Sometimes Salesmanship is Statesmanship

The Democrats couldn’t sell the Hope Diamond for a buck ninety-five. 

How horrible are they in persuading the country that their ideas are worthwhile? Now we have been treated to an intra-mural Democratic scrum over the passage laws for infrastructure improvement and for social benefits – a scrum that has led to Republican advances in the recent elections.  And the thing is, the laws they have been fighting over are laws that do things that will make everybody’s lives better.  

Forgive me. Not everybody’s. Not a lot of doctors. Not the coal industry. Not the inordinately wealthy. Not the oil companies. Not the people who complain about government benefits being socialism while they get their Medicare and Social Security payouts in amounts much larger than what they paid in. So, I guess it’s true. You can never make everybody happy.  The laws here would just make almost everybody happy. And, even at that, the Democrats couldn’t sell it.

Now, I’m no salesman, but I am a lawyer.  There’s not much difference. Salesmen sell products. Lawyers sell arguments.  I would like to think that I know something about how to be persuasive.

Many people have already said that the Democrats focused more on the cost of these bills than on what they would provide.  They are so right. That was a big selling mistake. Imagine a guy trying to sell a couch by talking only about how much the couch will cost and saying little about how comfortable the couch will make you feel. How long would that guy last at Raymour & Flanigan?

The laws the Democrats want to pass will make people a lot more comfortable than they are now. They’ll get new roads, new bridges, and new jobs building those roads and bridges. They’ll get a cleaned-up environment so our offspring can survive. They’ll get parents some help in paying for child-care and will give them universal pre-K. They’ll get increased health care for seniors. Need I go on? You get the point. Yet this stuff they couldn’t sell.

As I write this, the Democrats may have sold the House on it.  The Senate comes next. The Democrats are optimistic about that. But, why all the angst?

And even to the extent that they had to address problems with the cost. Those, too, can so readily be rebutted.

The Republicans and the centrist Democrats think that a price tag above $3 trillion dollars over ten years is untenable. They think it will cause inflation and undermine Social Security and Medicare (here we go again – some socialism is so good that it can’t be touched). Look, three trillion dollars is a lot of moolah. When I was a kid, I measured money by how many baseball cards I could buy. They were then five cents a pack. If Congress had given me three trillion dollars, I would have been able to buy more packs of cards than my I-phone calculator can figure out. I would have been very happy.

Yet, even at that exalted level of money, when you are talking about government spending, there is a comparison that the Democrats should have used that would have put it in perspective. As hard as it is to believe, $3 trillion dollars over ten years pales in comparison to what the Defense Department spends. From what I can gather from public records, over the past ten years, the Defense Department has spent $7 trillion dollars. This is more than twice as much as the Democrats want to spend to make our lives better. 

Of course, it is essential that we spend a lot of money on defense. We have a lot of enemies (why we have those enemies is another subject). We need to be protected. The point is, though, that the level of debate over our Defense spending is putrid compared to what we have just gone through during the debate over social benefits.

We may now get these bills passed. We may now enjoy all the benefits that these bills give us. That’s great. The problem is that it should have passed months ago. The failure to do that has, in part, created the results of the elections this month where Republicans did so much better than expected.

As the elections proceed in 2022 and 2024, it now appears that the issue will be whether the Democrats can govern. At this point, their lack of salesmanship dictates that the reasonable conclusion is that they can’t. 

The possibility is that, if these bills ultimately do pass and are put in place, all the goodies that they will give us will make even the opponents happy. Once drivers enjoy better roads and once parents enjoy reduced education costs and once seniors receive enhanced medical benefits, the hope is that we will forget the struggle it took to make all of that happen.  

That is why the Republicans opposed these bills. They know how much good they will do. It’s just that, for their typical selfish political reasons, they see it in their best interest to rather than help the country, choose to prevent the Democrats from helping the country.

Am I being too optimistic? Probably. But I can always hope.