Back to Gaffer's Variety.
Gaffer Variety:
More Notes For Hillary 009:
By Willie Gaffer:
October 10, 2005:
Now, let us get to the campaign organization. You will need to use the party machinery to win the nomination, but to get there you must win the grass roots struggle. You must demonstrate formidable support before they will let you in. Therefore it is clear you need an organization that is not party dependent. You must build that yourself. You cannot depend on the party to do that for you. Your people must be loyal to you and your philosophy, not to the party. You need people all over the country who are dedicated to good government. These people must become the core of your team. The people you need will not be political celebrities. They may be celebrities, but they are the busy local builders and doers who are active in their communities. They can gather support because their neighbors know them and trust them. You must travel around the country and talk to these people in small groups.
Never mind the mass rallies. These are just noisy events that don't propagate the philosophy or convince the people. Don't follow the media. Let the media follow you as you go where the grass root supporters are. Talk to the people. Don't pretend to talk to them while you are really talking for the media. Don't ever talk for the media. That will be transparent as hell to any thoughtful people. In recruiting people for your team you could do worse than to solicit the help of Dave Bing of Detroit and others like him. Once they decide to believe you and join your effort they will go to the wall for you. Your job is to make them believe you. You don't do that with BS and rhetoric. They are amateurs to be sure, but they are smart and dedicated. They will see through BS in a minute. You must be straight with them.
Your major recruiting and organizational problem comes from political history. Two bit attorneys have turned politics into a filthy business. As a result the truly great people avoid it. For them, getting into politics would be like exposing themselves to plague. Since the really good Americans are not in politics you will have to work to get them in. You will have to raise politics to their level.
Perhaps you have not had time to notice the really great people of American philosophy like Maslow, Rogers, and Joseph Campbell. As a result you may not know what your real duty is. The people are not super articulate. They cannot tell you what they need, but you should know. Yet, it is possible you do not understand what the people really want and need. Whatever they say, what they really want is someone who will restore the national ethos. The rules that a culture lives by no longer exist for us. The people desperately need a leadership with a solid ethic to support and guide them toward a sense of worth and wholeness. We lost our sense of worth when we lost our ethic. It is past time to restore it.
To get the people with you, you must follow some simple campaign rules. First, stay out of the gutter. Kerry forfeited a large number of thoughtful voters when he ignored that rule. Leave the gutter to George or his successor. Second, do not attack the current administration. Do not point out their errors. The people will figure that out if you state your position clearly. Stay with your program. Do not get suckered into politicking in the gutter. Do nothing negative. Third, when they lie about you, as they surely will, do not retaliate, simply set the record straight by stating your position clearly.
Now we can look at some remaining issues .For this, we can define a fringe issue as one which affects a small number of citizens. We cannot give these fringe issues the same degree of attention we allot to the top issues. It is sufficient to take moderate positions on them. What makes some of these issues seem much more important than they are, are the fundamentalist religious crazies who muscle into situations where they have no legitimate business. Gay rights is one such area. Abortion is another. These are really fringe issues because they only affect a small number of people. The thing you must know about those crazies who muscle in is, if they vote at all they will vote republican. They have no other choice. You should waste no time trying to appease these fools because their votes are not yours to win under any circumstances. You must concentrate your energy on the people who have a mind to make up. On the fringe issues, simply answer the questions with moderate positions.
For example, you can and should support a woman's right to choose. You can also support abortion in cases of rape or when the mother's life is at risk, but you should not support abortions of convenience (frivolous abortions) at government expense. There are consequences to careless behavior. It is not the function of government to protect people against carelessness. This is all you ever need to say on this issue. No matter how many times you are challenged on this, you can just give the same answer.
It's the same for gay rights. Homosexuals do not control the world. They are an extreme minority. They sound bigger that they are because they are very noisy as are the religious zealots who oppose them. You need pander to neither of these nut groups. It is sufficient to advocate gay civil unions for legal purpose. You need not support gay marriage, nor should you condemn gays.
Another issue that is not a top five, but is big and can win a lot of support is the idea of portable pensions. We need a portable pension plan for all workers that belongs to the workers and cannot be stolen by corporate criminals. We also need to imprison some people who have stolen pension funds. The federal government cannot carry the entire burden of covering default pensions. The corporations must be made responsible. I will write more about this later to detail this plan. For now, it is sufficient to propose the idea.
There are, of course, many other issues that come up. You cannot, nor should you try to, deal with all of these in your campaign. For now, it is sufficient to express the ideas. For example, we need to deal with the proliferation of guns in our culture. It's a supporting cause of violent crime. Also, you will need a special prosecutor under the attorney general to bust corporate crooks. It's not different than any other organized crime and should be so treated. For corporate executives, ignorance is no excuse. If they did not know criminal activity was going on, they were not doing their jobs. They should have known. They were paid big bucks to know what was going on. In addition, we really need a betrayal of trust (BOT) law. This would treble the penalty for people in positions of public trust who commit crimes.
We need a fraudulent threat law. People who call in phony bomb threats or mail powder that looks like anthrax should be treated just as though they had actually carried out the crime. These frauds are felonies not pranks. We must consider the cost to the community of these thing and make laws that punish them accordingly. We must acknowledge that health care costs are rising due in part to unethical behavior on the part of insurance companies. It is time to seek solutions for this.
As the campaign progresses, you may want to throw in a surprise emotional issue to bedevil your opponents. For that, you may want to consider a promise to restore the freedom of the media to report without fear of government reprisal. Offer to sponsor a law that will allow a reporter to protect their confidential sources. The recent internment of Judith Miller surely demonstrates this seriousness of the need for such a law.
Finally, you could do worse than Barack Obama for a running
mate. Give it serious consideration. This guy is articulate and
convincing in the public forum.
Back to Gaffer's Variety.
|
|
|
|