The Democrats nationwide are holding a pair of sevens with a king high.\u00a0 In Minnesota, the DFL’s holding a couple of four and nothing much more.<\/p>\n
As they say in law school (or so I’m told) if the facts are against you, argue the law.\u00a0 If the law is against you, argue facts.\u00a0 If both are against you, argue like hell.<\/p>\n
The climate is against the Dems (suspect polling about “voters wanting centrism” notwithstanding).\u00a0 They just lost big in one of the most epic two-year turnarounds in electoral history.\u00a0 They stand, quite possibly (if the GOP doesn’t screw up) to lose the Senate in 2012, and maybe the Presidency to boot (although it’s way too early to even feel to optimistic yet; we have a ways to go). They are gathered behind a very weak president whose primary platform has been “I’m not George W. Bush”, yet whose only successful policies were cribbed from his predecessor.<\/p>\n
The facts – the electorate – are against them.\u00a0 The “law” – time, really, in the form of the a huge number of Senators coming up for re-election in 2012 – is against them.<\/p>\n
So they’re going to argue like hell.<\/p>\n
And at this, the Dems have some huge advantages; a compliant and in-the-bag media, a huge public class, and masses of voters, especially in big cities, who are dependent on government either as employees or clients.<\/p>\n
My prediction:\u00a0 Look for the Dems, nationwide and in Minnesota, to start pushing a series of memes – I’ve been calling them “chanting points” on this blog, and having a lot of fun with it – to try to give the media and their sound-bite-addled acolytes something to chant.<\/p>\n
Here are my predictions:<\/p>\n
“Tea Baggers Are Teh Crazee”<\/strong>:\u00a0 That one’s already started; Jerry Nadler’s outburst yesterday (accompanied by some too-perfectly-timed media appearances by the likes of Dahlia Lithwick) on the “Fetishization of the Constitution” is a part of this; trying to frame constitutional originalism as some form of snake handling.\u00a0 Watch for this meme to work its way down through Media Matters and the leftyblogs (pardon the redundancy), through Jon Stewart and the lefty chattering classes (ibid), and countless editorial pages.\u00a0 Because actually showing that originalism actually is a pseudo-religious fetish isn’t important; creating the impression is.<\/p>\n “Disagreement Equals Disintegration”<\/strong>: Look for any disagreement among the conservative bloc – which is not a bloc, but a coalition of social and fiscal conservatives and newly-minted libertarians – to be portrayed as “the disintegration of the Tea Party”.\u00a0 Look for rumors of the disintegration of the Tea Party to crash ashore about Wednesday of every news week.\u00a0\u00a0 Because the disintegration isn’t important; creating the impression that it is, is.<\/p>\n “There Is a Huge, Throbbing Center Out there”<\/strong>:\u00a0 We saw a dress rehearsal of this in Minnesota, where the media set up Tom Horner as a viable “centrist Republican”, notwithstanding the fact that his policies fit in better as a moderate DFLer.\u00a0 All through the summer, the DFL and media (PTR) tried to put purple lipstick on the blue pig.\u00a0 Did Horner take 8,000 votes away from Emmer?\u00a0 We will never know – but the tactic is the important part.\u00a0 We’re seeing this already; the very days the new US House and Minnesota Legislature were sworn in, the media trumpeted polls of dubious geneology claiming the American People were begging for more centrism.\u00a0 And you know how polls work these days<\/a>.<\/p>\n More?<\/p>\n Discuss.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Democrats nationwide are holding a pair of sevens with a king high.\u00a0 In Minnesota, the DFL’s holding a couple of four and nothing much more. As they say in law school (or so I’m told) if the facts are against you, argue the law.\u00a0 If the law is against you, argue facts.\u00a0 If both […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[63,4,51],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17069","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-lefty-alt-media","category-media","category-liberal-tyranny"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17069","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17069"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17069\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17070,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17069\/revisions\/17070"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17069"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17069"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17069"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}