Lindaman writes:
Michael Moore recently put out five keys to a Democrat victory in the midterm elections on his website. His winning keys ranged from "growing a backbone" to "supporting a moratorium on foreclosures."
And of course, Lindaman doesn’t link to the actual source.
Moore’s five suggestions were:
1. Deliver a blunt, nonstop reminder to the American people about exactly who it was that got us into the mess we're in.
2. Declare a moratorium on home foreclosures.
3. Prosecute the banks and Wall Street for the Crime of the Century. 4. Create a 21st century WPA (hire the unemployed to rebuild America).
5. Pledge that no Dem will take a dime from Wall Street in the next election cycle.
See why Lindaman didn’t link to the actual source?
In that spirit, I wanted to give Republicans five keys to victory.
Don’t forget, folks! Lindaman is an “Independent(tm)” and totally not a Republican.
Oh, and I thought writing rebuttal articles are a sign of unoriginality, remember? You keep saying that yourself!
And unlike Mike, mine actually might work.
Because it’s better to listen to a fat loser, than a fat winner.
1) Let the Democrats go negative, but respond with a positive. In judo, a student learns to use an opponent's force against himself/herself.
So in addition to being a global warming expert and a crowd estimator expert, he’s now a judo master!
This election season, the Democrats are facing an uphill battle, so their natural inclination (having exhausted the possibility that they might run on their records)
We’ll go to records in just a minute.
is to go negative. However, that doesn't mean the GOP needs to follow suit. Running a positive ad after a negative one from the Left will have a positive effect, in my opinion. Take Christine O'Donnell's ad responding to what Leftists like Bill Maher have said about her.
“Said about her?” He used her actual video!
It was simple, to the point, and barely referenced politics at all. Even an ad with a "soft negative" like Carly Fiorina's ad using footage of Barbara Boxer asking a soldier to call her "Senator" instead of "ma'am" would work.
Well, we saw how well Christine’s ad worked. Her numbers are lower than ever. But at least we got a good remix out of the ad.
2) Don't assume the TEA Party will vote Republican. A common theme with the Right these days is to call for "party unity" over voting for a TEA Party candidate we can support. That's what gave us McCain/Palin 08, another victory for Arlen Specter, and moderate Republicans getting control of the party. Yeah, how'd that work out for ya? The TEA Party may be made up of Republicans in great numbers, but that doesn't mean they'll vote Republican out of reflex. The GOP needs to take some stock in what the TEA Parties represent and work that back into the platform going forward. Saying you're a "compassionate conservative" that votes for continued funding of the Department of Education is nice, but making it so that parents have more say over curricula than some bureaucrat in Washington, DC, is nicer.
The Teabaggers won’t vote Republican? Right. That's why the tea party doesn't actively criticize Republicans. That’s why the people leading the tea party movement are all former Republicans. That’s why their head spokesperson was the Republican VP candidate not even two years ago.
3) Make the Left run on the issues. You know the Left is going to go personal this year, but that's because they're desperate to avoid talking issues. With an electorate looking for more than typical politics, give them issues to discuss. Make a Democrat Representative like Alan Grayson defend his stance on health care reform. Make Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid explain the benefits of the stimulus package. And watch as they will do anything in their power to avoid giving a straight answer. They have no substance, folks. Time to step up and make the campaign about what the American people want.
You right-wingers are the last people on planet earth to make comments about going personal and “avoiding the issues.”
Fucking Swift Boaters.
Death Panels!
Willy Ayers!
Jeremiah Wright!
Communisms!
Statists!
Socialisms!
Muslins!
Entitlement Programs!
Obamacare!
Redistribution!
Government Takeover!
Birf Certificat!
Carter!
4) Take command. Democrats love to say the Republicans are the "Party of No" because Republicans haven't done a good job at widespread articulation of their alternatives. It's almost like Republicans are ashamed to engage in the exchange of ideas, mainly because the Left has done such a masterful job at twisting the truth.
Let’s hear it!
