Wampum

Bad Ideas, Good Politics

Nick Confessore at Tapped notes that the Democrats fail to efectively use wedge issues:

Question: Where were the Democratic wedge issues? Where were the ballot initiatives in Nevada, Oregon, Ohio, and Florida -- home to millions of senior citizens looking down the barrel of the Alzheimer's gun -- legalizing stem-cell research? (California was already in the bag, folks.) What I'm getting at is what appears to be a congenital Democratic inability to think several moves ahead and plant political traps and wedges for the other team, something the Republican Party is very good at doing to Democrats.

Atrios goes a bit further and calls for very popular bad ideas:

Republicans have always been good at coming up with really bad ideas which are very popular with voters (say, term limits), and making it a central campaign issue. Most of these things never actually become law, because they're actually really horrible, but they're useful for scoring points.

I think the Democrats need to come up with a few of these. Get creative...

I think that the GOP is vulnerable on issues related to the way they run the House. Their symbiotic relationship to corporate lobbyists, the arrogance with which the leadership pushes legislation through without any input from the other members, and the violation of procedural rules all suggest a degree of hubris that could be exploited. Remember what the GOP circa 1994 did with the issue of the House bank?

The following ideas are not intended to be good policy. They are just a way to raise the profile of various issues related to the way the GOP runs the House.

One idea is to require each Congressman to sign a statement, under oath, declaring that he or she has read and understands the contents of any bill on which he or she casts a vote. That is a very bad idea that would never be implemented but does not sound bad. It might provide opportunities to ridicule the GOP.

A similar idea is to require that each Congressman certify, under oath, that he or she believes that any earmarked appropriation is in the best interest of the country as a whole and that the benefits of such spending is worth the money.

Perhaps we should require each Congressman post on the net a disclosure of every contact with any registered lobbyist. The disclosure would include the subject matter of the contact, the people present, the time and place of the contact, as well as the number of martinis consumed.

Any thoughts?

Posted by Dwight Meredith at November 3, 2004 07:59 PM | TrackBack