owned by right-wing advertising and communications conglomerate Clear Channel.
• Contracting voter access -- Whether repressed by newly enacted over-reaching photo ID requirements, reducing early voting days, issuing erroneous voting information or intimidating prospective voters via advertising and poll watchers -- all tactics target likely Democratic voters. 
• Decimation of unions -- Republican-controlled legislatures and state houses have worked tirelessly to kill off unions, in both the private and the public sectors, which historically have supported Democratic candidates. The amount of campaign contributions from unions has shrunk to a fraction of previous elections while corporate and special moneyed interests contributions to Republicans have burgeoned, plus super-PAC, which are overwhelmingly Republicans, such as Karl Rove's Crossroads GPS, have flooded the airwaves with political ads.

So polls, not withstanding, which even veteran pollsters say are not only all over the place, but increasingly unreliable, I think the Republicans' strategy of intimidation, indoctrination and election fraud is just very likely to overcome

Get in the Front of the Line!

A long-ago school classmate with whom I remain in touch is almost religiously sanctimonious about self reliance, individual responsibility, the virtues of capitalism, and the evils of big government, government spending and social programs.

This person personifies the current polarization in which I see tea partiers serving as rocket launchers that have just about blasted the Republican Party off the cliff to the right. And they epitomize hyprocisy. Here's why:

This man and his siblings were raised by a single mother who supported her family by working as a public school teacher, which, of course, means she was paid by the government.

After his graduation from high school, he received a taxpayer-funded U.S. military academy, then had 20-plus year military career, which included not only his tax-funded pay, but benefits, including healthcare that was essentially free to him.

After retiring from the military and receiving a military pension and, again, almost free to him, healthcare, he went to work for a major defense contractor which receives a vast amount of its revenue from government (tax-funded) contracts.

In other words, during the nearly 70 years of his life, he has benefitted almost entirely from government funding.

My eternal question about him and so many of his like-minded ideologues, is why government spending and enjoying a comfortable lifestyle, which this man does, is fine for them, but not for their fellow Americans?

Even Alan Simpson, a 22-year U.S. senator, thus recipient of a federal pension and healthcare benefits, and who recently served as co-chair President Obama's commission on reducing the federal deficits, is one the "310 million" Americans sucking on his "milk cow" analogy of Social Security. Only he's been suckling for a lifetime.

Being truly conservative, I say people like my childhood acquaintance and Mr. Simpson, who are so liberal with their rhetoric that government should cut spending, shred the social safety net and eliminate benefits for others, need to step--or be shoved--to the front of the line of those they say should not be on the government payroll or dole.

Putting the Fringe in Perspective

Several pundits remarked today in blathering about President Barack Obama finally resorting to having the State of Hawaii produce his "long form" birth certificate, that what used to be considered the "fringe" of right-wing partisans has moved in to become the center of the Republican Party.

I absolutely disagree with that assessment.

Rather than the fringers moving in and becoming the mainstream of one of only two major political parties in this country, the mainstream of that party has moved out to the fringe.

What's the difference? you might ask.

There's a huge difference.

It's one thing for parasites that cluster around the edges of a host to invade and take over the body then consume it by devouring it from the inside out.

When that happens in nature, the host body becomes infested and if the parasite gets a firm enough of a foothold, the host is rendered helpless and dies. Pity the pure hapless host.

It's quite another thing for the host to migrate out to the fringe, embrace the parasites then suck them in and, of its on volition, transform itself into the fringe of parasites so that they feed off of each other and become indistinguishable from each other.

Here's someone who clearly and eloquently states the case behind, not only the 'birther' inanity, but the Republicans' merger with fringers. http://www.thegrio.com/politics/why-obama-shouldnt-have-had-to-show-his-papers.php

Revolution

Recently defeated South Carolina Republican Representative Bob Inglis was interviewed a couple of days ago on National Public Radio in a piece headlined, “Republican Swamped By The GOP Wave.”

http://www.npr.org/2010/11/20/131474413/exiting-inglis-laments-conservatism-s-derailment

Contributing to Inglis’s electoral defeat was what has become the right-wing political career-ending position of daring to say he “believes in” climate change (apparently, although not said, as having some degree of human cause).

As an aside, use of the term “believe in” in this and similar contexts, sends my eyebrows skyward, as if one would “believe in” climate change as though it were some kind of religious ideology or deity.

Despite Congressman Inglis’s 93% conservative” voting record (yet not “conservative” enough for today’s South Carolina voters), I agreed with much of what he said on NPR.

He lamented the disappearance of the Republican Party of Teddy Roosevelt, whose platform as both a Republican and a Progressive of the Bull Moose Party, was conservation. I think that must have been the Republican Party of my parents, or at least my father, who thought the best light switch was one in the "off" position.

That concept of conservatism has been flipped on its head as today’s conservative archetype, instead of being frugal and thrifty, comprises the bigger-is-better, consume-and-throw-away crowd.

New York Times right-of-center columnist David Brooks snarked about the nation’s capital being awash last month with famously high-gas-mileage Priuses—Brooks’s stereotypical vehicle of Birkenstock-wearing, granola-eating, tree-hugging liberals—during The Daily Show host Jon Stewart’s Rally to Restore Sanity.

So are “conservatives’” ideal vehicles gas-guzzling, super-sized SUVs and trucks? I think driving high-gas-mileage cars, eating healthfully and caring about trees are truly conservative virtues.

Also in the NPR segment, Inglis, in discussing the Tea Party, harked back to the French Revolution in which a populist movement turned the streets of Paris and other parts of France into rivers of blood—quite literally—with the wholesale purging of the nobility and privileged classes. (Inglis didn’t mention the rest of that story, in which the insurrection split into factions, attempted counter-revolution and countless pay-back executions (better hang tight to your heads, latter-day Robespierres), followed by the Reign of Terror years, which eventually produced Napoleon.)

Inglis’s reference to the French Revolution resonated with me as that bloody era in which innocents were indiscriminately killed off along with aristocrats and royalty has and continues to come to mind amidst the Tea Party rage that has morphed into elected officials with questionable qualifications and what might turn out to be anything but populist agendas.

Another nail in Inglis’s political coffin was veering off the conservative page by decrying faux assertions about President Obama religious faith, birth certificate and being a socialist/communist/fascist and the vicious attempt to destroy reputations and institutions.

I agree with the soon-to-be former congressman on that, too.

I'm on Twitter @jerrianneh