Playing their game

Clinton I'm not crazy about for his record in the drug war, but the man did have good sense when it came to how to get things accomplished. Find a message and stick to it, for him it was "it's the economy, stupid".

How many of us spent a lot of time debating immigration before the neocons told us it was supposed to be an issue for us? Was it on the top of our lists, or theirs? They walked us into Iraq by shaping the debate, they walked us into the Patriot act by shaping the debate, and they are distracting us from many of the problems we should be facing today by showing us another group of brown people to worry about. It's no greater and no lesser a problem today than it was the day before they mentioned it, and it's not even near the top of any list of things that really do damage to this country.

How about a new line, one that's actually ours? It's about the poor maybe, about our future? Neither side has given much thought to the poor in recent decades, it's all the middle and upper class, free trade and such. Trickle down doesn't work from the upper to the middle we say, but let's let the poor figure it out and fend for themselves? How does that work? It should be about the poor, they are worse off now than in decades and their numbers are growing in no small part due to our own policies such as the prison system and loss of education and benefits.

There's a large voting block out there who used to vote dem but doesn't vote much for anyone these days. We had them in the civil rights movement and did well, then we gave them up for drug war and it's been all downhill since. Want them back? Show them we care. We've got an issue there just waiting to be picked up, one that's more naturally ours and that we never should have dropped in the first place. Take it.

or, "They broke the economy...AGAIN"

No matter how much the gop tries to spin their fairy tale that the economy is strong, the average voter knows better. Repeal tax cuts for the wealthy, bring back manufacturing jobs by reinstating tariffs on goods that could be made here, insentives for small business--not big-business. No more borrow & spend. No more huge give-aways to corporate cronies. NO MORE NO BID CONTRACTS. Investigate waste, fraud, and abuse.

Focusing on the economy opens the door to other related policies such as health care. Health insurence is currently hitting people hard in their pocket-books for those lucky enough to have it. Illness is the number one cause of personal bankruptcy. John Conyers is about to introduce legislation for single payer health care which would greatly help hundreds of thousands of voters.


The economy is the key issue not only for it's importance all on it's own, but also because it highlights so many of the miserable failures, not to mention coruption, of the gop.

in a vain attempt to sway people that don't share those principles. We should be directing our efforts to giving the non-voters something to vote for, for a change.

Not being * is a big help, but it won't win, nor make any real difference.

Karl Rove narrative--stir up the base with hatred of browns, provide a post-election "explanation" for the Bushites' "miraculous" comeback in the fall, to be engineered by the new Bushite-controlled electronic voting machines with their "trade secret," proprietary programming code and virtually no audit/recount controls.

Same scenario as '04, i.e., the base's hatred of gays, and the post-election "explanation." First nationwide test-out of the Bushite corporate election theft machines, too.

We. Are. Being. Played.