“They had more resources and they didn’t have a primary”

This is a lame excuse.

Conservatives claim we want to wage a campaign on ideas, not on personalities.

That gives you four years to build a groundswell of support for your message, and then let your primary give you the personality candidate.

Democrats already have to pretend to favor low taxes, limited government, and free markets; they have to pretend that abortion is a necessary evil and a last resort; they have to pretend to support the military and the nation of Israel, and offer unqualified condemnation for the terrorist actions of militant Islamists. This means we are on the right side of these arguments. We just need to understand how to apply them at the federal level and do that.

IMO the trickiest catch is appeasing the social cons. In many ways, I am one of them, but social issues take a back seat to fiscal issues in my book, and there are other ways to enact a social agenda without bringing federal legislation in. But love em or leave em, what the Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition did well, was coalesce a large number of the evangelical vote and tell Republicans, if you want these votes, you need to integrate our agenda. Republicans can’t win without the Christian Right; despite the decline of the Falwells and the Robertsons of the world, that huge and monolithic bloc of voters is still out there, and these issues still matter to them.

On most social issues, we can probably get away with deferring them to the state level. Republicans already promote a state-rights platform, and this would have the dual effect of accommodating the social cons and deferring power from the federal level. And if gay marriage is this unstoppable force of nature or whatever, it will be enacted in the states eventually anyway, so you can argue the Dems don’t have a dog in the fight. The hard part will be extricating the feds where their claws are already in on these issues.

I hesitate to count abortion among the “social” issues, since to me it is a basic right-to-life issue, but that’s the conversion that needs to be made if action is to be taken at the federal level. Even if it is not, it will be a hard sell to defer the issue to the state level, as long as Roe exists to trump any state laws enacted. I don’t have a swift answer for this one.

I could go on at length, as I have with this “single” example of social issues, but it would consist largely of my own opinions which are only partially fleshed out anyways. The POINT is:
- determine on each issue, point by point, what will be the federal platform for these issues
- highlight the distinction so that people understand the role of federal versus state versus municipal government, which in turn educates people on how limited federal government does not equate to zero government
- spend our four years building a voter base on ideas, where we have the advantage, work on educating people on them in a practical, meaningful way so that future elections don’t get dragged into these “caring Democrats versus heartless Republicans” or “genius left versus neanderthal right” memes.

The Dems had four years to build an election around a personality. In 2016 they won’t have that, and the talking heads claim they don’t have a deep bench. We can’t always rely on a personality, and I don’t argue against the idea that having a milquetoast policy wonk will hurt us. But our demo is shrinking, and they’re bringing in a new batch of voters, indoctrinated in their schools and reinforced by Internet echo chambers like Reddit. If we don’t educate on the truth of our ideas, the personality won’t matter; we’ll lose an entire generation of elections to the “Republicans are evil racist idiots” mindset.

The Schaef on November 9, 2012 at 3:01 PM