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Despite my strongly held belief that electoral fraud will render the recent wave of Republican immolation moot, I'd like to offer the Democrats some advice that might actually help them win some converts next week. If the Republicans and their media surrogates have a point with any validity whatsoever, it's the oft-parroted idea that Democrats Have No Plan. A more accurate characterization would be that the Democrats don't have a plan that can be articulated in monosyllabic grunts. But let's pretend for now that exasperated Republican voters, disgusted by the stinking rot that is the Bush administration, actually mean it when they say “I'd vote for the Democrats if only they had a plan.” My cynical refutation is simply this: “No plan at all is better than the fucked-up plan your gang of crooks, liars, and idiots concocted.” But that probably won't fly in the heartland, so let's apply a bit more intellectual rigor to the matter at hand and try to come up with a plan and a slogan.
Longtime observers of our political landscape understand that in addition to the usual “three branches” of government, there's also a delineation along the lines of “permanent” and “temporary” government. The temporary government consists of elected officials that come and go with new administrations, as well as their political appointees. The permanent government comprises the career employees: the scientists, historians, archivists, analysts, spies, generals, economists, physicians, lawyers, educators, epidemiologists, and other long-term government workers who remain in their jobs long after the politicians leave Washington and their political appointees (often, unqualified cronies) are jettisoned by the incoming team of politicos. That our government can continue to function despite its ephemeral political leadership is due in large part to the people in the permanent government, many of whom are, simply put, experts. There is a long tradition of tension between the temporary and permanent governments, but the tension between the politics-uber-alles Bush team and the resident experts is unprecedented. Why? Because the Bushies have zero respect for expertise. Whether the matter at hand is climatological, military, economic, environmental, medical, or educational in nature, the Bush gang will, without fail, disregard expertise if it stands in the way of their political goals, in many cases destroying the career of the expert who committed the grave transgression of providing reasoned and objective analysis. The post-Bush landscape is littered with the corpses of intelligence analysts who concluded that Iraq wasn't a real threat; climatologists and astrophysicists who delivered bad news about global warming; engineers who determined that the levees in New Orleans wouldn't hold; educators who warned that No Child Left Behind would leave children behind and that abstinence-only sex education wouldn't work; generals who knew that securing the peace in Iraq would require far more troops than the number committed; CIA officials who warned that bin Laden was determined to strike inside the US; lawyers who insisted that holding detainees indefinitely without charges was illegal; economists who had determined that the Bush tax cuts would only benefit the wealthy. The list goes on and on and on.
The agencies haven't been incompetent. In retrospect, their analyses were often sage and prescient. It was the political branch that had it all wrong. Because of their arrogance and their fuck-you model of faith-based governance, We The People have paid dearly and will continue to pay dearly for years to come, long after the Bush gang have gone to their lobbying jobs, their CEO positions, and their jail cells in The Hague.
If it were up to me, the campaign slogan for 2006 would be “See? We told you so.” This, of course, will do little to sway the 32% of the population who still love W – you know, the cadre of dead enders and blunt-skulls who hate gays and blacks and think that the bible was written in English and that Jesus rode to Calvary on a Stegosaurus and was crucified because he advocated tax cuts for the rich. But these nitwits are hopelessly lost and should be written off if we wish to preserve our collective sanity. For them, I advocate a new twist on the old carrot-and-stick approach: they should be beaten with the stick, stabbed with the carrot, and left behind (in the literal sense, not the rapturous one). It's the ten to fifteen percent in the margin that need to be convinced to come along for the ride, and the Democrats can win their hearts and minds by articulating a plan for America that's clear and simple. Are you ready for it? Here it is: “We will listen to, respect, and heed the better judgment of experts.”
Now, about that Diebold problem...
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