What should our number one wedge issue be?

We need our own wedge issues, I've thought this for some time now. All of the following wedge issues, I think we should use, but what should be the Number One wedge issue that we promote the most intensely?

By Number One wedge issue, I'm meaning, what would be the easiest issue for us to go out and articulate to people, in a way that they could understand in even the most basic terms and thus agree with and thus in turn support us on?

:popcorn:

On Edit: I've added Healthcare and Health Insurance the cost of, as several people have mentioned that...and me being a bimbo, I'd forgotten about that and I've also added Border Control, which I think is actually an important issue that the Repukes are NOT FUNDING.

:popcorn:

on your list is whatever affects them personally, so that would be stem cell research. Broaden that to healthcare and it could be a runaway.

feel PROUD to be an American about. Something that gives them hope. Something that gives them the feeling that this country DESERVES to be defended. And something that gives them the ability to continue living close to how they were before * took over and tightened the blindfold around Justice before raping her in the name of the corporate elite... (why the bankruptcy "reform" first comes to mind escapes me at this time...)

A draft wouldn't work because those they draft will find new ways to not fight. (one example: expect mass suicides once the draftees get handed their government issued guns. They know the score.)

Right now, people may be concerned about $8 trillion (or $27,000 for each of us if you buy that tripe and I don't and I'll save my reasons for a later message... but the solution there is to rescind these tax cuts, made in times where tax cuts were the most irrational thing to do.) But more are concerned about wanting to live and if they don't see a chance to live, they're not going to care about ANYTHING else. Simple psychology.

Take it them. Promote stiff penalties (i.e. no government contracts for offenders) for companies that hire undocumented workers and also those that contract to companies that hire undocumented workers.

In addition to promoting stiff penalties for companies and large scale offenders we need to...

Institute genuine border intervention and enforcement.

Apply similar penalties to the home owners and day jobbers who employ these people on a pay check to pay check basis (those employers are just as culpable).

Streamline/expedite the deportation process and make it work.

we do need to stiffen the border, but it's impossible to lock it down. I don't think we should strive to lock it down, immigration is what made this country what it is today.

I also think we need a fair guest worker program so that we can take that economy out of the shadows. I don't think it's a bad thing foriegn nationals are here working. They do mostly low skilled labor jobs that no one else is willing to do, and they don't impose the burden freepers would lead to believe. If we can shift this sector into legal status, that would be a good thing.

So to recap, my solution: harsh penalties for companies that break the law, more attention to the border, and guest worker program. We also should stop the exploitation of Latin America, actually help them improve their economies, but I don't have the solution because I am cynical enough to believe we would just fuck things up worse.

the fundies and the corporatists. Point out the downright unchristian greed of the corporatists, drive the wedge there.

Neither side seems to have a firm grasp on the problem or really wants to fix it.

Currently, Bushs solution is really just to ignore or deny that there is no problem.

Of all our problems, illegal immigration has to be near the bottom of the barrel.

It's an issue that has supporters and detractors on both sides.

Neither party is all that happy or supportive of illegal immigration.

It's the reasons and what to blame or support that differ.

I'm so sick and tired of Lou Dobbs and his "Broken Borders" crap. Why doesn't he go after the friggin Corps hiring them? There are laws against it!

He's a hack.

After that it should be the economy. By the time we get close to the 06 elections, the Pubs will be pulling troops out of Iraq, or that would be the #1 issue. We can't let them use the pullout as a diversion to what they've done over the last 10 years!

....they lied.

investigations, indictments, and trials going on involving Pubs, there won't be any other issue but "restore honor and intregity" or just friggin tell the truth!

The cost of health insurance is beginning to strangle everyone. If we let the Repubs take this issue we are doomed.

it needs to be something else. People do understand the effects of healthcare (or lack thereof) and seeing their jobs go bye bye.

Pooh. We will grow outselves out of that debt, they will say. Debt is good, they will say. The national debt just doesn't directly impact the average Joe. As a wedge issue, it has all the strength of a wet noodle.

That said, if an eloquent and trustworthy Democrat were to take this up and make it his/her own and not stumble and had the rest of the Democrats vocally and legislatively supporting the message, then he/she and the Dems in general might be able to get somewhere with it. But I'm not holding my breath.

Poverty allows the Dems more flexibility in campaigning. It incorporates health care, outsourcing and many of the other issues on your list. Plus it allows us to shove Katrina right up thier ass.

I've added it. I'm coming to my editing time up, so the poverty issue could be the last issue that I can include.

