Elevator Pitch

Good Ezra Klein pitch criticizing a Kos-ian proposal for a Democratic elevator pitch. The Prospect ran a contest a little while back asking readers to submit ideas for a liberal counter to the conservative pitch of "low taxes, traditional family values, and a strong military." We got a few good ones, but the results were pretty bad. Largely, as with the example Ezra takes down, the problem was that people didn't even seem to understand the right kind of thing to be doing. What makes the conservative pitch work is that while it's general enough to be broadly appealing, it's specific enough that liberals will have to reject it. The submissions we got tended to either operate at an overly-broad level ("we're for good things happening and against bad ones") or else to just be policy laundry-lists.

It's important to recognize that for these purposes you need an idea that conservatives would reject as a self-description. If you say, "we're for the middle class, not just the wealthy" conservatives will say, "no, we're for the middle class." You may think (correctly) that this is an inaccurate description of the consequences of conservatism, but it's not how conservatives see things. Liberals, on the other hand, really aren't for low taxes. And part of the genius is that we wouldn't say that we're exactly for high taxes either. We're for, you know, adequate taxes, given necessary expenditures. And we're not against a strong military, but we really don't think that military strength is the essence of wise foreign policy-making. We're not opposed to traditional families, but we're not exactly for them in a straightforward way. It's a hard pitch to reply to. Which is precisely the idea.