Tuesday, May 31, 2005

Liberals: Put Up Or Shut Up

John Hawkins issues a challenge to liberal bloggers. Name the nine pieces of legislation you want to see passed. In the interest of fairness, he provides his own list. He explains why he is issuing the challenge:
Now you'd think that liberals, after writing something like that in these columns, would think: "Ok, conservatives have their "coherent, easy-to-summarize ideology," let's sum ours up for the people and show them why it's better" -- but no, that never happens because liberals understand that their beliefs are too unpopular to ever sell to the American people. So instead we get process, process, process in these pieces. How do we raise more money? Where are the think tanks? How do we build up liberal radio? How do we phrase what we're saying to appeal to the American people?

Certainly, there's nothing wrong with considering those things, but in most ways the liberal political "machine" is far superior to the one conservatives have. The average person in America, gets up, reads a liberal newspaper, sends his kid to a school run by liberals, comes home from work and watches news on the big 3 networks -- which all are liberal and have bigger audiences than Fox, and then settles in to watch TV, where a bunch of liberals entertain him all night.

In the 2004 elections, liberals raised more money than conservatives, dominated the mainstream media where most Americans got their information from, and even managed to produce best selling books and movies that blasted Bush. Sure conservatives have talk radio, Fox, the Washington Times, but the truth is that we were outgunned.

Well, how is that Republicans control all the levers of government then? Well, our ideas just work better than liberal ideas and furthermore, we're not afraid to pitch them to the American people.

Liberals can criticize what conservatives believe all day long, but when you ask them what they believe in, they suddenly get foggy and evasive because they know that many of the things that they want to do are unpopular and viewed as failed concepts.

So, in an effort to show how bipartisan and helpful that I am, I'm going to invite all the liberal blogs out there to participate in a little exercise that will do more for you than all the mamby-pamby, "we need to do things differently somehow or another" columns ever written.

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