The Little Blue Book: The Essential Guide to Thinking and Talking Democratic

By 2010 Obamacare had become a dirty word, and the most radical Republicans won their elections and took over the House with a promise to repeal it. What the Obama administration missed was the opportunity to argue on the basis of the same moral ideals of freedom and life. Serious illness without health care takes away your liberty and threatens yo

What we are trying to achieve with this book is a neural alternative that is open to important truths: the central role of the Public in American life, the overwhelming power of corporations in our public life, the predatory nature of privatization, the disastrous reality of humanly caused global warming, and the powerfully negative effect of extre

Liberals assume their own values are universal values, and then further assume that all they need to do is present the facts and offer policies that support these universal values. But values are not universal. Conservatives have a very different sense from liberals of what is moral, and a difference in fundamental morality is a deep difference.

Liberal TV commentators tend to practice the same pattern. First they will recite a quote or show a film clip from a conservative, repeat the conservative claim out loud, and only then cite the facts contradicting the claim. Activists do the same. An Occupy Wall Street sign read, “Obama is not a brown-skinned anti-war socialist who gives away free

The War on Women strategy has the advantages of uniting progressive women in a common cause and of raising money from women. But it also has disadvantages. First, it frames women as victims under attack. Second, it posits that conservatives are involved in a conscious movement to attack women, which is hard to sell except to liberals and which is p

Moral values are primary. They define what the issue areas are and place limits on possible policies. What about abstract ideals such as freedom, justice, fairness, equality, loyalty, accountability, authority, sanctity, and even caring? These are what linguists call contested concepts. They are ideas that appear to have a very simple, generally ag

To sum up: Use your own language; never use your opponent’s language. Be aware of what you believe and repeat it out loud over and over; never repeat ideas that you don’t believe in, even if you are arguing against them. Be positive. Be authentic. Bring it home. Say it simply.

Democrats need to be talking nonstop about the Public as the necessary foundation of the Private. Undermining, weakening, or eliminating the Public would be a disaster for the Private as well, destroying the sanctity and safety of American private life and the basis of most businesses. Conservatives never mention this fundamental truth of American

Some commentators point out that conservatives vote against their economic interests. What they miss is that those conservatives are voting their moral interests, and they will continue to do so. Therefore liberals need to understand the difference between policy and morality and that morality beats policy.