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It is less than six months until the US elections for President, House of Representatives,and one-third of the Senate.

A year ago, seeing the level of hate and vitriol against Obama from the ultra-right, and the paralysis of government, I was pretty convinced that the Republicans would win easily. Now, however, I think Obama will prevail, at least if the votes are counted accurately and the voters are allowed to vote (both of them BIG ifs, in the wake of anti-vote legislation and the near-unanimous adoption of vote-counting techniques that are entirely too easy to rig, as we saw in Florida in 2000 and Ohio in 2004).

What’s changed?

• The other candidates have been making very cogent arguments against Romney; the Republicans have given Obama plenty of ammunition.
• Romney himself is the most clueless major-party US presidential candidate I can remember, constantly putting his foot in his mouth, constantly shifting positions, and failing to convince pretty much anybody of his sincerity, his integrity, his ability to relate to common people, or even his basic competence. It’s almost as if he were coached by Dan Quayle and Sarah Palin.
• The Occupy (a/k/a 99%) movement has focused long-overdue attention on class issues, while Romney has cheerfully embraced his fellow one-percenters.
• The Republican Party as a whole, with Romney’s open support, has made it clear that their tent is not big enough to hold unemployed people, Latinos, women’s reproductive rights supporters, gays and lesbians, or students—or even moderate Republicans (just ask Senator Richard Lugar). Obama has opened his arms to these constituencies. If the Democrats can get all those folks to show up and vote, they win.
• It is painfully obvious that Washington’s political gridlock is the Republican Party’s doing. They’ve been dubbed “the party of no” for good reason. People are sick and tired of the constant obstructionism and of the specifically stated goal of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell: “Our top political priority is to deny President Obama a second term.” Not exactly an appropriate priority for a country still struggling with a deep recession, two major and several minor wars, crises in healthcare and education, and all the rest.
• Nobody likes a bunch of name-calling whining bullies. Instead of proposing actual solutions to our country’s problems, the Republicans have race-baited, religion-baited, called him a socialist (for goodness sake—Richard Nixon has a more progressive record!) and a Muslim, and all the rest of the ridiculous Big Lie nonsense.
• While Obama’s accomplishments are smaller in number and far more centrist than they need to be, he can point to some real strides: The economy is better, Osama Bin Laden is neutralized, Don’t Ask Don’t Tell s justifiably buried, two terrific Supreme Court Justices have been appointed (we need one more to replace one of the four on the extreme right), and something vaguely resembling healthcare reform actually got passed, where every other president since FDR failed.
• The right cannot attack Obama on the places he’s most vulnerable: personal liberty, an absurd faith in nuclear power, failure to keep his promises on renewable energy, and an inability to get us out of all these wars—because Obama’s positions on all these issues pretty much are the Republican positions.
• And finally, even if they totally forgot to do the necessary organizing to pass his agenda, Obama’s campaign knows a whole lot about social media and community organizing. This provided the edge in 2008, and could do so again if the Dems can convince young voters especially that they haven’t sold them out, and that the kind of change they voted for in ’08 may be difficult to achieve, but it would be impossible under Romney.

Still, the Democrats cannot and should not take victory for granted, and they have to make sure to pick up seats in Congress as well.

The thing Obama and the Democrats don’t seem to understand is that the ublic would have their back if they knew the facts. And thus, the Democrats need to articulate the facts: clearly, concisely (a challenge, I know), and consistently.

They would not have to give in at all on issues like Medicare, matching debt reduction with spending reduction dollar-for-dollar, and refusing all new revenue if they would put it out to the American people the way Lou Dubose did in the little-read but much-respected Washington Spectator of July 15. You can read the article here, if you happen to subscribe to that wonderful little newsletter.

So let me summarize some of Dubose’s points:

• Under George W. Bush, the government raised the debt ceiling eight times—something that had not had to be done in the last three years of the Clinton administration, because Clinton turned the Reagan/George H.W. Bush deficits into a surplus.
• George W. Bush’s first tax cut cost the government $1.3 trillion in lost revenue. His second tax cut added another $350 billion to the deficit. And his Medicare prescription bill (wildly considered a giveaway to the pharmaceutical giants) was an unfunded mandate of more than $600 billion.
• These huge additions to the deficit don’t even count the enormous cost of our illegal and very expensive wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; according to the National Priorities Project, the cost of these two wars is more than $1221 trillion as I write this, and escalating rapidly every second. You can actually watch the numbers jump at its Cost of War website.

Dubose quotes economist Chad’s Stone’ testimony at a Jont Economic Committee hearing June 21:

The economic downturn, tax cuts enacted under President Bush, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq explain virtually the entire federal budget deficit over the next 10 years.

The tax cuts alone, Stone concludes, represent 6 percent of GDP right now—but if they are not reversed, public debt will be an unimaginable 95 percent of GDP by 2019—not a legacy we want to saddle our children with.

