Terry McMahon's Awesome Blog

I don't know about you, but I have to say that I've had a hard time getting it up for the Sam Alito nomination. I mean, Roberts was fascinating, Miers was hilarious, and I don't know if I can take really caring about a third Bush Supreme Court nominee in a row. So I figured he would make it onto the Court, I wouldn't really care, and sooner or later a dark conservative cloud would come over America. The curiousity, then, was why I didn't care.

Paul Waldman, the senior fellow at Media Matters, the founder of Gadflyer, and one of the references on my law school apps, may have some answers. He just wrote a really fantastic article for tompaine.com about the Alito nomination, why we should care, and how the Democrats can get a win out of this. First, he shows how Democrats, per usual, are focusing on the wrong message for no real reason:

It seems pretty clear that Alito should have recused himself from any cases involving Vanguard. So what’s wrong with making this such a key part of the campaign against him? The problem is twofold. First of all, liberals are going to have an exceedingly hard time convincing large numbers of people that Alito is some kind of crook. ... Like it or not, to most Americans the recusal issue will seem too technical and nit-picky.

Secondly, this issue says nothing about the fundamental debate progressives should want Americans to be having about this nomination. The Alito nomination isn’t about whether the Supreme Court will follow legal ethics on recusal, it’s about whether abortion will be legal, about whether civil rights and liberties will be maintained, about whether the head of our government is a president or a king.

Does that ever freak you out as much as it does me? Sometimes I get the feeling that national Democrats decide something absurd like prescription drug care is the issue that's gonna bring this one home, and then they insist that everyone stay on that one message no matter what happens, what changes, what race you're running, or whether making a secondary issue your only issue sounds ridiculous. Evil U.S. Rep. Anne Northup (R-KY) has made a career out of doing personalized, individualized campaigns. It works. Point being, you have to figure out what people actually care about, and make sure they know where you and your opponent stand. Waldman points out the problem with the Alito pushback:

So what is the one thing Democrats and liberals want you to believe about Samuel Alito, the one reason he should not be on the Supreme Court? Is it that Alito is unethical, or that he’ll overturn Roe, or that he’ll let the government intrude on your privacy, or that he’ll give the executive branch unfettered authority? To return to the Kerry analogy, the story has it that at one point during the campaign Paul Begala went to Kerry headquarters, and in a meeting with some of the senior staff, he wrote out a number of central themes the campaign could employ. Pick one, he begged them—I don’t care which one you pick, but pick one.

Man, can I tell you how much regret I have looking at that sentence? We can't take back the past, but we sure can win the future. But not if Democrats talk like this:

The first thing that George Bush and Mike DeWine have to do is end their addiction to drug company money. Once you do that, then you can put on the table all of the issues that we need to address to bring down the cost of prescription drugs.

There is a prohibition in the Medicare drug bill on allowing the government to negotiate drug prices on the behalf of 30 million or 40 million Medicare beneficiaries. That's the most important change to make. But the drug industry is not going to let their acolytes - those elected officials they've helped so much - make any major changes that might in some ways make a dent in drug company profits.

This is an interview that MyDD did with Ohio Senate hopeful Sherrod Brown a few months back. Good guy, if he's the nominee I'm behind him all the way, but I mean, come on. Protip #1: Start with your best answer. No one gives a shit where someone's money comes from. Seriously. Can you think of an election where somebody lost because they got their money from drug companies or Hollywood liberals. Of course not. Again, I'm sure I'm not half the politician Sherrod Brown is, but no one cares. Stop talking about it.

His second point is better, but he falls victim to the next prominent Democratic malaise. Protip #2: Make sense. It took me a while on Team Tony in 2004 to phrase Brown's point here effectively, and here it is: when you buy in bulk, you get lower prices. Since the government buys a lot of stuff in bulk, they almost always negotiate lower prices. In fact, the one time the government doesn't negotiate for lower prices is when they cover seniors for prescription drugs in Medicare. That's right: the drug companies set the prices, and the federal government can't do anything about it. We need to take this Republican Medicare plan, scrap it, and start over.

How hard is that? But this other part is even worse:

Singer: Let's look at the primary, just briefly. This is the place where the blogosphere is very impassioned on one side or the other. Here's the difficult question: Why did it take so long to make the decision to jump in the race?

Brown: I was not working on any politician's timetable when I made the decision to run.

Yikes. Note that Singer, a blogger interviewing Brown for a blog, notes that bloggers are impassioned about his race. Presumably, a lot of the more influential of these impassioned bloggers will know that Sherrod Brown, a congressman since 1992, spent most of the 1980s as Ohio's Secretary of State. He's a politician. We know. We don't mind. But saying he's not working on "any politician's timetable" comes across as disingenuous. That's like me saying I'm not a law student: sure, I may have just discovered my college GPA is in the lowest quartile at NYU Law (this is true, and hilarious), but I can't go around like, "oh, I'm not one of those law students you hear about." Sorry cuz, you're a lawyer. I mean, politician.

(On the side note of the actual question, further in the interview he answers the question of why he took so long to get into the race, but he really screwed that up too. He said he wouldn't run, then Paul Hackett jumped in, and as things continued to worsen for Republicans, Brown jumped in. Come on, man.)

So that's me and message. Figure out what's important to people, phrase it well, and keep hitting it. I like to think it's just me, and Democrats aren't this bad, and Republicans aren't much better, but I suspect it's really this bad.