I recently recieved in my e-mail inbox an awful idea saying that supporters of President Obama should all honk at each other to show their support. Unlike whoever came up with that idea, I take my support of President Obama very seriously. So I wanted to offer some thoughts in the form of a blog on what things will actually help President Obama win reellection in 2012.
First, I'm not sure this healthcare thing is very politically good for us anymore. I'd like to see a public option as much as anyone, but I'd also like to see a reellection in 2012. What vote are we getting with healthcare that we need? What demographic are we going after with this? It might sound cruel, but it's something that we need to think about as a political party.
Granted, this is still incredibly early in President Obama's first term. We could be going after anything and the republicans would be fighting it, that's the nature of the two party system. In that way, it's a spectacular issue to persue right now, simply because it's so early that many of the arguments about it will be forgotten by election time. But I worry about the direction that this continued persuit of a single issue is taking the opposition.
Why are we Democrats always the one that get hated by the working class? This whole healthcare thing benefits the working class, but they hate it because the Republicans have managed to market to them better than we have. We democrats also are always supporting limits on government and the freedom of speech, yet we get called big government supporters and communists. It has always been the Republican party that supports limiting the freedom of speech. It has always been the Republican party that has been most infavor of communist-like control of government.
Eventually, we have to lose ground to the Republicans, that's simply how the two party system works. But we don't need to do it now over such rediculas issues. We need to somehow reverse the arguments the Republicans use against us, to point how they are much more guilty of these things than we are. We need to tell people that Republicans want to take away your freedom, and that Republicans want the federal government to be strong and that we've always supported limits. Republicans would like to hide the working of government from us, but we Democrats have always supported the freedom of the press.
Republicans want nothing but big bank fat cats, stuffing their wallets while the rest of us almost fell into recession had it not been for President Obama.
Lastly, we need vastly more art. Last election, we had all these cool posters with single words like "Hope" and "Change". Granted, we might not be able to use those same words again, but we found those words rather easily by polling during the primaries. If we do another poll similar to the last we did, perhaps even on the same people, we could find a new list of words. Maybe things like "Freedom" "Jobs" "Opportunity" "Education", I have no idea, we need to poll to find out.
Then we need some nifty modern artist that all the kids like to do a few nice looking posters for us. Certainly, we must have enough funding to make this happen, after all artists sometimes support political movements for free. And even when they don't, they don't charge as much as most professions.
