Motivating the Right - Food for thought from Grover Norquist

I'm not a Grover Norquist clone, though I do agree with the vast majority of what he says, and even on what I disagree with he makes interesting points.  He's been doing events promoting his book "Leave Us Alone", in which he divides the political world into two main coalitions, the "takings" coaltion and, of course, the "leave us alone" coalition.

I'd highly recommend watching this video of Norquist in semi-hostile territory at the New America Foundation if you haven't seen him speak recently.  (The video clocks in at an hour and ten minutes, with four minutes of introduction, and the main spiel ending around the 30 min mark, followed by an interesting Q&A.)

"Leave us Alone" is, unfortunately, not a catchy slogan.  What caught my attention was the discussion of what ultimately motivates the leave-us-aloners is a direct threat to their particular voting issue.  Right off the top, Mr. Norquist asserts that it wasn't school prayer or Roe-v-Wade that catalyzed the religious right, but the idea that the Carter administration might take away the tax status of Christians schools and sic the FCC on Christian radio stations under the fairness doctrine.

Obama's "bitter" comments strike this same social nerve.  Of course people felt that their identities had been besmirched, but implicit in Obama's remarks was an actual threat to the religious and the gun owners.  They want those issues left alone.

Duplicating this outrage is the challenge.  We need to find "voting issues" on which activists and voters alike are righteously outraged.

Norquist cites the anti-earmark good-government movement as a potential voting issue.  I'm undecided as to whether this can be a voting issue, but at least McCain has the upper hand over Obama on that, particularly if Maverick will allow us to talk about the money Obama got for Father Pfleger's programs or for the hospital that happened to be his wife's employer.

Norquist also suggested that since the tax cuts on capital gains and dividends apparently caused the value of the stock market to increase, that Obama's proposed tax hikes could take a $5.5 trillion chunk out of people's 401k's and stock portfolios.  I think Norquist is wrong to imply a perfect correlation between the tax cuts and subsequent equity performance, but the basic idea is right - increasing these taxes will put a major hurting on (baby boomer) retirement accounts.

He is somewhat dismissive of the so-called 80/20 issue slates proposed by Newt Gingrich and others because they aren't framed as "voting issues", though he allows that some of them might be altered to fit such a mold.

So there's some food for thought.  Not too far off the beaten path, conveying a sense that coalitional calculus must still be performed, but steering us in the direction of finding the visceral connection with those areas where people's voting issues may be endangered.