The Cry for Democratic Moral Leadership and Effective Communication

If you don't read anything else today, read these:

George Lakoff at Truthout:

If you have not read Drew Westin's outstanding piece "What Created the Populist Explosion and How Democrats Can Avoid the Shrapnel in November" on The Huffington Post, AlterNet, and other venues, read it immediately. Westin states as eloquently and forcefully as anyone what he, I, and other progressives have been saying from the beginning of the Obama administration. I agree fully with everything he says. But ...

Westin's piece is incomplete in crucial ways. His piece can be read as saying that this election is about kitchen table economics (right) and only kitchen table economics (wrong).

This election is about more than just jobs and mortgages and adequate health care. All politics is moral. All political leaders say to do what they propose because it is right. No political leaders say to do what they say because it is wrong. Morality is behind everything in politics - and progressives and conservatives have different moral systems.

In the conservative moral system, the highest value is preserving and extending the moral system itself. That is why they keep saying no to Obama's proposals, even voting against their own ideas when Obama accepts them. To give Obama any victory at all would be a blow to their moral system. Their moral system requires non-cooperation. That is a major thing the Obama administration has not understood.

I won't go too deep into Repug "morals" except to say they're mean-spirited racist throwback bastards who lie and fearmonger. The end justifies the means, no matter what. All they want at the top is power and obeisance from the bottom. 'Top' and 'bottom' are carefully chosen words.

From the link:

Following the conventional wisdom, Democrats return to their all-too-familiar defensive crouch, and conclude that when in trouble, tack right. [...]
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The White House starts adopting failed conservative policies and talking points that leave the public utterly confused about where the president, and by extension, his party, stands on the central issues of the day. [...]
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The underlying psychological assumption of these moves is that if you mix policies from the right and left in equal parts, you win the center. In fact, no one has ever won the center that way. It appears weak, opportunistic, and incoherent to the average swing voter, which is particularly problematic at a time when people in the center desperately want to know that their leaders have a vision and a coherent plan for what to do (which is why both FDR and Ronald Reagan were so effective in moving voters in the center). It doesn't win any votes on the right. But it does have one predictable effect: It sucks the motivation out of your base, who feel demoralized and betrayed (if they're part of the "professional left") or less likely to vote (if they're average voters who don't follow politics carefully but just don't feel very enthusiastic anymore, even if they don't really know why).

Much, much more in both pieces.