We Need to Make the Argument
Mitt Romney ran a carefully calibrated presidential campaign, single-mindedly targeting swing voters with the message that Obama was a great guy who failed to deliver the goods, so why not vote Republican and hope for change.
In contrast, Barack Obama made a sweeping moral argument: America is moving forward toward a fairer society where everybody has a shot; in order to finish the journey we must reject Romney’s plan to return us to the greed and selfishness of the Bush years; in particular, we cannot afford the tax cutting and lax regulation that caused the recent financial crisis.
Oh, and in case you missed it: Osama bin Laden is dead.
The Left has a built-in persuasive advantage in any campaign: Any premises left unstated on the stump are fully baked into the popular milieu through the tireless mediation of teachers, comedians, pop singers, businessmen, journalists … you name it.
The typical response from the Right—particularly establishment Republicans—is to first bemoan the unfairness of our left-leaning cultural predisposition, and then ignore it, preemptively discarding the counterargument. It’s so very difficult, you see; we might alienate women and Hispanics; those ideas mainly appeal to old white men; and so on.
So having ceded the commanding heights of worldview and language to the Left, the candidate of the Right is left to tinker at the margins. Under these conditions it is surprising that Romney came as close to victory as he did.
Let’s start with a glittering example: Barack Obama endlessly repeated the line that Mitt Romney would return us to the failed policies that brought us to the brink of global financial ruin in 2008; as though a five-percentage point difference in the top marginal income tax rate marked the divide between prosperity and calamity.
Yet I never heard anybody in Republican campaign-land gainsay any of this.
Even under the time constraint of a televised debate, it would be simple to point out the flourishing of crony capitalism under the coercive umbrella of the Community Reinvestment Act, abetted by government-sponsored Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which were led by assorted Democrat politicos-turned-executives who got fantastically rich pumping up the sub-prime mortgage market. All this with the grateful assistance of the usual suspects from the rent-seeking wing of the private sector.
For another example, it is seemingly everywhere noted in the run-up to the Fiscal Cliff that universal peace, prosperity, and balanced budgets prevailed under the Clinton-era income tax rates, so why all this Sturm und Drang from elected Republicans hell-bent on safeguarding the interests of the top one percent?
Again, nobody on our side bothers to point to the elephant in the room: Obama's runaway spending. Our brief moment of fiscal rectitude under President Clinton resulted from federal outlays falling to 18% of gross domestic product as against rising to 24% of GDP under the Obama program of budget-by-continuing-resolution. And if the Left insists on calling out Clinton's income tax increase, shouldn't the Right mention his substantial capital gains tax cut?
However, the most troubling omission from our side in recent months is the absence of a consistent moral argument made in favor of individual liberty. We need to promote an alternative worldview, not just a different tax code.
An economic system run by free people and free markets is morally superior in every respect to President Obama's government-directed version, which favors the well-heeled and politically connected. Ironically, Obamanomics creates the very social conditions the president inveighs against: A nation of haves and have nots, locked in unending conflict.
Far from creating the financial crisis, limited constitutional government, established to secure God-given natural rights, resulted in the fairest, most prosperous, and most ethnically diverse civilization in world history. This is the heritage we seek to preserve.
In order to win the argument, we first must make it.
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Comments:
Jun '10
Re: We Need to Make the Argument
Romney was on 3 nationally-televised debates and spent millions on TV ads. That is clearly a means to deliver a message directly to the American people.
For better or for worse, Presidential election campaigns are one of our best opportunities to get our message across unfiltered. We need to make the most of it.
Jun '10
Re: We Need to Make the Argument
romney was right about everythingbut obama being a nice guy. otherwise it really was the stupidity of 62 million americans. obama should have received two votes. presuming michelle voted for him.
Re: We Need to Make the Argument
Drusus: Good points, all. Another statement I longed to hear countered: "...blah blah blah pay theirfairshare..." Why wasn't anyone pressing back on this point? What is a fair share? Do the drastically higher tax rates payed by the evil millionaires and billionaires constitute something that could conceivably be called fair?
And the anemic defense of low capital gains tax...double taxation is not difficult to explain. · 2 hours ago
We absolutely must offer up a competing definition of the word "fairness."
Our Constitution requires that each of us be treated "fairly" -- meaning equally --under the law. Among other things, this means that the government is not empowered to single out a despised minority--say today's "top 2 percent" of wage earners--for maltreatment; "spreading the wealth around" not being an enumerated power.
Re: We Need to Make the Argument
Being on the same wavelength as Dr. Sowell makes my day.
Sep '10
Re: We Need to Make the Argument
We absolutely must offer up a competing definition of the word "fairness."
