Reply #23: It's the left's version of 'policies rammed down our throats'

[anigbrowl]

Those who dislike Obama picked up on it during the primaries (from Jeremiah Wright, if I recall) and have been using it ever since. This is not to say that its use is limited to Obama's primary opponents, it has caught on with others in the meantime.

I don't care for this victimology either, no matter what part of the political spectrum it comes from. Ultimately, it's a loser strategy which marks the complainer as a failure - whether it's the GOP on economic policies or a constituency on the left not getting what it had hoped for.

Political promises have no value, that's why they are broken so often. A promise is not a contract. The way to get results as a political activist is to hold out for a commit that will have to be defended. If you don't get a specific policy that a candidate sticks to even after being attacked by the opposition, then you got nothing. The best way to get such a policy commitment is to give the candidate a way to sell it to the electorate as a net gain for the country in general. Moral arguments and the like are generally only as good as the popularity of the assumptions they rest on.

So a policy of 'Do X because it's the right thing to do' is more likely to fail - if we haven't done X yet, it's quite possible that a large part, perhaps even a majority, does not actually believe in X. If that is the case then you're stuck, because making a good argument requires agreement about the underlying facts. It's more effictive to focus on 'why X will make us all better off' even if that is not too important to you as an advocate.