Ask any Republican, and they’ll tell you that those principles are essentially the core of their party’s message. Those are the ones that are on every Republican’s list. Of course, there are factions within the party that will put other things on the list:

There are the strict constitutionalists that will talk about limiting government exclusively to constitutionally prescribed responsibilities.

There are libertarian-leaning Republicans holding back against infringement, but also opposed generally to governmental obligations (social programs). They don’t want “my tax money” going to pay for benefits for “other people”.

Then there are the Fundamentalist Christian Republicans, who operate under a delusion that the United States was “founded on Christian beliefs” ignoring the historical fact that most of those we call “founding fathers” were actually Deist. These wedge issue voters get a lot of voice within the party, but most of their actual positions are minority views even within their own party, and certainly across the nation as a whole.

But the average rank and file folks who have identified with the Republican Party for decades haven’t given it that much thought. They ascribe to a much simpler list of priorities:

Lower taxes, smaller government and a strong national defense.

It’s simple, really. Who can argue with those principles? Democrats should know there is nothing wrong with those ideas. What’s wrong is the widely held view that those ideas are somehow exclusively Republican.

When Republican’s say they are for lower taxes, they imply that Democrats are for taking more of your money and wasting it. Frankly, I don’t know any Democrats who are for wasting money.

Did you say you were for smaller government? If that means that ineffective programs should be replaced or eliminated or that redundant layers of bureaucracy should be streamlined, well, I can’t name any Democrats that would object. Individual politicians may have fallen into the ‘pork for votes’ trap, but nobody is really for it, are they?

A strong National Defense? I can’t remember the name of the Democrat who ran on a platform of weak defense, can you?

It’s time for average Americans to wake up to the idea that if they really want lower taxes and more efficient government, they ought to support a party that believes in being good at governing! The Republican power structure is currently in the hands of ideologues that don’t believe government is capable of working. Why would you hire someone to do a job they believe cannot be done?

In pursuit of lower taxes, half the nation votes against their own economic interest over and over again. We need to conflate the idea of lower taxes with the idea of using the power of government to create an economic climate that supports the financial interests of the general population. We need to stop talking about taxes as a burden. They are not penalties or fines. They are dues; they are our collective investment that benefits society and creates infrastructure. If we do it right, there is a return on that investment far beyond what we can provide for ourselves individually.

If you line up all your money, the dollars nearer to the zero end of the scale are spent on basic necessities: food, clothing and shelter. The dollars closer to the infinity end of the scale are spent either on luxuries or investment. It stands to reason that if you barely have enough money for the basic necessities part of the scale that your rate of dues assessment should be lower than if you are blessed to have a surplus of discretionary capital available for investment. Historically, this country has been the most abundant when the tax rates have been the most progressive. Reducing the tax rates of the upper end of the economic scale doesn’t put more capital into the economy. It sucks it out. Wealth in the hands of a few rich individuals doesn’t ‘trickle down’, but a little more abundance in the budgets of the general population bubbles up generously.

It’s also time to conflate the ideas of smaller government with lobbying and ethics reform as well as campaign finance reform and voting rights protection. Nothing is as wasteful as theft. When you decrease the power of the individual voter and increase the influence of lobbyists, you get results like laws that insure that the highest prices are paid for pharmaceuticals or loosened regulations that allow no-bid contracts awarded for slip-shod performance. You get ton-load pallets of missing money.

And it’s finally time to stop giving a pass to the miserable defense record of the current and last several Republican administrations. If you really are interested in a strong defense, try active, principled diplomacy that strives to be the best example to the world. Try supporting G.I. benefits which properly repay our returning veterans and thereby make the choice of a military career more attractive. Try avoiding inflammatory and immoral behavior that gives recruiting advantages to our mortal enemies. Maybe even try not committing war crimes!

It’s time to be vocal and proud of these Democratic Party principles:

Lower taxes for those who need it, responsible contribution from those who are able to pay it and an economic environment that encourages financial growth.

Streamlined and efficient government with effective oversight and well crafted programs that open up opportunities for those who aspire to improve their lives.

State of the art military hardware, the best protection equipment for our troops, attractive benefits for our enlisted personnel, and a principled diplomatic stance that strives to resolve disputes before they result in armed conflict.

Strings Attached

I don’t expect the hope we have placed in our new President Elect to be proved wrong. This man is clearly a brilliant statesman. I fully expect his skills in governing to match his extraordinary skills as a campaigner. He proved his transcendent wisdom in the masterful campaign he ran. We have watched previous candidates fail to answer the mud of manufactured accusations and leave the uninformed electorate with the impression that we had no answer. We’ve watched other candidates get right down into the slime of gutter politics answering those charges hurled at them but getting caught in the distraction of back and forth name calling and leaving undecided voters with an intense desire for a legitimate “none of the above” option on the ballot.