You don't have an 'Other' category. Wedge issues is a technique used by the thugs in power. All we need to do is illuminate the vast differences between them and us.

There are two views of government.

Progressive: Traditional American concept - we use the common wealth for the common good and the benefit of everyone. We care for and take care of each other.

Conservative: New concept in American politics - each man for himself. IF you help others you are being taken advantage of, if you need help you are a failure. Your suffering is your fault.

These drive everything evil the conservatives have been doing and this should be our only issue, pointing out this difference.

It manifests itself everywhere. The vast majority of American's favor universal health care. It is all of us using our common wealth for our common good. The conservatives oppose it.
Protecting the environment. The vast majority of American's favor protection of the environment. It is protecting our common wealth for our common good. The conservatives see it as a resource to be exploited for profit to the benefit of a small number of people.
Social Security. Well, the differences between the country (and Progressives) and the conservatives on this one have played out already. SS is using the common wealth for the common good. The conservatives would dismantle it and leave everyone on their own.
The failures of Katrina showed this extremely clearly, most Americans want a government that uses our common resources to help those in need. The conservatives don't and people suffer and die under this 'everyman for himself' attitude.

Over and over and over again, polls show that Americans support progressive social policies, policies where we all care for each other and take care of each other. Time and time again, the conservatives dismantle programs that take care of our fellow citizens and enrich their wealthy friends.
There is nothing the conservatives do that isn't driven by this 'I got mine, it's your fault if you don't have yours' attitude and it is so unAmerican and it is so out of touch with what most Americans believe.

All we need to do is repeat this over and over and over. Anytime a conservative states that they DO care for people we ask 'why have you cut '? Anytime a conservative talks about private initiative we ask 'are there never times when people need help'?
Always frame the issue as we want to take care of each other, all of us, all the time, in every way we can. You don't. You want to help those who are already well off and hurt those who need our help most, the elderly, the infirm, the young, the poor, the unemployed, and - most scandalous of all - strip the benefits of the soldiers you have sent to war.

Sorry, just meant to be a note saying you don't have an 'Other' category.

:shrug: why not?

like honor, integrity, compassion, greed, misjudgments, falsehoods, lies...etc... Those type of "personal" issues are much stronger than issues of policy matters, such as immigration, healthcare, or whatever. Republicans have understood this for quite some time. We need to challenge their basic personal beliefs and actions. We need to challenge them personally. We can do better than they can do personally. The other issues are secondary to that.

of life in America is not: outsourcing, downsizing, pension-looting, forcible reduction of wages (including by illegal immigration), methodical destruction of the social safety net, the fact the United States is the only industrial nation without adequate healthcare or adequate public transportation -- these are all paycheck issues the Democratic Party could easily turn into a demand for restoration and expansion of the New Deal: precisely the ultimate wedge-issue both next year and in 2008. Two potential 2008 candidates, John Edwards and Nancy Pelosi, are already moving definitively in that direction: Edwards has in fact already called for restoration of the New Deal.

But the Democratic Leadership Council -- which in truth is the Republican/corporate/fascist Fifth Column within the Democratic Party -- won't allow that to happen. This is because the core of the New Deal is recognition of the Marxist truth of class struggle and accommodation of its historical reality in a Constitutional context: government as protector of the people against the capitalist oligarchy (which includes the implicit acknowledgment capitalism is both necessary and intrinsically evil and therefore must be shackled), and government as provider of services the oligarchy refuses to provide (healthcare, transport, retraining for displaced workers) or refuses to provide at affordable prices (electricity, fuel, universal education through the college level).

I voted above for "healthcare" because that seemed the most representative (or paradigm) issue among the choices offered. But outsourcing and illegal immigration issues are potentially major too -- especially if all such issues are presented as what they truly are -- that is, expressions of class-struggle: resistance to the oligarchy's ever-more-brazen concentration of wealth, deliberate disempowerment of American workers, and increasingly genocidal policies toward the poor and the disabled -- ever more brazen revelation of the fascist jackboot beneath the velvet slipper of "compassionate conservatism."

Invoking the reality of class-struggle and the threat of fascism here at home is precisely is how FDR dealt with the Depression Era versions of these issues, and this is how Edwards seems increasingly inclined to deal with them today. Let us therefore hope his divorcement from the DLC is much more than illusion. If it is not, America is doomed: another four years of Republican tyranny and theocratic schemes against the Constitution will destroy American liberty forever.


Edit: typo in headline.

Democrats and Republicans have both been guilty of contributing to this problem. Add in the debt and you have an economic wedge issue.

