I know John already wrote about this, but I wanted to reiterate this one point in the new Democracy Corps poll, because it's important:
WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama's apparent willingness to consider cuts in Social Security benefits may be winning him points with Washington elites, but it's killing him with voters, who see the program as inviolate and may start to wonder what the Democratic Party stands for, if not for Social Security.
That's the conclusion of three top progressive pollsters who spoke to reporters Wednesday at a briefing sponsored by the Economic Policy Institute, the Century Foundation and Demos.
"For the public, cutting benefits is the problem, not the solution," said Guy Molyneux, a partner at Hart Research Associates.
Precisely. If the Democratic Party doesn't stand for public education, helping unemployed workers during a recession, and Social Security, what the hell do they stand for?
Do you suppose maybe we're having a little marketing problem? Our potential supporters aren't quite clear on our core values, Look at the reason Republicans won the midterms: They flooded the airwaves with commercials that said the Democrats were cutting a half-trillion dollars from Medicare. And now the polls show that voters trust the Republicans more than Democrats on saving Medicare.
Think about that. First of all, voters actually believed that Democrats would cut a half-trillion dollars from Medicare, the same people who have always defended it. Sounds like they're not quite sure anymore, huh?
This shouldn't have been difficult. All the Democrats had to do was run response ads, pointing out this had to do with Medicare Advantage, the part where private insurers are raping and pillaging the treasury. Now, I don't know about where you live, but we were inundated with these GOP attack ads in Pennsylvania -- and the Democrats never answered them.
It seems to me that the Democratic Party, like any organization that's adrift, needs to define itself. We can be the party of working people --- or we can be the party of the bankers. But we can't be both, and obviously most voters are just as annoyed and confused about it as I am.
In the private sector, we'd remove our attention and resources from anything that wasn't in line with our core mission. It would help if the Democrats did that, but first they'll have to figure out what, exactly, that is.
