Friday, February 04, 2005

A Democratic elevator pitch

When I started this blog back in November, one of my first posts concerned the need for the Democrats to create an effective elevator pitch. That is, I called on the Democrats to develop (perhaps only for internal purposes) a statement that would capture the emotional core of why people identify (or would like to identify) with the Party. In other words, I called for a simple statement of principle that (1) the vast majority of Democrats could happily sign up for, (2) would appeal to many swing voters and independents, but (3) would cause hard-core Republicans to feel unvarnished revulsion.

Well, recently we spent a little time with reader RWM to formulate a draft of what such a Democratic Party elevator pitch might look like. As a template, we considered Josh Marshall's suggested that the Republican elevator pitch consisted of the claim that, "They're for lowering taxes in exchange for giving up whatever it is the government pretends to do for us, (at a minimum) riding the brakes on the on-going transformation of American culture, and kicking ass abroad."

For the Democrats, this is what we came up with:
The Democrats are for promoting fairness and the rule of law at home and abroad, for keeping government out of the morality business, and for ensuring equal access to economic opportunity and political power.
Does that work?
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2 comments:

  1. Nils11:48 PM, February 04, 2005

    Perhaps you're right Zak. To make the contrast sharper, we have to get explicit about the belief in the moral value of redistributing wealth... the hatred of plutocrats. And you're probably right that #3 should make more explicit the idea of respecting internationally-formed rules (or, to be even more specific, to respect for the idea that at least the long-term goal should be create a rules-based international system, even if obviously many particular rules that have been, are, and will be written are foolish).

    Beyond this point, however, I don't think the Democrats and the Republicans differ much at all in foreign policy -- they both believe, largely, in the Empire. As you know, I argued all during the Fall campaign against the belief -- held by some on the left as well as most on the right -- that Kerry would conduct a policy materially different from Bush in, say, Iraq.

    In short, it's the domestic issues that really distinguish the parties. As much as I think Iraq is a fool's errand, you can tell from the preponderance of what I blog on that I consider the salient difference between the two parties to be the domestic issues.

    But as I say, I think your criticisms are fair, and I'll keep noodling. How about some constructive criticism?

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  2. Anonymous7:32 AM, February 05, 2005

    Hi. You don't do trackbacks, so I wanted you to know you've been linked here:

    http://www.command-post.org/oped/2_archives/018852.html

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