As Thomas Sowell has said many times: equality of outcome is not the same thing as equality of opportunity.
Re: We Need to Make the Argument
liberal jim
The only problem I see is that GWB's policies where a lot closer to Obama's than they were to limited constitutional government principles. If Romney had started out apologizing for the mess bozo Bush and his Republican lackeys made and then pointed out Obama had proceeded to put those policies on steroids he could have run against the Bush/Obama economy.
LJ, I agree. Bush is to Obama as Hoover was to FDR. Obama demonizes his predecessor while doubling down on his worst economic policies. Stimulus, TARP, too big to fail, the auto industry bailout: all began during the Bush administration.
But Obama's disastrous performance is blamed on Bush's income tax rate cuts, not the Obama-lite economics instituted during the run-up to the Great Recession.
George W. Bush is a decent and honorable man who did many good things as president. However, his handling of the financial crisis was disastrous.
Sep '10
Re: We Need to Make the Argument
Did someone say Franklin Delano Roosevelt?
Re: We Need to Make the Argument
Elected Republicans are on television every night. Karl Rove raised and spent over $300 million in the past few month pushing his targeted swing-voter-friendly message.
But there is no there there.
Republicans with access to a microphone need to begin every statement with a prefatory clause connecting to the Founding or otherwise establishing a moral foundation for the point to follow. This needs to start now. Just as the Obama ground game that turned out his base the other day started grinding it out in late 2008, so we need to begin laying the philosophical argument for 2016 today. Otherwise, we really have lost our country.
Re: We Need to Make the Argument
Nick Stuart Maybe if the time and effort the conservative punditocracy (not a few of whom appear on Ricochet regularly and who have been bemoaning Obama's reelection) and Republican elites spent whining, complaining, carping, and kvetching generally about everything Romney said and didn't say, did and didn't do were spent making these cases, and rebutting the Left the outcome would have been different.
Let's see if 2014 and 2016 are any different, if there's any point to it by then. · 2 hours ago
Nick, the Republican establishment wanted Romney as the candidate and the single-mother-in-Bucks-County targeted campaign messaging. After the loss, the problem isn't the establishment but the conservatives, at least according to the establishment.
If I had the $325 million American Crossroads budget, then I would skip the kvetching and just get on with making the argument to the citizenry.
But Ricochet will have to do.
Re: We Need to Make the Argument
katievs: Dr. Savage, can'tyou run?
I promise to give money to a Savage the Senatecampaign. I will fly to California and knock on doors. · 2 hours ago
Thanks, but as I remain a California resident despite knowing what I know, I must harbor some significant psychological defect that renders me unfit to serve.
Re: We Need to Make the Argument
Palaeologus: I disagree George. It is not about making "the argument."
Mitt won "the argument." The economy sucks and Obama hasn't fixed it.
Nope. Voters agreed with Romney's diagnosis: the economy sucks. However, voters simultaneously agreed with Obama's argument: If you are an enlightened, fair-minded person, you will vote for me, because voting for my opponent is, in effect, supporting evil.
Pure Alinsky: Personalize the issues and portray the other guy as morally unacceptable. No good person can possibly vote for him.
Effectively, Obama ran unopposed, which is what Obama does best.
Oct '10
Re: We Need to Make the Argument
George Savage
Nope. Voters agreed with Romney's diagnosis: the economy sucks. However, voters simultaneously agreed with Obama's argument: If you are an enlightened, fair-minded person, you will vote for me, because voting for my opponent is, in effect, supporting evil.
Pure Alinsky: Personalize the issues and portray the other guy as morally unacceptable. No good person can possibly vote for him.
Effectively, Obama ran unopposed, which is what Obama does best.
Your article and this reply nail it. Pure Alinsky. Alinsky is all about worldview. Worldview is undergirded by philosophy. Political philosophy, when expressed, is called an ideology.
We had an incumbent who oozes ideology from every pore running against a technocrat, an ideological chameleon who really just likes fixing things according to the tech specs found in the owner's manual. "Obama ran unopposed" captures it perfectly.
Here's the mystery: With all of the Romney/Ryan team's intellectual power and financial resources, why couldn't they figure this out? They let an Alinskyite run his perfectly predictable game plan and appear not to have even conceived of needing an effective counter-strategy.
Oct '10
Re: We Need to Make the Argument
George Savage
Drusus: Good points, all. Another statement I longed to hear countered: "...blah blah blah pay theirfairshare..." Why wasn't anyone pressing back on this point? What is a fair share? Do the drastically higher tax rates payed by the evil millionaires and billionaires constitute something that could conceivably be called fair?
And the anemic defense of low capital gains tax...double taxation is not difficult to explain. · 2 hours ago
We absolutely must offer up a competing definition of the word "fairness."
