It’s Ideas, Not Money, That’s The Real Mother’s Milk of Politics
Sometimes a simple phrase sticks in politicians’ minds like duct tape and guides their actions no matter how misguided the phrase or how intrinsically destructive. Such a phrase is Tip O’Neill’s famous throwaway line that “money is the mother’s milk of politics,” which suggests that money is what always separates winners from losers, and thus what always must shape policy decisions.
That shouldn’t be true. In fact, it usually isn’t. And when it is, it nourishes sickly offspring.
What generally wins elections is ideas. They need not be new ones. They can be retreads. They need not even be good ideas. As we’re seeing in Washington these days, nothing succeeds on national politics like bad ideas whose time has come.
So what do progressives need to do to gain back power? Not power in this coming election cycle, of course, because the Democrats are locked into a Clinton dance with Wall Street and big donors generally that Obama has adopted as his own two-step. So forget 2012 as a time to bring back or unveil truly progressive ideas via the medium of the Democratic Party.
Rather, this is a time for reflection. A time when old goals must be melded with new realities. When a new packet of ideas that collectively form a vision has to be created — ideas and a vision that will be enforced with a Tea Party-like single mindedness at a later date.
I’m looking for previews to crop up in 2012, with a full blossoming in 2014. Now we need to focus on slowing the retreat, Consolidate. Put down roots for a major offensive by a reanimated progressive left in 2014 elections. At which time the spineless Moderate Democrat feeders on big bucks mother’s milk will knuckle under or be swept unceremoniously into their post-public service employments.
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2 Responses to “It’s Ideas, Not Money, That’s The Real Mother’s Milk of Politics”
Wow, someone needs to drink more coffee in the morning and wake up.
Mike, you appear to be in a dream state. Ideas are not the mother’s milk of politics. It’s all about showmanship, sound bites, collecting constituents, appeasing demographics, and putting together a story that’s better than your opponents.
Our political system hasn’t been based on ideas for years and years.
Ideas are indeed at the core, but –
Michael Silverstein wrote:
(Ignoring the far-left whining about the “betraying” Dems and the slander about the Tea Party, i.e., the US public opposition to wretched excess in Washington)
To gain back power, other than to hope for disaster by the GOP sometime in the future, you have to face reality, which by definition means scrapping much of your “progressive” dreams and realizing that it’s not the 1960s any longer.
Otherwise, you’re in even more trouble in the 2020s, when in addition to tough times in many other ways, it also will be the time when the money runs out for Washington as well as the states to do much of what “progressives” and other lefties want, and it’s a time for less money, setting priorities and ending much of what the feds do, and what the state and local governments do as well, when the dream-like fun and wishes or a pale imitation will be curtailed even more than the public wants it done today.