Burnt Orange Report

Have no fear, Nate is here

By Nathan Nance

Guest post from Nate Nance

I just wrote a comment in Jim's post on redistricting in California. The basic gist was that we're the minority party. We have no power under the Republicans in Congress. What are we so afraid of?

The idea that somehow we can have some impact if we're nicer to the GOP, or if we have candidates that they can't possibly object to or if we reach out in a bipartisan manner, I think all of that is just pointless. We're the minority party, we should understand an accept it. But we don't have to kowtow to the Republicans because of it. Americans like an underdog story, that's us. We need partisanship.

I'm using kind of an interesting model for this idea. I'm using the Republicans themselves. The Newt Gingrich Revolution in 1993 should be our game plan on this. The GOP was in the minority, did they beg to be let into conference committees? No. They attacked attacked attacked. Relentlessly. We might decry it, but it is effective.

Kevin Drum has a post on this very thing where he references Bill Kristol from 1993:

Bill Kristol’s famous strategy memos [urged] Republicans to reject any and all health care proposals from the White House “sight unseen.”....Kristol penned these memos as head of the Project for a Republican Majority, launched in November 1993 to “frame a new Republicanism by challenging not just the particulars of big-government policies, but their very premises and purposes.”

Kristol warned of the political and ideological repercussions of a successfully passed health care bill — it would revive the Democrats’ reputation as “the generous protector of middle-class interests” and “relegitimize middle-class dependence for ‘security’ on government spending and regulation” — but he also promised that a successful and total defeat of Clinton’s plan, if handled in the correct way by the Republicans, would mark “a watershed in the resurgence of a newly bold and principled Republican politics.”

We've got to be willing to embrace crazy, bold new ideas. The old ones don't work. People can scream all they want that we'll lose elections, but I've got news for them. We're losing elections now. We are at the point that we can say or do anything and we can't go much lower. Somewhere out there is someone with a bright idea we can embrace that will make us win, though.

Whether it is non-partisan redistricting schemes or universal health care or whatever, we can't be the old party on this. Things have got to change in a big way or nothing is going to change. I don't know about you, but I would rather have a discussion about how to keep power 4 years from now. That's going to take a big change and the first step has to start right here, right now.

This is a guest post from Nathan Nance. Nate is a sports/news clerk at the Waco Tribune-Herald and writer editor of Common Sense a Texas-based Democratic Web log. He can be reached at nate_nance@yahoo.com.