I woke up this morning to this story on NPR. At the GOP governors meeting this weekend the bubble was strong. I'm still a bit amazed at what I heard. Yes, the Obama / Democratic ground game was powerful and successful. Yes, the demographics were changed a bit this time by it. Yes, in the first round Citizen's United was kind of a bust for the money involved. But to the governors, their goals are what Americans really want, contrary to extensive evidence.
This sort of tone deafness may bode for weaker all around numbers for the GOP in elections, although Citizen's United and pay-to-play elections may prove very much more difficult two years from now. If you do nothing else today, please listen to this Bill Moyers interview with Trevor Potter, Steven Colbert's superpac lawyer. It outlines how, if we cannot show that running government as we did in the late forties into the sixties is the blueprint for US revival we may have a very tough fight in 2014. Even some of those whom we elected may not really believe that substantially higher taxes over all, perhaps 5 to 10 percent, along with short-term spending boosts and debit pay-downs over the next 4 years are a major part of the solution. We also need higher wages to complete the model and make it work, something rarely spoken of in Washington. We need them to advance this point of view into our upcoming legislation and the execution thereof. We here at DKos, in the end, are yearning for more of what we saw in how FDR turned us around in the great depression. And how Truman, Kennedy, Democratic majorities in Congress, even the Keynesian advocate Dwight Eisenhower, created the launching pad into our information age. We now live in a time where world wide prosperity and peace are in our grasp. We live in an age which must undo the environmental climactic disaster we have created, perhaps even needing to terraform our way out of it. We need to invest, wisely, in this future.
In the short run things are even graver. This viewpoint believed against evidence by the governors, the reason that Obama had a machine which won was because it was fueled by optimism and hope for idiots chasing after freebies, will continue to add to the Neoconservative belligerent temper tantrums in Washington. We're likely in good tactical shape to have the GOP tax the rich, but beyond that we can expect no change from the Republicans short of powerful partisan strong-arming on our side. Which is no way to run a country efficiently. Even if the Democrats in the senate modify the filibuster, we might stand to see more endless gridlock in Congress.
Let's do a quick jump and I'll wrap up.
President Obama has expressed a desire to keep Obama For America intact over the next four years. This is indeed a desirable strategy and could be morphed into a Democratic activist base that can be transferred on to our upcoming races up to and beyond 2012. Still this assumes that the president over the next four years decides to govern more like FDR and Truman than Reagan and Ike. I contend our blowout in 2010 came from an activist base which had the wind knocked out of its sails by an administration who listened least to it and more to the Republican party in an ill fated attempt at bipartisanship. With 2012 excitement we would have smitten the Tea Party in the bud. That would have trounced the last two years of absolute GOP stonewalling based on the Neoconservative failed ideology.
I think the strong evangelical bent of the republican party drives it far more strongly than many people realize. It creates a mindset where one puts the importance of beliefs above truth demonstrated by evidence. There was no shortage of information by Silver, Wang, and Markos as to where the election was heading. Their mindset did not allow them to at least average what they believed what the polling said with what we thought it said. The result with victories by Obama and senate had no basis to be as shocking as it was to them. None at all when averaged out, or even considered to be right. They also put belief above knowledge when they ignore the days worth of reading at this site alone about what liberals really think and what our true goals and aspirations are. Many Republicans simply cannot consider their worldview incorrect. They believe they need to change the tone of their message, not the message itself. We must break this spell for the good of our nation.
We need to keep ourselves organized now and speak loudly to the President and our Democratic congresspeople. To our governors and statewide parties. I think Obama realized his mistake in 2010 and at least suspects that we need an exaggerated effort to change the narrative conservatives believe for our success. We also need to tell our stories and experiences to help conservatives across the country re-calibrate what they think they know about liberalism. To re-calibrate what they think they know of reality. That was a scary sentence to write. We need to have all of us, from the president on down explain the history of America's rise from 1946 into the late 60's under a powerhouse Democratic Keynesian model of economic strength and fairness. We need to see unions re-invent themselves for a fast moving 21st century which will raise wages in this country, the real solution to our economic woes. We need to create and maintain enough influence by the base, and as much as we can from OWS, to demonstrate the evidence of our political theories. Theories that liberals allowed to falter for 30 years by not adhering to them as strongly as we did when Democrats lead the way about 70 years ago to this country becoming the greatest example of democracy ever witnessed by humankind.