No, Barack Obama found the formula. He simply operated on a different political wavelength. He answered whatever charges the McCain/Palin campaign came up with by exposing them as irrelevant and each time delivered a powerful and inspirational flood of high minded ideals which left the petty attacks squirming in their own soiled diaper. The wisdom he portrayed in creating and managing a comprehensive political ground game set a new standard for future campaigns. His fund raising and get out the vote drive were the best in history and they simply overwhelmed the competition.

But while we are basking in our new hard fought position of governing strength we should not fail to anticipate the next threat from the vanquished, but still entrenched greed class. Make no mistake – they don’t think the war is over. They see this as one battle in a war for wealth that never ends. They’ll sit in a different spot during the oncoming two or four year cycle and plan their countering strategy for the next offensive.

There was an announced 1% increase in counted voter turnout in this presidential election. Do you remember the long lines wrapped around early voting locations for several weeks prior to Election Day? Didn’t those lines look like a little more than a 1% increase to you? There were over 6,000,000 provisional ballots cast nationwide. Provisional ballots that were handed to disenfranchised voters as a means of getting them to stop complaining and go home with the false idea that they had cast a vote which would count for something. Many anticipated the inconvenience of a huge increase in voter turnout and chose to cast absentee ballots. But once those ballots were mailed, where did they go? In the words of Greg Palast (see www.GregPalast.com ), “I can tell you that officially, three-fourths of a million absentee ballots were never counted last time, on the weakest of technical excuses.” Don’t be fooled into thinking this time was different.

Stop for a moment and imagine what the size of the tsunami would have been had every citizen’s right to vote had been honored. Imagine the totals if every vote cast been properly counted. Imagine the extra Senate seats; imagine the additional congressional representation for change. Lost in the euphoria of the Democratic win was a hidden truth: the voter suppression effort and vote stealing perpetrations were not thwarted. They were overwhelmed. We owe our top of the ticket victory to the fact that even traditionally Republican leaning independents went for Obama. The Reagan Democrats became Obamicans. The Debold party didn’t see it coming. Next time they will be ready.

So now that we’ve got it, what should we do with it? I do not intend to take anything away from the importance of seizing the moment to put forth a progressive policy agenda that recoups the economic strength of the middle class and rights the wrongs of the dark post-Reagan decades. But I do see an unhealed Achilles heal lurking in the wings. In this writer’s opinion the first order of business of the new Democratic majority should be to set forth a voter protection agenda that contains elements such as legislation that prohibits private company ownership of voting hardware and software. We need to make it a federal crime for State attorneys general to purge voting rolls. We need to pursue and prosecute originators of false date /place change notifications. We need to require States to submit detailed workable plans to increase vote capture capacity in every single precinct capable of accommodating every single voter without inconvenience. There needs to be harsh and devastating penalties for any State’s failure to put realistic vote capture processes into immediate effect. And we need to, once and for all, declare that Election Day is to be a national holiday requiring the closure of all non-critical businesses and requiring short work shift voting opportunity plans for workers in critical businesses such as emergency rooms and pharmacies.

We also need to go back to enforcing the Sherman Anti-Trust act especially as it applies to the Media. Information is power and we have allowed that power to fall into the hands of five corporations whose primary specialty is the manufacture of weapons of mass destruction. The “Fairness Doctrine” is not the answer – diversification of sources of information is. Censorship never works – sunlight is the best disinfectant. We also need to protect the internet from thinly disguised attempts to corral its tremendous informational power into the pens of a few huge corporations. The internet needs to remain the modern world’s free marketplace of ideas.

The grass roots ground game of the internet was one of the strengths of the Obama campaign. But now that he has been elected, we aren’t going to disappear. We were united in the single purpose of regime change in America, but we no longer have that as a unifying focus. In the short term that task has been accomplished. Most of us probably feel that our next task is to hold our representatives accountable for the progressive agenda we envisioned as we worked so hard to get them elected. Many of us will persist in demanding comprehensive health care reform which will be undone by the returning neo-cons of the next political pendulum swing. Many of us will focus on economic reform which will eventually be neutered under the returning Republicans of some future cycle. Many of us will demand an end to the illegal occupations of our military only to be frightened again into supporting a future attack on some mischaracterized world threat.

I feel strongly that we must place first things first and use our collective voice while we still have the ability to be heard to demand that we institute an election process that is worthy of our reputation as the world’s leading democracy. We need to pair that effort with strong and permanent support for free and unfettered access to the availability of information and freedom of expression which is the lifeblood of a free people. These are the one-two punch that can deal the knock out blow to the brutish thug who is the champion of the economic aristocracy as he rises off the mat for the next round.

Strings Attached