And yet another "Five Lessons"...

There has been a lot of hay made in the blogoshpere about everyones' "five lessons" from the recent election of Scott Brown. So, herewith my "Five Lessons":

1) Winning an election should not be automatically construed as an endorsement of your agenda.

This was a mistake Democrats made. It's also a mistake Republicans eventually made with respect to the rout of Democrats in 1994 that led to their own rout in 2006 and 2008. Democrats beat out Republicans in 2006 and 2008 and then proceeded to assume this was an endorsement of liberal Democratic ideology and then worked to impose their liberal agenda. What is probably closer to reality is that the voters voted against Republicans in repudiation of their conservative agenda. And Democrats only won because they were the benefactors of that repudiation. And now voters are sending the message to Democrats, "we didn't elect you as an endorsement to pursue a liberal agenda, we elected you to stop Republicans from pursuing a conservative agenda."

2) Everything involving people is represented by the classic "bell curve."

This is especially true when it comes to socio-political views. The vast majority of voters are somewhere in the middle. If you get voted out of office, it's probably because you are on one side or the other of the bump in the middle and have pissed off that large number of people in that bump in the middle. When you are sitting out there on the lip of the bell curve and this is why you got kicked to the curb, it makes absolutely no sense to move further out on the lip as a strategy to regain voter favor. Even if those out on the lip think you are too far toward the center and vote against you as a result, those people who might now vote for you are far fewer in number than those who will now vote against you by shifting away from the center. And yet surprisingly, or perhaps not so surprisingly, some of the Democratic demagogues are proposing doing exactly this: if people voted against us because we weren't extreme enough the answer is to become even more extreme. Well, good luck with that. If you think a lot of people voted against you before, wait and see how many vote against you after you move even farther afield.

Consider these two examples. The last time Joe Lieberman ran as a Democrat, the Democrats decreed that Joe Lieberman, the incumbent at the time, was not liberal enough to suit the Democratic demagogues, so they selected a more liberal candidate to run for the Democratic party. Joe Lieberman then ran as an independent and beat the more liberal Democrat. Recently in a race for a New York senator, two candidates were vying for the Republican nomination. The candidate who was more moderate and in all likelihood would have won had he been nominated, was ousted by the right wing demagogues in favor of the more extremely conservative candidate. Needless to say, the Democrat won. If your seat is in jeopardy, moving farther from the middle in order to "recapture your 'base'" is a "strategy" that is mathematically certain to fail.

In the end, if your candidate is to win, he must be voted for by a majority of the entire voting public, not just your "base." It does no good to "energize your base" if in the process you alienate an even larger portion of the general public. Alienating the major portion of the population in the big fat middle of the bell curve is not the path to victory but rather to defeat.

Apropos of points 1 and 2, I came across a posting on a message board where the poster stated that the voters are schizophrenic because they first voted for Democrats in 2006 and 2008 and then have been voting against them of late. Of course the flaw is that logic is the assumption that they voted _for_ Democrats in 2006 and 2008 more so than as Democrats being the benefactor of deservedly voting against Republicans. It is not schizophrenic to repudiate Republican ideological idiocy on the right in 2006 and 2008 and then repudiate Democratic ideological idiocy on the left now when all along what you wanted was the middle.

3) Solve the problems people want you to solve, not the problems you want to solve.

Too many Democrats were so mono maniacally obsessed with addressing health care that they neglected the, literally, bread and butter issues that people are most concerned about today. I think many Democrats viewed "fixing" health care as a hallmark achievement for liberal ideology and desperately wanted that trophy to hang on the wall and they put that quest above the will of the people. Serving the will of the people and actually making American's lives better should not take a back seat to "big game trophy hunting," or worse yet, get left on the curb. I think too often, the "helping people" aspect of liberal ideology is less about actually helping people and more about making the acolytes feel good about themselves about having "done something to help the people" regardless of whether or not anybody is actually any better off or even worse off as a result. Health care took on this dimension. It was no longer about fixing health care, helping anyone, or about dealing with the problems people wanted fixed, it was all about the obsession with passing health care legislation so that they could have that trophy to hang on their wall, and damn the torpedoes. The problem is that, while many people want health care reform, it is moot when what they need or are worried about is keeping a roof over their head or putting food on the table. Its good to have good health care coverage, but having health care doesn't put a roof over your head or food on the table. "Great! I have health care but I lost my job, have nowhere to live, and nothing to eat!"