In situations like that, you don't get frustrated and cede the battleground to the enemy. You charge ahead and you fight for the ground you're standing on. Democrats counted on Republicans to be lazy and still cowed by their connections to George W. Bush, but with an electorate that no longer cares what Bush did by and large and a Democrat Party
“Democrat Party”… Lindaman is totally not a Republican, folks!
For pete's sake, it took four years to undo the Reagan recession and nearly twenty years to recover from the Great Depression. What do you want in two years? Job growth? We have that. GDP growth? We have that. Financial reregulation? We have that. Health care reform? We have that. Manufacturing is growing, exports are growing (and I'll fully admit that so are imports), and we're ramping up our investment in green tech, which regardless of whether you believe in science or not is a growth industry.
The Democrats passed credit card, financial, health care, and fair pay reform all in two years. What did you guys do when you had all the control?
so eager to bring up Bush in lieu of talking about the current President, now is a golden opportunity to take back the intellectual and rhetorical high ground.
Take it back? Like you guys ever had it?
What’s the current list of conspiracies against the Republicans again?
Liberals
Democrats
Socialists
Geologists
Biologists
Climatologists
Meteorologists
Atheists
Muslims
Jews
ABC
NBC
CNN
CBS
PBS
All of cable except FNC
The New York Times
The LA Times
The Washington Post
The Associated Press
Reuters
BBC
The Guardian
Black People
Mexicans
Human Rights Activists
SCOTUS
Europe
Movie Industry
Television Industry
Environmentalists
ACLU
The United Nations
Labor Unions
Colleges
Teachers
Professors
ACORN
National Endowment for the Arts
Gays
Judges
NPR
Paleontologists
Astrophysicists
Museums (*except Creationism Museums)
WHO
WTO
Inflated tires
The Honolulu Advertiser
The Star Bulletin
Teletubbies
Sponge Bob and Patrick
Nobel Prize Committee
US Census Bureau
NOAA
Sesame Street
Comic Books
Dogs
Karl Rove
Electronic Arts
Punk rockers
5) Fight for every last vote. Conventional thinking on the Right has it that certain groups won't vote Republican, so they're written off (case in point: blacks). Yet, even with overwhelming odds like that, there are people seriously rethinking their support for Obama and Democrats in general. That's a good sign for the GOP, especially going into 2012. Closer to home, as it were, you might be able to sway some votes from the Independent and conservative Democrat side by engaging them, giving them some kind of sign that you might actually care about this country and have ideas on how to fix it. Even if a voter is 99% sure he or she is going to vote Democrat in November, there's still 1% that can be used as a foothold.
It may be short notice for the GOP, but using these ideas in the home stretch could mean the difference between victory and defeat in several close races across this country.
Republicans only have three strategies on how to court black voters:
1) Show them pictures of black Republicans--no matter how dumb they are. Republicans think when black people see other black people, they will naturally want to connect with them in order to maintain the "hive mind." Kinda like how dogs are supposed to freak out when they see other dogs on TV.
2) Call them SLAVES... to the Democratic party. They think that since black people have a visceral reaction to the word "slave" and if they accuse the Democrats of holding them slaves, they will naturally flock to the Republicans. If they ask the Republicans for evidence or reasoning, just call them SLAVES to the Democratic party again. That should get the job done, right?
3) Claim that the Republican Party has always been the party of civil rights... and hope none of the black people have access to a history book.
They rotate these strategies over and over again. And when black voters tell them to fuck off year after year, they can just fall back on the same excuse: "THEY don't know what's good for them. There couldn't possibly be anything wrong with US. WE'RE doing everything right." Sweet, soothing denial.
If you look at the way blacks almost never vote Republican, it becomes obvious that they are the most politically intelligent group in the country. Meanwhile stupid white trash keep screwing themselves by voting Republican while claiming they're smarter than black people.
If the GOP really wanted to appeal to minorities, they'd be decrying the racism in their own party first, but they won't -- they know there are far more rednecks than blacks that will vote for them, and they're not about to alienate the racism vote right now when the target is the President.
Republicans trying to court black people remind me of this site:
http://www.blackpeopleloveus.com/
Don’t believe me? Take a look at this billboard, hilarious stuff:
Now, about issues:
Imagine if the Republicans weren't actively working to bring those blue bars down. You know, imagine if the Republicans were actually working to make our country better regardless of who gets the credit.
