CT Blue

Sometimes, methinks, folks in the leftmost portion of the blogosphere take things just a little too seriously.

Yesterday, in the grand tradition of John Kerry, Bill Richardson tried to make a joke. In the grand tradition of present day politicans of all stripes, he failed miserably. Richardson was in Iowa, and, seeking to curry favor with his audience, tried to justify Iowa’s undeserved place in the presidential nominating process. Since neither logic nor reason justifies Iowa’s privileged place, only two entities are left to to blame, neither one of which can defend themselves these days. Per Richardson:

“Iowa, for good reason, for constitutional reasons, for reasons related to the Lord, should be the first caucus and primary,”

Now there are two possibilities here. Richardson either really believes that Iowa comes first by constitutional mandate and the will of God, or he does not. If the first, then he is almost as deranged as George Bush, who believes even more bizarre things about both God and the Constitution, and thinks God talks to him to boot. If, on the other hand, Richardson does not believe these assertions, then he was attempting, as his campaign now claims, to do something that all Democrats should attempt with extreme trepidation: tell a joke.

I incline, indeed I positively avalanche, toward the latter conclusion. On a scale of 1 to 10, the joke is minus 10 funny, about par for the course for politicians these days, but that doesn’t diminish his mens rea (the word is apt, it was a crime against humour) one bit. Nonetheless it appear that even the mighty Kos feels that it is an example of pandering and some appear to think that Richardson was serious.

If it was a pander it was of the harmless sort, so over the top that it is practically a parody of pandering. In fact, that might very well be what he was intending to do, he just couldn’t pull it off. In any event, this isn’t the sort of thing we should pile on one of our candidates about. It’s bad enough that the media often run with these things, as they did when they crucified Kerry for telling a Bush is stupid joke. There’s no need for us to inflate a story that’s essentially meaningless. Stupid statements, when uttered by Republicans, are usually ignored (e.g., Mitt Romney’s assertion that his five sons were doing the equivalent of Iraq service by working on his campaign), while those from Democrats often have a long shelf life. There’s no need for us to add fuel to the fire.

The incomparable Krugman points out what many of us in the internet wilderness have said at one time or another :

There’s a powerful political faction in this country that’s determined to draw exactly the wrong lesson from the Katrina debacle — namely, that the government always fails when it attempts to help people in need, so it shouldn’t even try. “I don’t want the people who ran the Katrina cleanup to manage our health care system,” says Mitt Romney, as if the Bush administration’s practice of appointing incompetent cronies to key positions and refusing to hold them accountable no matter how badly they perform — did I mention that Mr. Chertoff still has his job? — were the way government always works.

And I’m not sure that faction is losing the argument. The thing about conservative governance is that it can succeed by failing: when conservative politicians mess up, they foster a cynicism about government that may actually help their cause.

The Democratic candidates can’t win, or can’t govern once they win, unless they push back against this sort of thing. By definition, you can’t push back with timidity. The Republicans have handed the Democrats a perfect opportunity to be the party of optimism and old fashioned American can-doism. How hard could it be to fashion a message around the concept of rebuilding, or better yet, taking back America. At this point, if we aggressively offer hope against a message that implicitly denies the possibility of improvement through sound governance, we can’t lose.

When Dukakis ran for president he started his convention speech with the claim that the election was about competence, not ideology. The message didn’t work then, largely because of the way it was packaged. But packaged right, particularly after eight years of monumental incompetence, it can’t lose. We should be prepared to deliver the steak, but sell the sizzle. Dukakis was all steak.

But this implies an ambitious agenda, not the sort of incrementalism Democrats have pushed in the recent past. We don’t need, for example, to hear about tinkering with the drug benefit; we need to talk about Universal Health Care. How about, for another example, being aggressively in favor of tolerance and human rights, instead of soft pedalling our support for those values. Those things can sell, if packaged right. People are tired of hate. Given the choice they will vote for someone who gives them hope over someone who will tell them that the decline they see all around them is a permanent feature of the American scene.