George W. Bush or Dick Cheney—who’s more frightening to liberals? Some progressive political strategists seem to believe the answer is Cheney.
This past weekend, Democracy for America, a grassroots progressive founded by Howard Dean that recruits, trains, promotes, and funds progressive candidates, sent out a an email signed by Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT). The piece focused on the current fight over whether to extend the Bush administration tax cuts for folks who make more than $250,000 a year. Leahy’s email read,
To this day, America’s top income-earners—households making more than $250,000 a year—aren’t paying their fair share in taxes. Letting these tax cuts for the wealthy continue for another decade would saddle middle class Americans, our kids, and our grandkids with an additional $680 billion of debt, largely payable to the Chinese government.
The Bush-Cheney tax cuts for the wealthy are wrong. Thankfully they’re set to expire this December, unless Republicans in Congress get their way and renew them indefinitely.
With debate set to begin on the Senate floor as early as next week, we don’t have a lot of time to get this right.
Leahy asked recipients of the email to sign a petition urging Congress to allow the tax cuts for the rich to expire. And in his note, he repeatedly referred to these breaks as the “Bush-Cheney tax cuts.”
Yet the email’s subject line put it a bit differently. When a recipient spotted the email in his or her inbox, the note was titled, “Dick Cheney’s Tax Cut.” The guy at the top was missing. The point of a subject line for a mass email is to get the recipient to click and open the message. DFA’s consultants must figure that Cheney is more of a motivator for their target audience than Bush. That prompts a question: should Democrats this campaign season run against “Cheney Republicans”?
