<$BlogRSDURL$>

Ramblings From the Ragged Crumbling Edge Of The Reality-Based Community

Wednesday, February 08, 2006

Who, Me?? Angry??!? 

...they say we're angry. They've been saying it for a few weeks now and we're going to hear a lot more of that noise because the primordial collection of undifferentiated ganglia that passes these days for a Republican brain trust has determined that this is a winning strategy in 2008, if not in 2006. Voters don't like angry people, they say, and a screeching posse of harpies like Gore and Clinton and Dean as faces of the Democratic party are going to turn voters off. That may well be true, but there are a variety of situations, circumstances, and possibilities circling out there like a stinking flock of turkey buzzards that suggest that they would be doing Democrats a huge favor by hanging their hats on that particular peg. Gas prices, the actual weakness of the economy, instability in the real estate market, the continual mishandling of the mess in Iraq and the potential that it could drag on for a couple of more years with the constant drip-drip-drip of American deaths - or even the more dramatic possibility of everything going to hell all at once, accompanied by 21st Century versions of those 1975 photo's of helicopters snatching escaping Americans off of Saigon rooftops; a fiscal crisis caused by the big-league foreign investors who are propping up this government deciding to call in their markers; a major terrorist attack at some nickpoint that Bushco has repeatedly refused to fund; the list goes on and on...

Anger can be a positive emotion if properly focused. It is possible, with suitable application of goal-oriented self-control, to remain relatively calm while angry and channel that anger into a specific message. Democrats are angry:
at George W. Bush and his whole gaggle of fixers, whores, and thugs; at a media that obsessed over the color of Al Gore's wardrobe but can't seem to get its act together to juxtapose established facts against the lies and misrepresentations that the Bush administration tells day after day, even when it doesn't matter, as if they are just trying to stay in practice; even at each other over differring perceptions of what a "real" Democrat looks like. Democrats are angry over the squandering of a healthy budget surplus and what now is beginning to look like the first stages of the "drown it in the bathtub" plan to cut back on the social services side of the Federal Government. Democrats are angry at the rather casual nature with which the Bush Monkeys are going about trying to reduce civil liberties and they are angry about the relentless pounding effort of the people in charge to make the world a safe, profitable place for corporate contributors at the expense of the average working guy. Democrats are tired of being called traitors when they disagree with the current ship of fools over issues of security or anything that even remotely impinges on those issues...

The odd thing about all this is that Republicans have been angry and intemperate for years, even while in the majority. You can't swing a dead cat without hitting a Lott or Frist or Delay or Hastert or - most recently - McCain caught in the act of sounding just as snarky as anything the Democrats have cranked up over the last few months. The other unmeasured dynamic is the mood of the voters. People living in a structure that only about 40% of likely voters consider to be sound should be prepared for the possibility that the other 60% will, when the whole thing begins to fall down around everybody's ears, decide that they, too, are angry. Voters aren't necessarily there yet, if one uses the always reliable "Operation Rescue Bullet Holes Through Windows" metric that has stood various winger nutcase groups in good stead for the last few years. At the same time, Republican success to date has been predicated on the twin strategies of talking a good game with a simple message and not pissing everybody off at the same time but, perhaps unfortunately for them, they have perfectly positioned themselves to be the target of plenty enough voter anger (bullet holes optional), being on the wrong side of public opinion on just about everything from abortion to tax cuts to the War in Iraq. The president's 2007 budget calls for many more opportunities to irk us little people, targeting as it does a host of programs that affect not only the poor and downtrodden but farmers and middle-class college students and a host of other average Americans. The time will eventually come - it always does - when all of the pieces of personal irritation will come together. Indignant voters will connect with indignant candidates who want to be agents of change, and that's the point where the Republican "angry Democrat" meme will fall apart...

