I HAVE BEEN looking for a quote I remember reading from the very late and, it would seem, largely forgotten giant of my youth and middle age, John Kenneth Galbraith which said, in substance, that it was a mistake for liberals to depend on the Supreme Court as much as they had become in the habit of doing instead of depending on winning elections. How much of that habit was the result of the non-stop PR from the ACLU asking for us to fund their brave fight for the rights of Nazis, gun-lovers, pornographers and on behalf of the wealthy to put as much money as they wanted into elections, I wonder. I will have more to say about that as I have from the first post I ever posted online.
I haven't found it though I found a reference to him saying it in the first issue of The American Prospect magazine, though I've searched their site I haven't tracked down the quote yet. But I did find this worth reading article, How to Win Elections: Integrity as a Political Ploy, which might be useful to not only those who want to win campaigns but to we the liberal to leftish, . . . . to Christian socialist Voter.
This passage is one I'm sure I'll remember the next time James Carville opens his mouth though I could name dozens of those I recall it applying to equally, maybe I'll look for my post in which I condemned Democratic campaign operatives who touted the benefits of strategic losing of elections during the years when Galbraith was alive to hear that bullshit
Speaking out of personal experience and acquaintance going back to James Aloysius Farley, I am persuaded that the self-styled political expert is, in most respects and in most instances, a compulsively articulate idiot. His reputation, when separated from his unlimited and intellectually unsupported self-confidence, depends on his having been accidentally on the winning side in the last election and thus being qualified now to help lose the next.
The advice that this self-admitted wizard gives his candidate and his coworkers is always the same. It is based on the one thing in which he is unquestionably accomplished, namely simple arithmetic. Subtract votes from the other side, add them to your totals and, mirabile dictum, you have a majority.
From this, accordingly, the strategy. You abandon your own supporters and their aspirations and desires — they are deemed to be yours anyway — and put on as impressive as possible an imitation of the opposing candidate and his program. There is always thought to be something clever, even deviously brilliant, about thus setting aside one’s own beliefs and principles along with those of the candidate. The press responds wonderfully: “That fellow is certainly politically adept.” The name of Machiavelli is invoked by the many who have never read him. Such praise then reinforces the political magician in his error and, needless to say, in his self-esteem, and, sadly, it also impresses the candidate.
Speaking of ACLU BS, the idea that the press is the friend of the left and those who the left either serves or it is no left at all, the underclass, is in almost all cases complete bullshit. They're corporate whores who know one thing above all, which side their own bread is buttered on. The "right to lie" which the "civil libertarians" won for them is one of those backfiring Warren Court rulings I mention below
Also, I try to remember to capitalize "Voter" and the noun "Vote" because it is always forgotten that those are the very trunk of legitimate government. Without the real consent of the majority, those three branches including the goddamned Supreme Court are only a muslin tree under a climate change burning sky.
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