According to Greenberg, Quinlan, Rosner [pdf], this is the best message for Democrats this Fall:
“As people here know better than anyone, we can only get change if we get more common sense in Washington. In such tough times, Congress should not be voting to raise their pay. I want to end the revolving door of lawmakers becoming lobbyists and voted against my own party to crack down on powerful committee chairs. I supported eliminating special tax breaks for big oil companies and corporate subsidies that bust the budget. Republicans want business as usual – allowing corporate lobbyists to have free rein and permitting big corporations to regulate themselves, write their own rules and make unlimited campaign contributions. That’s not right, and I’ll fight to change Washington.”
Who knows what poll respondents are picking out of this mish-mash. I hope it’s the tax breaks and lobbying stuff, but it could just as well be the pay cuts and “voting against my own party”.
I found this because I was looking for the wording of the question GQR asked to get the 62% result on tax cuts for those making more than $250K. This is the most recent result I could find, from a poll taken at the beginning of September [pdf]:
It’s obviously suicide for Democrats to do nothing on tax cuts. The $250K issue seems to elicit differing degrees of enthusiasm based on who you ask and how the question is asked.
My take is that the $250K issue is serving as a proxy for what voters really want, which is some form of economic justice in the wake of the bank crisis and the bailout. My guess is that when polling firms formulate the $250K tax cut question in words that touch the voters’ feelings about the justice they desire, it polls better, because voters see the $250K cut as part of the way that we can recover the tax dollars spent on bank bailouts. Democrats are unable and/or afraid to really get to the nub of the issue and dish out some justice in the form of specific taxation of banksters. Instead, we get the $250K gambit, which might possibly satisfy a majority of voters if it is packaged correctly, just like some of the other Democratic messaging might possibly satisfy a majority if it is mixed together with old reliables like Congressional pay cuts and voting against party.
The reason this is unsettling is that the Democrats’ inability to directly address a short-term injustice, the banksters’ profits, is also true for the long-term issue of the decline of the middle class. If Democrats can’t get a coherent plan together to address that, a plan that will probably include long-term higher taxes on the wealthiest Americans, then all the framing in the world isn’t going to help them. They’ll be whipsawed back-and-forth by the middle-class electorate who want fundamental change, don’t get it, vote them out, and then vote them back in when Republicans fail them, too.
NobodySpecial
Haven’t you heard? Nick got it from CNBC that Americans want to keep all the tax cuts and Obama is smelly. Therefore, we will lose the House and Senate and everything will be all Tea Party all the time.
Plus, liberals can suck it because CNBC would NEVER lie or distort stuff to attack Obama.
cleek
sounds like a good time for a third party to step up – a
“middle-class” party.
The Republic of Stupidity
I don’t think there is a good message for Democrats at this point. Apart from their own overwhelming incompetence, and apart from the fact that Republicans have somehow managed to put shit in a box, wrapped it in tissue paper and ribbons and are selling as a ‘platform’, the real problem is the fact that the electorate – the public, or at least a certain percentage of it, has gone completely farkin’ insane.
On one hand, far too many keep screeching about too much government, too much government, too much government… and then turn around and demand Dems get out of office because they haven’t done enough to fix the country, which is another way of saying, “You haven’t done enough for ME”…
Sooooooooo… what ‘message’ to you formulate for a group of people who can’t begin to understand they’re not making any sense anymore?
Ever try arguing w/ an idiot? Or someone mentally ill?
Zifnab
@cleek: When you find one, let me know.
Moses2317
Wow, that message seems incomprehensible.
On taxes, how about:
Democrats want to provide tax relief to folks making under $250k per year. Republicans are holding tax relief for the rest of us hostage so that they can provide an average of $103,000 per year to millionaire health insurance executives, Wall Street speculators, and folks like Paris Hilton.
Similar messages can be made for other issues, all along the theme of Democrats will fight for average Americans, Republicans are fighting for the wealthy elite.
Winning Progressive
Zifnab
Honestly, I think all that deficit hawking is finally baring fruit. If you scream 24/7/365 about deficits, deficits, deficits and then turn on a dime to defend $700 billion dollars in tax cuts to people that clearly don’t need them, it’s going to take a while for the independent opinion to catch back up to you.