There is a message lurking for Democratic canditates. I won't pretend to define it, partly because there are lots of clever young lefty operatives that can do that marketing thing better than me and partly because that's not really my point. Or maybe it is, since just about any discussion about Democratic electoral success is about an effective and effectively transmitted message. But watching Democrats trying to develop a coherent message is like watching buffalo mating: much bellowing, massive collisions, and a tremendous amount of dust obscuring the event in any case. Aside from the message thing, there is the opportunity to drive whatever message comes from the consumation of buffalo love with an undercurrent of strongly focused indignation. There's nothing wrong with being indignant at the direction this country has taken and there are plenty of people out there that will buy off on that indignation. Republicans can call it anger if they so chose, or declare the left to be engulfed in hissy fits or tantrums or whatever the hell else they would like to say about it, but the fact remains that - while anger may not have worked in the past - righteous indignation has worked, and with a sufficient message can work again...
Posted by: Jack K. / 6:44 PM 0 comments

Who, Me?? Angry??!? 

...they say we're angry. They've been saying it for a few weeks now and we're going to hear a lot more of that noise because the primordial collection of undifferentiated ganglia that passes these days for a Republican brain trust has determined that this is a winning strategy in 2008, if not in 2006. Voters don't like angry people, they say, and a screeching posse of harpies like Gore and Clinton and Dean as faces of the Democratic party are going to turn voters off. That may well be true, but there are a variety of situations, circumstances, and possibilities circling out there like a stinking flock of turkey buzzards that suggest that they would be doing Democrats a huge favor by hanging their hats on that particular peg. Gas prices, the actual weakness of the economy, instability in the real estate market, the continual mishandling of the mess in Iraq and the potential that it could drag on for a couple of more years with the constant drip-drip-drip of American deaths - or even the more dramatic possibility of everything going to hell all at once, accompanied by 21st Century versions of those 1975 photo's of helicopters snatching escaping Americans off of Saigon rooftops; a fiscal crisis caused by the big-league foreign investors who are propping up this government deciding to call in their markers; a major terrorist attack at some nickpoint that Bushco has repeatedly refused to fund; the list goes on and on...

Anger can be a positive emotion if properly focused. It is possible, with suitable application of goal-oriented self-control, to remain relatively calm while angry and channel that anger into a specific message. Democrats are angry:
at George W. Bush and his whole gaggle of fixers, whores, and thugs; at a media that obsessed over the color of Al Gore's wardrobe but can't seem to get its act together to juxtapose established facts against the lies and misrepresentations that the Bush administration tells day after day, even when it doesn't matter, as if they are just trying to stay in practice; even at each other over differring perceptions of what a "real" Democrat looks like. Democrats are angry over the squandering of a healthy budget surplus and what now is beginning to look like the first stages of the "drown it in the bathtub" plan to cut back on the social services side of the Federal Government. Democrats are angry at the rather casual nature with which the Bush Monkeys are going about trying to reduce civil liberties and they are angry about the relentless pounding effort of the people in charge to make the world a safe, profitable place for corporate contributors at the expense of the average working guy. Democrats are tired of being called traitors when they disagree with the current ship of fools over issues of security or anything that even remotely impinges on those issues...

The odd thing about all this is that Republicans have been angry and intemperate for years, even while in the majority. You can't swing a dead cat without hitting a Lott or Frist or Delay or Hastert or - most recently - McCain caught in the act of sounding just as snarky as anything the Democrats have cranked up over the last few months. The other unmeasured dynamic is the mood of the voters. People living in a structure that only about 40% of likely voters consider to be sound should be prepared for the possibility that the other 60% will, when the whole thing begins to fall down around everybody's ears, decide that they, too, are angry. Voters aren't necessarily there yet, if one uses the always reliable "Operation Rescue Bullet Holes Through Windows" metric that has stood various winger nutcase groups in good stead for the last few years. At the same time, Republican success to date has been predicated on the twin strategies of talking a good game with a simple message and not pissing everybody off at the same time but, perhaps unfortunately for them, they have perfectly positioned themselves to be the target of plenty enough voter anger (bullet holes optional), being on the wrong side of public opinion on just about everything from abortion to tax cuts to the War in Iraq. The president's 2007 budget calls for many more opportunities to irk us little people, targeting as it does a host of programs that affect not only the poor and downtrodden but farmers and middle-class college students and a host of other average Americans. The time will eventually come - it always does - when all of the pieces of personal irritation will come together. Indignant voters will connect with indignant candidates who want to be agents of change, and that's the point where the Republican "angry Democrat" meme will fall apart...

