The swing voters, who are key to the fate of the Democratic Party, care most about three things: reigniting the economy, reducing the deficit and creating jobs.In other words, Schoen and Caddell are saying that the 18% of Americans who are the hard core conservative Tea Party will certainly vote for the Democrats rather than the Republicans if the Dems simply pretend to be the Republicans.
These voters are outraged by the seeming indifference of the Obama administration and congressional Democrats, who they believe wasted a year on health-care reform. These voters will not tolerate more diversion from their pressing economic concerns. They view the Obama administration as working systematically to protect the interests of public-sector employees and organized labor -- by offering specific benefits such as pension protection and tax reductions at the expense of all taxpayers.
Democrats must understand that voters will not accept seeing their tax dollars used to pay for higher wages and better benefits for public-sector employees when they themselves are getting higher taxes and lower wages.
Winning over swing voters will require a bold, new focus from the president and his party. They must adopt an agenda aimed at reducing the debt, with an emphasis on tax cuts, while implementing carefully crafted initiatives to stimulate and encourage job creation. This is the agenda that largely motivated the Clinton administration from 1995 through 2000 and that led to a balanced budget and welfare reform. It promoted a modest degree of social welfare spending. This agenda is enormously popular with the electorate and could eventually turn around Democratic fortunes.
Democrats can avoid the electoral bloodbath we predicted before passage of the health-care bill, but in one way: through a bold commitment to fiscal discipline and targeted fiscal stimulus of the private sector and entrepreneurship.
Really? Because if you believe that, you really are as stupid as these two think you are. Let's get something straight: the Tea Party voters are Republicans. They despise, loathe, and vilify the Democrats every chance they get. They call Obama a Socialist even when he's not, they yell and scream that he has raised taxes when he's lowered them, and a healthy chunk of them don't even believe he's legally President because they're not sure if he's a U.S. citizen.
What on God's green Earth makes anyone believe for a microsecond that in 2010 with such virulent anti-incumbent fervor out there that incumbent Democrats can convince these voters to not throw them out of office? What exactly can they do to make hard core Republican supporters vote for the Democrats?
It's idiocy at its core here. Not only are the Tea Party voters never going to vote for the Democrat, they are not "mainstream swing voters" either...by any stretch of the imagination. What Schoen and Caddell are trying to do is get the Dems to run as Republicans and scrap Obama's agenda...in which case they get voted out of office anyway. Does nobody recall 1996? It took the Dems a decade after tacking back to the right after 1994 to get the House back, and that was done how?
By running as Democrats.
It's a lesson the Democrats of 2010 need to continue to apply now instead of surrendering to the Tea Party fringe.
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