Terry McMahon's Awesome Blog

I think I'm about ready to give up on Nancy Pelosi as House Democratic Leader. I found this press release from a few days ago, and a couple things I saw give me pause.

First is the headline:

Pelosi: ‘What You Saw on the House Floor This Afternoon Was a Shameless Display of the Republican Culture of Corruption’

OK, that's true: Team Republican held a five-minute vote open for 45 minutes, because that's how long it took to twist enough Republican arms to vote for another one of those Bush-administration energy bills. Not cool, and good that Pelosi and her folks are bringing it up.

Unfortunately, that's a terrible way of framing the issue. "What you saw on the House floor today" was NOTHING. No one saw what happened on the House floor. Maybe the 15 or so reporters who have to watch this, or everyone who watches C-SPAN. Those groups, together, add up to zero of the United States voting population. No one who has anything non-political driving their lives saw anything on the House floor, and they probably wouldn't give a shit if they did. Don't get me wrong, you can frame the issue to speak to people, but it has to be point #5 as to why the Republican agenda is ruining our country: (wait for applause to die down) "Not only that, but the Republicans in Congress will routinely hold a five-minute vote, realize they don't have enough votes, and then turn a five-minute vote into twenty, thirty, even forty-five minutes desperately begging, cajoling, and even threatening their own Republicans to vote for a bill that most people in the House know is a sham." See, that's not too bad.

Unfortunately, Pelosi seems to think that the vote itself is the issue. This is her statement:

Democrats have proposed guidelines for how we think the House of Representatives should operate, a Minority Bill of Rights. Included in this document is the declaration that ‘No vote shall be held open in order to manipulate the outcome.’ When we take back the People’s House, we will heed that declaration.

You guys know I think Paul Waldman is great, and not just because he's my former Mass Media professor. Last week a report by a couple of prominent consultant-class Democrats came out saying Democrats were in danger if they moved too far to the left. Waldman, writing over at Gadflyer, properly eviscerates the report, but in doing so crystallizes a point I had only rarely remembered in my three years in politics:

The ugly fact of American public opinion is that most people know next to nothing about politics. They don't have a clear understanding of where the parties stand on most things, and they don't have a meaningful grasp of exactly what it means to be "liberal" or "conservative." Tweaking your issue positions just won't register with them.

Very flipping true. He even backs it up with evidence, and here's a good one:

Similarly, until 1992 the NES asked respondents which party is more conservative on the national level. This may be the most basic fact about American politics one could imagine; if you don't know that the answer is "the Republicans," then you really don't know anything. The last time the proportion of people answering this question correctly cracked 60% was 1968; the last time it was asked, in 1992, 57% got it right (and they had a 50-50 chance by guessing, after all).

Waldman's point, that "the question is not whether voters perceive Democratic policies as weak or strong, the question is whether they perceive Democrats themselves as weak or strong" is only peripherally related to my issues with Nancy Pelosi. Nonetheless, he sure does a good job of illustrating a major problem with Washington Democrats: they seem to assume that everyone's paying attention to politics. If everyone in the country were really into legislative rules, I could see the Republican vote-extending shenanigans as a big deal. But given that most people, with good cause, would rather focus on anything else, we've got to do a better job of explaining why this matters and how it fits into the big picture. (In case you can't tell, by the way, that whole Waldman piece is terrific.)

But I'm not just flailing wildly here: there's another thing about this Pelosi press release that pissed me off. The top of the release has a heading, which seems to appear on every other release too, which reads, and this is good:

Democratic priorities are clear: we will fight to get the economy back on track, we will create jobs, and we will help unemployed workers.

That reads like an SNL skit: "I will stop at nothing to win this competition. I will practice, I will prepare, and if there's time, I might also get ready." I have an awesome suggestion for Team Pelosi: if you've got space for three goals, make the three goals different things.

But that's not the real issue. I know I've said this before, and I will be more than happy to say it again, but Democrats will not win nationally in this country until we are taken seriously on terrorism. Republicans are tanking on this issue (uh, no pun intended), but terrorism still can lead the Democrats to losses in 2006 if we're not chickenshit about speaking out on it. That's right, I said it: we can actually lose more ground in 2006 if we don't start speaking out on terrorism. Here's a bold statement: The American people realize the Republican policy on terrorism has failed, and they desperately want an alternative. I suspect, honestly, that the public would buy any plan at all from the Democrats on Iraq, from "withdraw now" to "come up with benchmarks and stick to them," even if they proposed nothing else. But we don't even have to do that. If Democrats started speaking of terrorism in broader terms - my personal favorite is to say that accounting for and securing nuclear weapons should be our top priority, but, oh, I don't know, shutting down al-Qaeda might be a good one too - I honestly believe the Democrats could become the party of national security within only a few years.

I desperately want Nancy Pelosi and the House Democrats to succeed, but just as A-Rod can't hit a hanging curve in the playoffs, sometimes you can blow even the easy ones. Here's hoping our team comes through.

(P.S. That picture's from Germany. There's an actual bridge of water over a river. Here's the Snopes entry.)