So if I were Obama or Pelosi or Reid, or any Democrat who wants to win his or her next election, I’d be out there every day, telling the press and the public:

• Spending cuts on programs for the poor and on economic stimulus measures like energy conservation programs make no sense when you’re trying to bring the country out of a big recession
• Bush and the Republicans squandered the surplus on wars and tax cuts; that was a failed strategy and now it’s time to do it differently
• The poor and middle class have already sacrificed far more than their share, including the shriveling of their investments, while billionaires and huge corporations have done very well of late
• Public servants are actually paid far less than they would get for jobs with similar levels of responsibility in the private sector; they are dedicated teachers, firefighters, police officers, etc., who keep society functioning, and who deserve to be treated better than to be the whipping boys for government spending zealots
• If you want to look at spending cuts, look at the military—that’s a lace with a lot more fat to cut
• A one-sided set of demands with no room for negotiation is not a compromise, and is not acceptable.
• Revenue growth has to be part of any deficit discussion
• These deficits are of the GOP’s own making, as is the financial crisis that resulted from combining the big tax cuts with nearly complete lack of oversight under Bush—doing it again won’t solve the problem
• We need good, clean jobs to rebuld the econmy, and the way to get them is through a Marshall Plan-style effort to get us off carbon and nuclear and into safe energy and deep conservation (I’ve written about this several times; see, for instance, my blog posts “Where is the LEFT Challenge to Obama?” and “Why the Democrats Lost: Failure to Be Bold”)

Etcetera.

In short, the Dems (and I’ve said this before) have to get much better at framing and messaging. They should study George Lakoff’s Don’t Think of an Elephant. They need to understand that politics is about marketing, and the reason they lose so often is because they don’t have a clue about marketing. And they need to identify Republicans as the bad guys concerning why the American people have NOT gotten so much of the “Change” mantra that got Obama elected. Otherwise, he will deserve to lose next year.

Considering their enormous and deep understanding of marketing during the campaign, it’s hard to understand why the Obama administration is so bad at marketing itself as a governing force. Obama’s advisors need to take some lessons from George W. Bush. He was a terrible president, but he was extremely skilled at marketing himself and his accomplishments—and all my years observing politics, I’ve never before seen a team that was as good at staying on message. Better even than Reagan, if you ask me.

With just over a month left before the election, it’s time for the Democrats to go deep and hard on their marketing: to create a message that will resonate with the American people and cut the floor out from under the Republicans.

If I were running the national Democratic Senate and House campaign committees, I’d do it like this:
You voted for “Yes We Can”—But the Republicans Gave You “No We Won’t”

Two years ago, you, the American people, voted for change. You said it was long past time to focus the economy on Main Street…to get out of the illegal and unwinnable Iraq war…to begin once again to stop behaving like a “rogue state” and take our place among nations as the most powerful and inspirational democracy in the world…to once and for all rein in runaway corporate power and massive environmental devastation.

We’ve done a lot in the short time we’ve had to reverse the disastrous policies of the Bush administration. Here’s a list of 91 different things the Obama administration has accomplished.

But most of those 91 accomplishments didn’t require approval by Congress. The Republicans have decided, as a bloc, to vote against almost anything we propose—even if they proposed it first. If it comes from the Democrats, they vote no, end of story. How much more progress would we have made without their tantrumy-two-year-old behavior? How much better shape would the economy and our carbon footprint be in—if, for instance, the green Jobs package hadn’t been so watered down?

You didn’t vote for “No We Won’t” in 2008. You voted for “Yes We Can! Vote Democratic and get the change you wanted all along.

I may get smeared for this as Van Jones was, but let me say that I find it disgraceful that Van Jones was the target of a smear campaign and was forced out as Obama’s Green jobs person. He was one of the few genuine progressive voices in a sea of “moderate-centrists” who would have been considered quite far to the right a few decades back.

What were Jones’ “crimes”?

* He called for an investigation into possible government foreknowledge about 9/11. It’s pretty clear that elements within the U.S. government had advance knowledge that something was brewing (even George W. Bush was briefed on this the month before the attack, as Condoleezza Rice admitted in her May 19, 2004 testimony in front of the 9/11 investigation commission), and many respected scholars such as David Ray Griffin have widely circulated hypotheses of U.S. government involvement. My own view is that the U.S. saw the attack coming and decided for its own purposes to let the attack occur (our Reichstag fire, if you will)–but were not directly involved. Why is it unreasonable to ask for an investigation?

* He used an unfortunate metaphor to describe his radicalization in the aftermath of the acquittal verdict in the Rodney King beating case:

By August, I was a Communist,” he says in the article, describing his sense of radicalization at the time.

* He said that Republican strong-arm legislators who managed to force through legislation even when short of a super-majority in the Senate were “assholes.” How is this any worse than commentator Glenn Beck, who led the charge against Jones, calling Obama a racist, or
George W. Bush, when he was Governor of Texas, threatening a legislator with “I’m going to kick your butt if you don’t go along with me.”. And if you listen to it in context, the subtext was that Democrats are too gentlemanly to play this kind of hardball, and that’s why they can’t get their agenda enacted. This, unfortunately, is patently obvious to observers of the current political scene.

Glenn Beck, this is the latest in a long line of despicable things you’ve done. You may feel smug now, but you’re the one whose conscience will bother you–not Van Jones.