But still they insisted that we must hoist the banners of all their dear causes.
I asked them how, with their approach, they saw us defeating the Bushites.
Did they disagree with me that ï � �in order to prevail over the Bushitesï � � we need to rally the mainstream of the public to our side? Or did they have some reason for believing that these causes they were faulting me for deferring provided a basis on which we could rally such a majority? Could they find a single instance in the past decade or more in which one of their favorite causes ï � �or indeed any issue that registers on the liberal-vs-conservative spectrum-had worked to the political advantage of the liberal side?
They really had no reply. But more fundamentally, it seemed they saw my questions as entirely beside the point. They evidently were not really concerned with defeating the Bushites. They were not interested in the question of what strategy might work to give us victory. It seemed to be much more important to them to strike a noble pose, to carry aloft the worthy banners, regardless whether or not their approach guaranteed their political defeat.
And perhaps that's why some people who, judging from their critiques of my "What the Democrats Should Say..." pieces, are of the same political stripe as those who attacked me at that college, assume that my counsel to the Democrats must be dictated by my own needs for pure self-expression, an opportunity for me simply to let it all hang out, tell the truth as I see it, rather than my strategic advice about how to achieve some larger goal, namely how to tell that part of the truth that will rally to our cause the support we need in order to win.
In my books, and on my website, I tell the truth pretty much precisely as I see it. My love of the truth comes first, and I accept that my audience will consist of whoever my vision of the truth might happen to attract. I have chosen to be a writer rather than a politician who runs for office.
But when I advise actors in the political arena about what to say, as in these recent pieces, I think differently. For a major political party in America, the audience cannot be some self-selected, small, appreciative following. The audience is the whole of the electorate, and a successful message is one that appeals to a majority of voters.
I do not recommend that the Democrats tell lies. I believe that the Bushites, who gain power through moral lies, can best be defeated with the moral truth. But I do not believe that they should say EVERYTHING that's true, because many Americans are so far from grasping the dark truth about the present situation that some of those truths would simply drive them away. Radical, they'd think. Extremist, they'd say. Hysterical, they'd judge.
It would be great for Americans to come to understand that this regime is a bunch of lying, criminal, bullies. I believe that to be the truth. But the majority will come to that realization, if they come to it at all, by degrees.
I expect that a majority would not, at this point, move in the desirable direction if they were told that 9/11 was America's Reichstag fire--i.e. that it was an inside job staged by the regime for its political purposes-- even if that is true. Most people would recoil, and the messenger would be branded in their minds as lacking credibility. Nor do I imagine that the impact on the majority of declaring that the Bushites have stolen one or both of their presidential elections --even if that is true-- would be beneficial to politicians who so declared.
But the American mainstream might well be ready now, I would judge, to receive the idea that this regime deliberately deceived the country to get their chosen war in Iraq.
And the thing is, each dark truth that the majority does give credence to makes them that much readier to hear the next dark truths. The majority of Americans are readier now to hear the dark truths about Iraq than they were two years ago, even though to many of us those truths were apparent enough then.
If the goal is to win, there must be strategy. And given that winning, for us, requires majority support, strategy requires thinking about how the American mainstream will respond to any given message.
I could of course be wrong in my answers to the question about what people are prepared to hear and what they are not. But anyone who approaches our political struggle without even taking that factor into account is not even asking the right questions, and is more likely to help the Bushites than to defeat them.
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