Fiscal Responsibility

We all know the tale of Lee Atwater and the "Southern Strategy". If not, you can hear it straight from the horses mouth.

No bones about it, that's how "I'm a fiscal conservative" become code for "I'm a behind the scenes racist." A secret handshake, if you will. The trouble with that, of course, is that being a fiscal conservative also implies that you are fiscally responsible. So, well meaning people also picked up the term. I cringe when I hear people say "I'm socially liberal, but fiscally conservative." People who have grown up in this society have no idea that they are falling in line with one of the most obscene sleight of hands to ever grace the United States of America.

It doesn't help when people running for office don't want to have "tax and spend" hung around their neck, but that is just another iteration from another direction and is a layer of abstraction for what it is really meant. The code works on people who have no idea what the true meaning and true intention is. There is no other way to put it, the folks in this category are useful idiots, spreading a mantra with ill intent at the root of it. And the racists hiding behind these useful idiots daring people to start slinging mud at them, right through that middle ground, gleefully hoping for collateral damage.

But what really chafes is that it is a tag that progressives cannot seem to tackle effectively. Given the current state of the clown show in Washington, now seems like a good time to take control of The Message. We want what we pay for. We want to get the medical services we pay for. We don't want to pay more than the rest of the world and get less in return. We want the infrastructure that we pay for. We want someone in Washington that will get it for us. We want Fiscal Responsibility. We want to get what we paid for.

So, when tagged as "tax and spend", spin it to, "pay our bills on time". When faced with a claim of "Fiscally Conservative", turn it around to claim "Fiscal Responsibility". Call those frauds shop lifters, call them porch pirates, call them a toddler with a credit card. With the "debt ceiling" in the news, this should be ringing across the land like a bell rolling down a mountain. There is no equivocating, you either pay for the goods that you got, or you are a deadbeat. Make "Fiscal Responsibility" the rallying cry. Beat people over the heads with it, drop it at every opportunity.

And here is maybe a more important part, and where the Democrat Party fails in general and certainly fails in the public's perception; realizing that "Controlling the Message" is not the same thing as actually controlling the situation. You have to execute, not just talk about it and release pretty Powerpoints.