Our Constitution requires that each of us be treated "fairly" -- meaning equally --under the law. Among other things, this means that the government is not empowered to single out a despised minority--say today's "top 2 percent" of wage earners--for maltreatment; "spreading the wealth around" not being an enumerated power. · 1 hour ago
People respond more to pain than than pleasure. I think we need to show that redistribution hurts the poor--while enriching bureaucrats.
Let's give that ressentiment a new target.
Edited on November 16, 2012 at 8:04amSep '10
Re: We Need to Make the Argument
George Savage
George W. Bush is a decent and honorable man who did many good things as president. However, his handling of the financial crisis was disastrous. · 7 hours ago
GWB took a job in the family business and proved to be worse at it than his father.
When a major figure repeatedly calls himself a "compassionate conservative" he is reinforcing the message that most conservatives don't care about people especially the poor. Bush with his communication team were aware of this, but chose to do it anyway. Am I incorrect?
This tells me GWB was primarily concerned with advancing his political career. Decent and honorable is not the first adjectives I would choose to describe such a person.
Sep '10
Re: We Need to Make the Argument
Without forming an opinion on the rest of your thesis, I think this is the nub of the problem. The phrase "compassionate conservatism" was a convenient way of deferring the political debate that we're now having. The GWB administration is the Republican elephant in the room: no future candidate can afford not to think through how they're going to deal with it. Ignoring it won't make it go away: Madeline Albright said they're going to blame GWB "forever" and she meant it.
May '10
Re: We Need to Make the Argument
We need not only to make the case that our ideas are fair, we need to show that their ideas are evil and destructive.
We need leaders who will dare to say to the poor and the immigrant and all those tempted by big government handouts:
"You think they care about you? They don't care about you. They want you weak. They want you dependent. That's how they get your vote. That's how they get power. That's how they get their hands on the public money and use it to enrich themselves and their cronies. They are manipulating you. They're using you. Don't let them do it. You didn't come to this country to be servants to the rich. You came here to be Americans. To stand on your two feet. To live by your own labor, and to raise your children in freedom, in a country that honors God and honors you. Don't help them turn America in the rest of the world--a place where the elites are in charge and the people are at their mercy. In America, government is for the people and by the people."
Edited on November 16, 2012 at 3:58pmNov '12
Re: We Need to Make the Argument
I agree, George. Romney ran a timid, limited campaign, much like McCain's. It seems to me politically unforgivable how the Republican Party and their consultants keep pushing a failed timid strategy, using their stronger organization to give us McCain II; and not learning anything from McCain I or the 2010 elections, which oddly enough everybody seems to have forgotten.
I also believe the Republicans, and the conservatives too, unfortunately, use the language of the left much too much. That has to change--although I think the conservatives are yet unaware of how often they too slip into using the language of identity politics and the left.
May '10
Re: We Need to Make the Argument
The elites are secularists at bottom. They are embarrassed by the religious faction of the party. They want the rubes to shut up and cooperate with their own undoing.
Meanwhile, the Democrats are worse than mere secularists, they are actively setting out to re-design society in defiance of God and in defiance of human nature. As Whittaker Chambers took pains to point out: it's a faith. It has to be answered with another faith.
Secularism has no power of resistance, neither to Marxism nor to radical Islam. It can only survive as long as a majority agree not to be serious about religion and morality.
Jul '10
Re: We Need to Make the Argument
George Savage
Palaeologus: I disagree George. It is not about making "the argument."
Mitt won "the argument." The economy sucks and Obama hasn't fixed it.
Effectively, Obama ran unopposed, which is what Obama does best. · 10 hours ago
Putting it mildly, that is not my recollection of the campaign.
Also, the whole "make the other guy evil" business would have been a counterproductive tactic (and make no mistake, it is a tactic) this cycle. Why?
Because normal people don't want to believe that their President is evil. What is useful for an incumbent isn't necessarily so for a challenger.
Finally, if Mitt ran such a poor campaign why is it that he consistently outperformed our Senate candidates in competitive races?
May '10
Re: We Need to Make the Argument
Palaeologus
George Savage
Palaeologus: I disagree George. It is not about making "the argument."
Mitt won "the argument." The economy sucks and Obama hasn't fixed it.
Effectively, Obama ran unopposed, which is what Obama does best. · 10 hours ago
Putting it mildly, that is not my recollection of the campaign.
Also, the whole "make the other guy evil" business would have been a counterproductive tactic (and make no mistake, it is a tactic) this cycle.
You don't make the other guy evil, you show the destructiveness of the other side's policies.
This is what Reagan did. He opposed the Democrats on the level of principle and ideology.