People will defend their own tax cuts, sure. But if you convince them that budget deficits are such a big issue, then ask them for a big cup of government money, you’re going to lose a lot of traction.
WyldPirate
This is why we are done for as a society.
The Dems we elected simply don’t give a fuck. They are the same rich bastards as the Rethugs. They don’t give two shits about the middle class. They only care about serving their corporate masters and campaign donors who can pony up 10K at fundraising dinners. In other words–their peers.
Obama is no goddamned better as evidenced by the sweetheart backroom patent deal he cut with Big Pharma.
Nothing will change until blood runs in the streets.
NonyNony
@The Republic of Stupidity:
This isn’t really all that hard:
It’s “too much government” when someone else benefits. It’s an “essential service” when I benefit.
This is why politicians who read polls that say “Americans believe that there’s too much government and it needs to get smaller” and walk away thinking that Americans really believe that need to consider a career other than politics. Americans don’t, by and large, really believe that. Americans tend to believe that there’s too much government in areas where they think government is taking their money and giving it to someone else and too little government in areas where they’re getting something they want.
Republicans have been working for over 60 years on that meme, by the way. My reading of history says that Americans have always been sympathetic towards that kind of thing, but the Republican effort to hammer the idea that “your tax money is being stolen and given to people that don’t deserve it” has really impacted the American psyche.
(There’s also the fact that Americans, by and large, want to have nice things but don’t want to pay for them. If we had a direct democracy every state would be California – vote in nice benefits and vote down efforts to pay for them.)
The Republic of Stupidity
@NonyNony:
True… and that also explains the ‘smash and grab’ mentality so prevalent across a broader spectrum of American society these days..
And that leaves us back at: Just what sort of message DO you come up w/ when talking to idiots and the mentally ill?
LGRooney
The message is simple: Do you want deficits to continue to benefit those who caused you or your loved ones to lose their jobs or do you want to make sure that those who received 6- and 7-figure bonuses after you bailed them to pay their fair share and help lessen the deficit?
arguingwithsignposts
@The Republic of Stupidity:
I’m sure bender, sanka or the like will be along shortly to demonstrate.
The Republic of Stupidity
@arguingwithsignposts:
Then although it is early here on the Left Coast, I will sit back w/ some chips and cold one once the fireworks begin…
It just occurred to me that a similar perception on your part is what drove you to using the name ‘arguingwithsignposts’…
Allison W.
@Moses2317:
Obama has said that already minus the Paris Hilton part. Why bring her into this?
TR
@arguingwithsignposts:
Try Time’s Swampland blog. Ask for the guy who goes by “Newfreedomblog.” Just hysterically stupid.
TR
@Allison W.:
Because when Republicans talk about cutting taxes for the rich, they paint them as the hard workers who are doing God’s work and creating jobs for the rest of us. Paris Hilton is a reminder that not all of the rich are industrious.
She should be trotted out front and center every time the GOP tries to portray the estate tax as some kind of burden on small family farmers.
TJ
It could happen
RalfW
@cleek: “sounds like a good time for a third party to step up – a ‘middle-class’ party.”
Ironically enough, this is what I think under-girds the (original, pre-astroturf) Tea Party. And why a lot of fairly average, fairly middle-class people still turn out for Tea Party events, since they don’t follow politics the way we obsessed BJ people do.
Now, sure, the Tea Party also included a bunch of blacksploitated older white people from the start, but I think we on the left dismiss the Tea Party too easily and miss exactly what cleek is aiming at.
At this point, the Tea Party may as well be one of Jack DeCoster’s eggs, so that dog won’t hunt no more, but looking at the ever-growing roles of non-aligned voters, the rot in the Republican party and the trembling of the Democrats, the two-party system is f*cked.
