Republican Rhetoric is Too Good

One of the toughest things about being a Democrat is that the Republican values sound really neat -- individual liberty! personal responsibility! a small government! low taxes! not much bureaucracy! entrepreneurial spirit!

We doubt that any Republican with a high IQ, and there are some, actually believes that their party really works for those values.

Yet they sound really attractive. So here's what young Democrats need to do -- build up a habit of CHALLENGING it whenever Republicans ooze about "personal responsibility" and all the others. If you get into an argument that consists mostly of you chanting some Democratic values and their chanting the Republican ones, you won't win more than 50% of the time. Nowadays, messages like "low taxes" are so popular that you probably won't even win 50%.

So you have to move the arguments from ABSTRACT VALUES to ACTUAL FACTS.

What are some actual facts? Get started with these....

• Republicans have fought against individual liberty all along, by favoring spying on our own citizens, authorizing wiretaps, and attempting to curtail the First Amendment

• Republicans have never actually worked for a small government; even under popular Ronald Reagan for eight years, government spending grew faster than GDP

• Republicans obviously don't believe in personal responsibility or they would stop supporting giveaways of federal land to timber companies, range land to large ranches, water to large irrigators, mines to large mining corporations, and airwaves to large broadcasters. These are our nation's biggest welfare payments. (When you walk around in the U.S. Capitol, you see some lobbyists but guess what? None of the lobbyists are hired by poor urban mothers on welfare; they're hired by rich fatcats on multimillion dollar welfare.)

• If Republicans really wanted to cut bureaucracy, why didn't they support Al Gore's "reinventing government" initiative wholeheartedly?

• If Republicans really want low taxes, then why haven't they proposed a cut in the payroll tax (Social Security and Medicare), or moved to boost the zero bracket (the amount you can earn before taxes start) of the federal income tax? No, the tax cut proposals you see from Republicans aren't made for the purpose of cutting taxes for America, they're just for the purpose of cutting taxes for Republicans.

• The entrepreneurial spirit in America goes beyond party boundaries. Most entrepreneurs in the U.S. are small businesses, not huge corporations. Republicans spend their time and effort on clunky old elephantine corporations and pretend that those are entrepreneurial, when in truth the entrepreneurial leadership has always come from the small ones. If Republicans were serious about rewarding inventiveness, let them try to name any incentive program that's even half as big as their welfare handout program to multi-billion dollar mining companies.

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