(As a somewhat neglected Medi-Cal recipient, I would also like to see better health care, but a lot of healthy people don't give a shit about us. I think the economy affects everyone, healthy or not.)

For instance "Stem Cell research" and "The erosion by the Right-Wing of Separation between Church and State" are - at their core - almost the same issue. And while these are a single "Litmus test" issue for me, "The cost of Healthcare...Health Insurance" is a bread and butter, time critical issue for me -- and is definitely a major contributor to "The outsourcing of jobs to countries such as India and the Far East" (and Canada and Mexico in the case of autos), and secondarily to "The problem of Poverty...which millions of people find themselves in".

I belong to a Progressive Democratic Club in the SF Bay Area - with a predominately "Over Age 65 Demographic" - and we have some members that will argue for each and every one of those wedge issues. But, given our demographics, "The cost of Healthcare...Health Insurance" is everybody's first or second choice.

Formulate some kind of combination Wedge Issue, such as how you described incredibly well.

Yes, many of these issues are connected to each other, so I think we could do something whereby we link them all together by a common thread.

Your post gives much food for thought :)

when the churches, temples, and mosques were on the Progressive side of the political spectrum --- and the issues were Civil Rights and VietNam. And this whole hijacking of God by the Conservative Fundies is very distressing.

Given the home and family I grew up in, this hijacking of God by the Conservatives is like the sun rising in the west and setting in the east - it's Kafkaesque, something out of Joseph Heller's "Catch 22" - Orwellian in a sense - like an explosion of insanity that shatters the reality that molded me.

That's why this breach of " Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof" is so disconcerting.

And this breaking down of Jefferson's wall is really our core issue.

A lot of people do not participate in this "democracy" anymore because they see no difference between the "sides" of arguments.

I think it would be big news if the "opposition" would try to unite the people of the US rather than dividing them like children.

Instead, we always playing catch up with the Republican pile of shit.

"Their pile of shit is bigger than ours! Quick! More shit on our side!"

We win when we are HONEST and FRANK. Kerry lost because (yes, there was fraud) he double talked, trying to please everyone. If he had not said, "I voted for it before I voted against it", he would be president today.

It came down to personal issues. If we can't beat them because we are better than them, on issues of honesty, integrity, and brains, then we don't deserve to win. We can talk until we are blue in the face about healthcare, deficits, the war, or whatever, but if the voters don't think we are as good or better personally than our opponent, then we will not win the vote. If they think we are "flip-floppers" or "liars", then we lose, pure and simple.

State. However I voted for outsourcing of jobs as I feel that this is what most Americans, including middle class and low-income Republicans, will be concerned about. Even the die-hard fundies can get a rise out of fear of their jobs being shipped overseas.

I think a wedge issue is something that their party is split on. In that case, I believe that the #1 wedge issue for the repubs is religion in politics.

I think, though, that this mostly plays out in states that already vote Democratic. A "Californian Repub" is someone who does not want religion in their government, they just want all of the tax breaks. These people will be found in major metropolitan cities that usually go Dem. But there are some in Kansas City & Atlanta ect..

I would love for pollsters to go after this voting base to see what is there rather than here what are supposed to be representatives of the Democratic Party advocating faith-based-initiatives & "pro-life" stances.

...problem is that the general public only views the national debt as some really huge number. They don't see it as something that impacts their daily lives....

Healthcare/Health Insurance, and job outsourcing ARE issues that everybody thinks about. Especially those who are personally impacted by one or both of these major issues. And obviously the unemployed are also the uninsured.

These are issues that will resonate with people in every state. Border control, is obviously going to be more of a regional issue in terms of the degree of impact. And the disasterous neocon foreign policy must be a MAJOR issue. We cannot accept any part of this traitorous horseshit. PPI is a whitewashed branch of PNAC, and even more so than its DLC alter ego, must be cut out from this party like the cancer it is.

(I think people voted for "the debt" because other, or fiscal management are not choices.)

We have strength.

"Strong policy" sounds better than "the debt."
Strengthen deficit reduction and turn into surplus.
Only strong response to natural disaster or a needed war ought block this.
Strengthen paying the debt like it's paying our mortgage.
Strengthen SS continuing after the debt/mortgage is paid, like it's helping our own, retired parents.
Strengthen and streamline the military.

Can't focus on "the debt" as a positive image for Dems. It's backward. Suddenly bigger is NOT BETTER. Too weird.

Dems are strong.

many issues, which are either causes or results of poverty.

affordable healthcare
outsourcing
minimum wage
corporate influence on government

to name a few

Let the right defend themselves on their WAR PROFITS....