There is a message lurking for Democratic canditates. I won't pretend to define it, partly because there are lots of clever young lefty operatives that can do that marketing thing better than me and partly because that's not really my point. Or maybe it is, since just about any discussion about Democratic electoral success is about an effective and effectively transmitted message. But watching Democrats trying to develop a coherent message is like watching buffalo mating: much bellowing, massive collisions, and a tremendous amount of dust obscuring the event in any case. Aside from the message thing, there is the opportunity to drive whatever message comes from the consumation of buffalo love with an undercurrent of strongly focused indignation. There's nothing wrong with being indignant at the direction this country has taken and there are plenty of people out there that will buy off on that indignation. Republicans can call it anger if they so chose, or declare the left to be engulfed in hissy fits or tantrums or whatever the hell else they would like to say about it, but the fact remains that - while anger may not have worked in the past - righteous indignation has worked, and with a sufficient message can work again...
Posted by: Jack K. / 6:44 PM 0 comments

Monday, February 06, 2006

Robbing Peter to Pay KBR 

...back in the '90's, an entirely different administration, for entirely different reasons, set out on something of an austerity campaign with regard to the federal budget with a goal of eliminating deficit spending. That administration was eminently successful, building up a couple hundred billions of dollars in surplus, but it came with pain. Some of that pain was personal; a lot of people with whom I worked - not to mention me - were shown the door in one way or another, either losing their federal jobs outright or being moved from one type of job to another and from one duty station to another. Families were at least uprooted, if not economically disabled from forced demotions or destroyed entirely from the personal stress that accompanies job loss and dislocation. We were by no means the only victims of that budget cutting effort or even the most visible, but we were there, with the guilt-ridden survivors hanging on for the hope of a better day when all those problems would be finally fixed and some stability could be restored. Sadly that day never came....

Gee Dub's tax cuts, perhaps as part of Grover Norquist's grand plan, converted the Clinton surplus in a black hole of debt that has become almost inconceivable in its size, even though that outcome was a readily predictable - and readily predicted - outcome of his fat-cat tax cuts. Now, we are again facing a budget proposal for FY 2007 that offers more of the same pain for no apparently good reason. If Gee Dub has his way, a host of programs - many of which provide the safety net that makes life survivable for the least of our citizens. Medicare, Medicaid, food support for the poor, all of that is on the line. Out west, the program enacted by the unlikely bipartisan work of Idaho's Larry Craig and Oregon's Ron Wyden that pays a guaranteed sum to counties to account for the untaxable federal land within their boundaries (and a replacement for the money those counties used to receive from as a result of timber sales and other commodity uses of federal land) is proposed to be cut in half, which would plunge Oregon's school funding program into the sort of chaos that you wouldn't allow your children to watch if was a movie...

This all may well be the end game of an elaborate plan to apply the meataxe principle to our Federal government, or it may be just a neocon shot at a target of opportunity; you make the call. It is clearly an absurdly disproportionate administration of the pain that the Bush Monkeys say we all need to bear in order to deal with the entirely artificial crisis of their own making. It makes for a compelling bumpersticker sort of message: Tax Cuts for the Rich and Lifeline Cuts For the Poor. You want to go to college to improve your lot in life, but your parents can't affort it? Too bad. Grandma needs to see the doctor under the Medicaid program? Tough luck. Your kids need to eat but there's no money for food? Think kibble, baby. That's what you'll be getting from the Bush Monkeys if you aren't a major defense contractor or a scion of the oil industry. But, hey, thanks for playing...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:22 PM 0 comments

This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?