Over at the National Review, I just caught a preview of what I'm sure will be a Republican campaign platform for 2008. It's an article titled "The Democratic War Against Prosperity."
Instantly, I thought: uh-oh, here's another right-wing "war" meme. The war on drugs. The war on terror. The war on Christmas. The war on _______. These simplistic, jingoistic knee-jerk talking points always gain traction, regardless of their actual content or lack thereof, precisely because they are so simplistic. It's an all-purpose four-word ideological slogan that triggers an automatic Pavlovian response: "There's a war on - grab yer guns!"
We've seen it before, and Democrats need to prepare for it again. I expect a new salvo of "war" rhetoric to be unleashed in the 2008 campaign. It's already been attempted on Edwards - "class envy", anyone?
[Here's the link to the article if you really want to patronize their site]
The subheading of the article sums it up:
The latest salvo from the left includes tax penalties on successful investors and entrepreneurs.
Oh, you can hear the pitiful cries and whimpering already, can't you? "Those Commies - uh, Democrats - are attacking us with 'salvos' of their 'war' on 'success' and 'prosperity'!" (whose prosperity is a different story).
Democrats as usual have been weak and ineffective in countering this kind of rhetoric. Wishy-washy comebacks like "everyone should pay their fair share" are a losing position against the red-blooded patriotic fervor of a "war on prosperity."
We need to re-frame this debate NOW before Republicans cement another talking point. Obviously, this rhetoric will be non-stop on Fox News for months on end during the campaign season. Get ready.
So what is the Democratic repsonse to this kind of propaganda?
Democrats in Congress and on the presidential trail are intensifying their high-tax war against prosperity and the so-called rich. Their latest salvo includes more tax penalties on successful investors and entrepreneurs, such as a proposed 4.3 percent surtax on high-income earners and a tax assault on the private-equity buyout industry.
I won't force you to suffer through the rest of this "poor suffering rich folks" rhetoric; you get the point. You've seen it before, and it won't go away. (Ironically, for all the right's denunciation of the left's supposed "victim politics," they sure are happy to play victims themselves when it comes to taxes.)
So, here is a quick list of the key phrases from that article which we can expect to hear from the right in the coming campaign:
- War Against Prosperity
- penalties on success
- tax penalties
- high-tax war
- the so-called rich
- tax assault
- taking aim at
- risk-taking (aka investment profits)
- this is just the start
- class envy
- the era of globalization
- labor unions as villains
- low-tax Reaganomics as religious movement
- flat-rate tax as universal savior
- tax hikes (aka rolling back tax cuts for the rich)
All right, so how do we frame fairness and progressive taxation in a non-wimpy, populist, campaign-winning way? A war is on - and we need to win!