Winning the Public Sector Union Narrative

Interesting take over at Legal Insurrection on how to deal with public employee unions. I think that the states that are looking at public sector unions as a source of budget woes are going about it the wrong way.  Walker and others let the progressive grab the narrative and made the attempts to reign in public sector union power and costs as attacks on individual people. The right was never able to gain any traction in this arena.  The post linked provides an alternative or two.

While I do think the right should always attempt to maintain the high ground, especially since the left controls the media, we need to figure out a way to blunt the personal attacks and cry-baby antics of the progressives. The left has no problem dragging people through the mud in order to maintain their grip and to further their agenda. We don’t, and should not, do that.  We are getting better, but we are still babes in the woods when it comes to media manipulation. The advent of the internet has leveled the playing field somewhat, but even here they were able to get a jump-start on the right.

The Tucson Tragedy was a classic case of progressive ownership of the media. It was right at about an hour when the Daily Kos came out with the blame Sarah game, and from that moment on, the right was scrambling to mute these false attacks.  Eventually, the right was able to come even with the leftist press, but this was a case where we should have been in front from the moment the tragedy happened.

Same kind of thing happened in Wisconsin. The right was just not able to get over the hump. We did not hammer the “flee-baggers” (t/y Malkin) like we should have and the left was able to make them out to be a sort of anti-hero. These democrats were far from heroes, they were losers who were afraid to do their jobs in the proper manner. They called it democracy, but we don’t live in a democracy, we live in a republic. It is not one-man-one-vote. Democracy is pure chaos as proven by the misguided flee-baggers of Wisconsin.  Why we did not point this out is beyond me (sorry, rambling a bit).

As I have already pointed out, we are getting better, but until we either level the media playing field or control it outright (as the left does now), we will always fight an uphill battle.  Occasionally, we do come out on top (1994, 2010), but because we lose the battle for the narrative due to our lack of media savvy or inability to articulate clearly, those victories are short-lived. We will never win the battle of emotions because we are not emotion-based. But we had better figure out a way to couple some level of emotion with our absolute lock on logic and the truth.