In 2008, we on average lost 317,250 private sector jobs per month. In 2010, we gained an average of 95,888 private sector jobs per month. That's a difference of nearly five million jobs between President Bush's last year in office and President Obama's second year.
In fiscal year 2009, which began on September 1, 2008 and represents the Bush Administration's final budget, the budget deficit was $1.416 trillion. In fiscal year 2010, the first budget of the Obama Administration, the budget deficit was $1.291 trillion, a decline of $125 billion. President Obama has cut the deficit -- there's a long way to go, but we're in better shape now than we were under the GOP.
On Bush's final day in office, the numbers of the Dow, NASDAQ, and S&P 500 closed at 7,949, 1,440, and 805, respectively. On October 29th, 2010, they were at 11,108, 2,512, and 1,183. That means since President Obama took office, the Dow, NASDAQ, and S&P 500 have increased 40%, 74%, and 47%, respectively.
Below is the prediction of US deficit when Obama took office. Graph assumes that all policies voted in during GWB administration were kept constant and all economic indicators remained unchanged.
As you see, the deficit was supposed to rise in 2009 and 2010.
August 2009 (http://www.france24.com/en/20090820-lower-budget-deficit-usa-crisis-banking-finance-white-house) - it was around 262 billion dollars lower than forecast, thanks to fiscal responsibility.
April 2010 - the federal deficit was running significantly lower than it did one year previously, with the budget gap for the first half of fiscal 2010 down 8 percent over the same period in 2009 (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/12/AR2010041204364.html).
September 2010 - the deficit narrows 13%, thanks to rising tax receipts (http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-09-13/budget-deficit-in-u-s-narrows-13-to-90-5-billion-on-rising-tax-receipts.html). Tax cuts don't cut the deficit, increasing revenue does.
So we were supposed to be around the $1.5 trillion mark. That was the forecasted deficit. Well, the gap for the fiscal year that started in October 2009 was $1.26 trillion (compared with $1.37 trillion last year at the same time).
As a percentage of GDP? 9.1 percent this year, down substantially from 2009's 9.9 percent last year.
Things are getting better. The private sector is adding jobs every month. The deficit is lower than the CBO predicted deficit. Congress has passed major pieces of legislation in the face of unprecedented obstructionism. And the Democrats shrank deficit spending.
Even if you guys got majority control of the House and the Senate, and even if you got a Republican president in the next major election… What are you guys going to say when abortion is not made illegal? And when Social Security is still not privatized? And when you still can’t put Creationism in school textbooks? And when the Republicans spend us into unprecedented debt on nothing that benefits the American people… again?
Democrats have created more jobs in the last two years than Bush did in eight, and the GOP made 2/3 of current deficits.
And even if none of this happened, there’s still a ton of reasons to never vote Republican:
- anti-gay rights
- draconian drug laws
- warmongering and lying to invade a country
- torture
- racism
- creationism
- religious intolerance
- Christian theocracy
- Biblical literalism
- evolution denialism
- anti-science
- anti-intellectualism
- anti-education
- a belief that all government is evil
- anti-socialized medicine (in spite of every other Westernized country having it and almost all of them being ahead of us in healthcare quality and life expectancy)
- censorship and anti-free speech
- overblown fear of terrorism, and the use of that fear to curb civil rights
- continued opposition to ANY gun regulation in a country where 10,000 people die every year in firearm-related homicides
- Sarah Palin
You right-wingers should be grateful, as most Americans are simply too ignorant to know that Obama gave people tax cuts. And they’re also too dumb to know he reduced the deficit. Blame the liberal media, I guess. Revenue rose and spending fell amid recovery from recession and Obama's Democratic administration’s emergency measures taken to restore growth. This is what you Teabaggers keep lying about wanting.
It doesn’t matter that white trash is going to vote some Republicans back in again, because it’s based on absolutely nothing. And Republicans will still have nothing. These are the issues. These are the facts. And they are undeniable. So you’ll just have to stick to the rhetoric.
