PrintOctober 8, 2010
The Democrats' Latest Talking Point
Democrats recently have embraced a talking point at obvious variance with reality to explain away their massive unpopularity with voters. Since the Democrats ran the perfunctory "Blame Bush!" talking point into the ground by the persistent recitation of it in television studios for the better part of two years, the DNC realized it was time to manufacture another stock liberal argument, one that hasn't been repeated ad nauseam.Yet.
As parroted by mainstream media liberals, Obama's administration and congressional Democrats are struggling with the public because they are inarticulate, goes the narrative. We are supposed to believe that they are defined by the voice of the Republicans and that they don't know how to talk up their own legislative "successes" -- whereas the Republicans are supposedly "experts" at talking.
Indeed, this is an inventive line. It's not factual, but it's definitely inventive.
The fundamental point is that what Democrats consider their recent legislative "successes" are among the most detrimental economic policies that the American people have ever experienced. There is no amount of talking that can put the hearts of people at ease when they know that -- due to a few imprudent strokes of pen codifying massive, unread bills into law -- their life savings are going to be worth significantly less than they were previously, their jobs are hanging in the balance, and their health care is going to be compromised.
The problem that the Democrats have is that their policies are indefensibly reckless -- not that they're not gifted communicators.
It's peculiar that liberals would consider themselves poor articulators inasmuch as they are indisputably the best speakers in politics. The Democrats have deftly managed to distance themselves from inarguable historical facts that, if widely believed, would deter entire groups of people from ever pulling the lever for Democrat candidates ever again.
For example, the Democrats are so gifted in the realm of articulation that they have managed to wipe away an entire history of their inextricable relationship with the Ku Klux Klan. Even though the KKK was created to function exclusively as the terrorist arm of the Democratic Party prohibiting blacks from voting for antislavery Republicans, through very clever revisionist history, liberals wrote off that entire phenomenon with this great talking point: "The parties switched places. What was once the Democratic Party is now the Republican Party, and what was once the Republican Party is now the Democratic Party."
What this talking point fails to explain, however, is why the former KKK member Robert Byrd was not notified about this massive party change and sat for over fifty years in the Senate as a member of the Democratic Party. Surely, after fifty years, someone could have tapped him on his shoulder and told him he was sitting on the wrong side!
This is a behemoth lie that liberals have forcefully repeated so often that it has now become accepted political reality -- and invertebrate Republicans have noiselessly sat with foolish deference and allowed it to become political wisdom.
Similarly, left-wingers routinely marginalize Reagan as an economic right-wing extremist for doing nothing less than enacting capitalistic policies that engendered a massive economic boom, while genuflecting before Clinton for enacting similar policies under the duress of a apoplectic country and a Republican majority Congress.
Although it is true that the Clinton era did see economic prosperity, it was Clinton's incredibly far-left politics that caused an angry Republican insurgency in the 1994 elections, with the Republicans taking back both the House and Senate, rendering Clinton's liberal ideas feckless, making him the titular head of the country who merely signed bills Newt Gingrich put on his desk.
It was Gingrich's 104th Congress that created the Contract with America, which spurred the economic prosperity that Democrats took sole credit for, an act which Republicans happily allowed. To this day, Clinton is credited for the economic growth that happened during the '90s, yet we hear very little about his failed attempt at nationalizing health care under the auspices of his beloved wife, Hillary.
Democrats have a long history of being able to create wholly fictitious narratives and to glibly explain their way out of seemingly inescapable historical tight spots -- all while claiming absolute credit for successful policies that they were demonstrably incidental in implementing. With the media in their pocket, Hollywood in their corner, and prestigious colleges functioning as brazen citadels of liberal thought, Democrats have mobilized an entire propaganda machine that makes the dissemination of their talking points painlessly easy.
Contrarily, however, Republicans are inarticulate, and not only do they consistently allow their successes to be hijacked by the Democratic Party, but they remain horrifyingly mum whenever they are maligned with the most heinously slanderous pieces of revisionist history.
The fact that Democrats are experiencing difficulty articulating their way out of their current self-inflicted political predicament is evidence not of their inability to create and deliver clever talking points; rather, it is evidence that the mess that this Obama administration has created with stimulus, health care, and cap and trade is too egregious to be slickly talked out of.
Democrats may have been able to explain their way out of their historical relationship with the Klan as well as hijack the legislative accomplishment of Congressional Republicans during the '90s, but explaining away a dismantling of the Constitution and turning the Great America into a country indistinguishable from any meaningless, socialist non-country in the European Union is a feat too immense for even the Democrats to accomplish.
Mr. Okeem can be reached at mrokeem@gmail.com.
