1. When are you going to stop whining about the 2000 Election? No one likes a sore loser.

2. When are you going to stop talking about how you were misled into voting for the War in Iraq? No one believes you.

3. When are you going to get out of the 20th Century? You can’t continue to have social security, welfare, public health and other domestic programs premised on the social and economic conditions of the 1940s. African Americans are not where they were in the 1960s. Labor-management dynamics are not what they were in the 1920s. The world is flat. The workforce is mobile. People live longer. We’ve moved from a manufacturing-based economy to a service and information-based economy. The management of personal finances has been democritized. Get into the 21st Century.

4. Why do you continue to use John Kerry as the face of the party? Or Ted Kennedy. Or James Carville. Or, God forbid, Michael Moore. Get a spokesman without all of the baggage, who can speak plainly, stop beating around the bush, hit them where it hurts, and get to the bottom line.

5. Why don’t you discredit the “trickle down” theory once and for all? Most credible economists don’t support it. Bush’s own father called it “voodoo economics” as early as 1980. The facts are compelling. You can debunk all of the premises with an easy-to-understand set of color-coded pie charts and graphs.

6. When are you going to reverse the concept of “personal responsibility”? Deficit spending to be repaid, with interest, by future generations is shirking your responsibility. Consuming all of the earth’s natural resources as fast as possible is shirking your responsibility. Throwing out your garbage into the air, the earth, and the water for someone else to clean up is shirking your responsibility. Giving a corporation a tax break or a tax credit or a subsidy allows that business to shirk its responsibility. An immunity from suit allows a company, or an insurer, or a governmental official to shirk its responsibility. The Republican Party is not the party of “personal responsibility”.

7. When are you going to tear yourselves loose from the spiders' webs? Gay marriage, public prayer, the ten commandments, the pledge of allegiance, the war on Christmas, and to a large extent even abortion itself are not Legislative issues. And they are certainly not Executive issues. Don’t keep pretending that they are. Find ways to deflect them. Re-frame the issues where you can. (If, for example, the Republicans are forced to address the question of which prayer in public schools – Baptist or Methodist or Catholic or Presbyterian or Eastern Orthodox, not to mention Mormon, Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu, or Christian Scientist – instead of whether prayer in public schools, that whole debate is likely going to implode pretty quickly.) Point out that Republican principles and policies are in direct contravention to the words of the Old and New Testaments and the teachings of Christ. And that Jesus himself did not want Government in the business of Religion.

8. Why don’t you try leading? Get a long-term vision, that’s realistic, and good for the country, and stop trying to either simply oppose whatever the Republicans are doing or attempt to satisfy the base, build a big tent, and try to be everything to every voter.

9. What do you stand for?

10. When are you going to stand for it?



[Note - The views expressed on this political blog and legal blog are the personal views of Steve Herman and are not intended to represent the views of Herman Herman Katz & Cotlar, LTLA, TLPJ, the Civil Justice Foundation, or any other organization.]