Nick
@Moses2317:
This HAS been their message.
gene108
Unified message for Democrats seems like an oxymoron. The Democratic Party, at its core, is an every man for himself Party, where its up to the individual candidate to come up with a message that resonates with his voters.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@WyldPirate:
I think you are wrong here. I’ve met enough Dems over the years, including some past and present office holders, to say that this stereotype just doesn’t fit the people I’ve known. What does fit this stereotype is a moderately small group of Blue Doggy Dems who form roughly 1/3 or so of the Dem caucus, but who because they are positioned in the middle of the ideological spectrum between libs and conservatives, control the fulcrum of power in our system of govt., especially in the Senate. When the pivot of power in a finely balanced system is narrow enough, a small group of rent seekers can screw everyone else and get away with it.
This on the other hand, I agree with 100 percent. This era resembles the Gilded Age far too much, except in one respect. Rich people were dying during the Gilded Age. And the reform movements of that day were motivated at the top level by the fear that even somebody like a J.P. Morgan had to walk out of his house every day not knowing if an anarchist’s bomb was waiting for him, out there somewhere, in ways that nobody could predict or prevent. Today’s uber-elites in contrast, live without fear. The stranglehold they have on our small-c conservative system of govt. will not be relaxed until they learn to live in fear of what the mob may do to them. And I’m afraid that will take sporadic violence – and that is precisely what our counter-terrroism national security state has been set up to deal with. Not scary brown Mooslims with their Ground Zero Mosques, but royally pissed off white working class people running car bomb factories in their garages.
Jennifer
I raised this point a week or so back.
Pretty much all of the bailouts were done to protect the wealth of the wealthy. Granted, without TARP we probably would have all been screwed – but with it, about 15 million of us who weren’t responsible for the shenanigans in the markets got screwed anyway. The banks (and their shareholders, by extension) were made whole in the bailouts. Mortgageholders got nothing. And so on and so forth. The folks who across the board benefitted are the ones who hold instruments of financial wealth, who are mostly those same 3% whose favorable tax treatment is in question. Now, according to Republicans, they shouldn’t be asked to repay the favor by paying a slightly higher marginal rate so we don’t blow another $4 trillion hole in the budget.
WTF? If not for TARP and the other bailouts, most of them would have been if not entirely wiped out, then at least reduced to the lowly middle-class status of those who along with low-income people have suffered the brunt of the recession. As it happened, most of them saw a major, though temporary, hit to their wealth – probably around 35% if my investments are any indication – which in the two years since has gone back up to within 5 or 10% of the value they had before the crash.
This could be boiled down into a simple talking point: “We pulled their fat from the fire with the bailouts and stimulus; now it’s time for them to pay some of it back.”
Even at the higher tax rate, it’s a helluva sweetheart deal they got.
gene108
@WyldPirate:
But who’ll spill the most blood? It seems to me right-wingers are better armed, but maybe I’m just stereotyping…
FlipYrWhig
I kind of wish that no one on the Democratic side would talk about The Deficit for a while. I would rather have them say that really what’s going on with the debate on taxes is that both Republicans and Democrats are offering a plan to help stimulate the economy in the short term. The Democrats’ plan is to give 98% of people lower taxes, putting more money in their pockets to put into the economy. The Republicans’ plan is to give that 98% _less_ of a break than Democrats do, and cap it off by giving the 2% at the top of the scale a _huge_ break, putting more money in their already-bulging pockets, which they _don’t_ put into the economy because they don’t have a pressing need to buy anything with it.
Because if you were actually being serious about The Deficit the only course of action would be to reset all the tax rates, like Orszag wants. It does seem kind of lame to say that 98% need a tax cut to stimulate the economy but 2% need a tax hike to lower the deficit. Personally, I find that the better argument is that the money that flows to the top 2% doesn’t turn into the kind of economic activity we need to get out of this rut we’re in. Just ignore the deficit hawkery for a while. Or let the conservative Democrats come up with a long-range plan to fix the deficit _after_ the Keynesian Democrats get another bite at the tax-cut-as stimulus apple.
Nick
@FlipYrWhig:
The problem here is Democrats need a reason to defend not giving tax cuts to the rich. When people say “well, let everyone keep them,” we need to give a logical reason why the rich shouldn’t, and “because rich people suck” is not a logical reason and is unlikely to move the middle. “Because we’re broke and we can’t afford it” does, at least in theory.
