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Monday, January 03, 2005 |
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Don’t Just Say No Have you seen the credit card commercials starring David Spade? They’re for a card whose claim to fame is that the frequent-flyer-type points you accumulate can be used any time, on any airline, in any hotel. Spade plays a telephone answerer for the competition, one of the companies whose points are never valid for what you want to do: the time you’ve chosen is blacked out, or the hotel you want to stay at doesn’t honor the kind of points you have. Wherever you want to go, whenever you want to go, the answer’s always the same: No. "I’d like to redeem my credit card miles," says a caller, "someplace warm?" "No," Spade says. The caller tries again. "Can my miles get me to Mexico?" "No way, José," says Spade. Hawaii? "A-no-ha." L.A.? "N.O." "Who’s in charge over there?" the caller demands. "That," Spade answers, "would be our C.E.No." It’s very funny. But it’s not a political platform, at least not a winning one. The Republicans tried it for more than a quarter-century starting from the day Franklin D. Roosevelt was sworn in. They opposed FDR’s New Deal, Truman’s Fair Deal, Kennedy’s New Frontier, and LBJ’s Great Society. They advanced no alternatives to protect the aged against the perils of aging, no remedy for poor people priced out of health care, no remedies for the injustices of segregation, no constructive response to the poverty and racism that triggered the riots of the ‘sixties. More recently, dating about to the time that the government fell into the hands of the Republicans, it’s been the Democrats who have been just saying no. Invade Iraq? No. Tax cuts? No. Rolling back tax cuts? No to that too. No, as well, both to gay marriage and to a Constitutional amendment prohibiting gay marriage. What would they do about Iraq? Something other than what Bush did. John Kerry and the Democrats could have used Groucho Marx’s signature song from "Horsefeathers" as their campaign theme: I don't know what they have to say, And even when they've changed it It wasn’t enough in ‘04 and it likely won’t be enough in ‘08. Unless Bush’s policies go more disastrously wrong than even the most partisan Democrat would wish on the country, mere opposition–to Social Security privatization, to moving the courts even further to the right, to continued attempts to make chicken salad out of chicken...uh...feathers in Iraq–won’t be enough to keep Rudolph Giuliani or Jeb Bush out of the White House. You can’t beat somebody with nobody, and you can’t beat something with nothing. The Democrats will need to get what the Republicans have: a coherent, consistent, values-based political philosophy and the ability to state it in terms that can be understood by people who aren’t policy wonks or political junkies–clear enough, in other words, to fit into thirty-second spots. And they need to start getting it more or less now. Not only because, like any effort to convince lots of people of something, repetition is crucial. But because if the Democrats start saying it now, and keep saying it through the next election, and carry it out in their legislative positions, it will come to seem sincere–will actually be sincere–rather than just a soup of strategies cooked up to win an election. Or they can just say no. After all, just saying no won the war on drugs, right? 9:59:23 PM  comment []
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