4) Nothing has to be solved as an all encompassing "comprehensive reform" colossus.

In fact, most things probably can't be solved as such. And this has as much to do with the fact that it is virtually impossible to get a committee of people to agree on anything that massive that the end result will actually do anything to make anything the least bit better. The problem and the task at hand to solve it are made unnecessarily so massive that it simply can't be addressed in any meaningful way. The saying goes: "How do you eat and elephant? One bite at a time." (I've addressed the "elephant" problem in a previous post) Politicians would do well to heed this wisdom rather than trying to eat the elephant all in one bite and choking to death on it as a result. Why is it so wrong to solve a problem by tackling all the smaller problems one at a time in bite sized tractable problems especially if the end result is a much better solution or even any solution as opposed to none at all?

5) Saying a thing doesn't make it so.

Democrats continually trumpeted that the people wanted health care reform and that they were going to solve it and make health care so wonderful and cheap and everyone was going to have it. Well, they were right that people wanted health care. But the people didn't want the train wreck that Democrats were pushing as "health care reform." They didn't want what was being pushed and they didn't buy that it was going to produce what Democrats proclaimed it would. Democrats kept on with their mantra of how their health care reform was going to do all of these wonderful things. But as people had time to look at the text of what was being proffered, it became more and more apparent the this colossus was not going to achieve even half of what Democrats were saying it would do, if it even did anything net positive at all. Now Democrats are saying they failed to get the message out. Actually I think they did succeed and that was their problem. As people had time to digest the colossus, they discovered that what Democrats were saying it would do and what the legislation would produce in actuality were two completely different things. People saw through the smoke screens and colossally flawed logic and understood it simply was not going to do even half of what Democrats were claiming and only going create more new colossal government spending. Democrats could say what they probably honestly believed it would do, but no amount of saying what they were saying can make the legislation do it in actuality. And when politicians focus on "deficit neutrality" rather than the cost to taxpayers and even try to hide the real cost behind the smoke screen of "deficit neutrality", rest assured, it's going to hit taxpayers hard. (I've already addressed how "deficit neutral" doesn't mean free in a previous post)

You can candy coat crap all you want but that doesn't make it not crap. You can build a car and go around saying it's going to go 200 MPH, but saying it all you want, no matter how earnestly and fervently believed, won't make it go that fast if it hasn't been crafted with the engineering that is required to accomplish that. You can put a horse in high heels and a ball gown, but that doesn't make it a ballroom dancer. You can paint racing stripes on a Pinto and put race slicks on it, but it's still not going to win a Formula One Grand Prix. So when people see that it's just a lawnmower engine on a plank with four wheels, and still just a horse, and still just a Pinto, don't be surprised when people don't believe your claims of 200 MPH, doing the Tango, and winning the race no matter how fervently you believe those claims yourself.

At the end of the day, any legislation has to be evaluated on the merit of what it actually accomplishes, not on fancy feel-good titles and flowery rhetoric. I even remember a time when it seemed that every piece of legislation coming out of politicians nether regions was touted as "for the children." As if saying "it's for the children" even when seemingly no children are involved is supposed to obviate any need to evaluate the legislation based on actual merit and efficacy. "I should support this without actually understanding what it really does because I know that whatever it does in the end has to be good when they tell me 'it's for the children.' How could you oppose anything that is 'for the children'?" You can say "it's for the children" all you want, but that doesn't mean that any children are actually going to be better of as a result. Only legislation crafted in view of pragmatism and reality can produce the desired result, not fancy titles and flowery rhetoric based in ideology and denial.