To be honest, if there was no deficit, I wouldn’t have an issue with letting the rich keep their tax cuts right now, but there is and when there’s a deficit, we need to prioritize and tax cuts for the rich aren’t a priority, which is why we shouldn’t do it. Hell, I don’t think anyone should keep the tax cuts right now, the deficit is too large and we need to spend more money.
gene108
The reason to raise taxes is to control the deficit. If people are worried about the deficit, the only argument Democrats need to make is the tax increase is for deficit reduction.
FlipYrWhig
@Nick:
I think “it’s not cost-effective” is a pretty logical reason: giving more money to people who already have a lot of money doesn’t turn into activity that helps everyday people and everyday businesses. “Trickle-down” doesn’t work. Rich people already have money to spend and aren’t doing it; giving them more money won’t create more buying and long-term investment.
(I would even be willing to say that the middle-class tax cut creates a $3T hole in the budget, adding the upper-class tax cut creates a $4T hole in the budget, and that’s something we’ll have to address on the back end; but if we’re going to blow an extra-deep hole in the budget we can definitely get more for that money than doling it out to the richest 2%.)
OTOH, “we can’t afford it” reinforces a worldview that does a lot of harm to economic policy.
b-psycho
Now ask yourselves why…
Nick
@FlipYrWhig:
I think we’ve established that tax cuts don’t work, the question is, without them, does it hurt. That’s what he GOP is running on. They’re not running on “let’s keep doing this, it’s been awesome,” they’re running on “ok, so that didn’t work, but we’ll be worse without them”
Nick
@b-psycho:
they can’t unite on a single message and the media ignores any of them that aren’t Blue Dogs?
WyldPirate
ThatLeftTurnInABQ@20
Yeah, you’re right, i stereotyped the Dems. But you explain why it doesn’t matter which is WHY I use the stereotype I did.
Our system of government is totally and completely broken. It is corrupt, ineffectual and, basically useless for any purpose other than accelerating the speed at which the country accelerates down the shitter.
gene108@22
My bet would be on the rightwingnut Teatards. Too many similarities to Hitler and his Beer Hall putsch thugs.
The Teatards already have multiple candidates auditioning for their leader. They already have multiple Goebbels imitators in place. They’re already picking out multiple enemies to blame shit on.
It’s only a question of when the blood-letting begins. My bet is when things go to shit after oil production starts decreasing at 2-4% per year in the not to distant future and the US economy craters as the bottom falls out of GDP.
Ten years tops….
Jewish Steel
Mistermix, you touch the nerve of my dread for November.
Some kind of scalable rhetoric is what is needed for the cat-herding of the left. You need clear language and themes for the low information “independents.” You need meat and potatoes pro-union, working class rhetoric for the old guard rank and file. You need technocratic policy wonkery for the pundits and urban latte sippers. You need to make use of revolutionary/populist language for far left.
It’s got to be a lot easier on the right. One belligerently nationalist speech fits all.
Edward G. Talbot
if you’re right about the sentiment, here’s how the dems will blow it. They’ll compromise on tax cuts by allowing the marginal rate on the wealthy to go up but keeping the rest of the marginal cuts AND the dividend and cap gain tax cuts. So what would have been a “middle class” tax cut message will turn into “middle class plus stuff you all associate with wall street”.
Keenan
Income and wealth inequity in America is the worst since the Great Depression.
Wealth transfer from the middle class to the wealthiest couple of percent has continued unabated for decades.
Benefits of tax cuts in 2001 and 2003 went to the same group with much of their income (capital gains) taxed at absurdly low levels.
The American people pulled the financial sector and industry back from the brink of ruin. Taxing income that exceeds 250k at the previous rate (income below this is still taxed at lower rates) sounds fair.
Democratic leaders need to change their wording. It’s income ABOVE 250k that will be taxed at slightly higher rate. Most of us manage on a lot less without a peep.
Chris
I know you think you’re being all smart and logical, but if you want enough Dems to vote for something, you have to tell that it’ll be bad politics and bad policy, and that they can all get jobs as lobbyists after they get their asses kicked by a conservative electorate in what is, aftera all, a center-right country.
I wish I had better news, but that’s where the action in the Democratic party is.