The Baroness Margaret Thatcher had a saying; “First you win the argument, then you win the vote.”
This is how you win the argument.
Let me spell it out; get a bunch of your statisticians and Think Tank (e.g. The Buckeye Institute) folks, have them sit down with a bunch of Adobe Flash animators (heck, hire the same folks the MacIver Institute and AFP folks did in Wisconsin) and get something like this explaining the facts and figures, and the hows, whys, whats, wheres and whens. Cut it down to five minutes (if at all possible). This really should take no more than two days, three days at the max.
Remember Obama’s informercial? Who says the same tactic can’t work for Republicans? Spend all the money necessary (don’t flinch) to have it put on Ohioans TV screens for the last three to five days before the referendum – can you honestly say defeating the unions would not be worth a few million dollars, even tens of millions of dollars? I’d also recommend putting it on a web page with a nice big PayPal logo right beside it.
And, oh yeah, put it online as well all over your websites – every Republican elected official in Ohio should have it embedded on the front page of his or her website.
End point; you win. The voters in the “middle” need things thoroughly spelled out for them otherwise they go with what they see on their TV screens. This does exactly that.
Moe Lane
PG DeFreese
Victoria Coates
Daniel Horowitz
Dan Spencer
There's a reason why they haven't done this
Death_of_the_Donkey (Diary) Sunday, October 30th at 7:43AM EST (link)and that is because in Ohio, the average government employee actually does pay in 10% of their salary into the pension system (it is only a few union contracts that do not and the bulk who don’t pay are administrators who are exempt from this law). Also, the average Ohio employee does pay a portion of their healthcare (I don’t have the local stats in front of me, but state employees pay the 15% already). Even the study that was linked to on the front page this week showed that for salary and benefits, Ohio government employees are not any better off than their private sector counterparts, the only way that study showed the 43% difference was by (I read the methodology so this isn’t just a stab in the dark) counting “job security”as a huge cash benefit and by counting the pension itself as a huge benefit while almost completely discounting both social security and 401k matches. In other words, the actual numbers in Ohio are not as bad as in other states.
None of this should be taken as my saying that reform isn’t needed, only that the reason that Ohio hasn’t used the “numbers” is because the real argument here isn’t about numbers it is about peripherals (merit pay, arbitration, seniority, paycheck deductions, etc).
Different situation, different numbers ...
Martin Knight (Diary) Sunday, October 30th at 7:57AM EST (link)That being said, the reason they haven’t done this is because Republican operatives tend not to be so imaginative.