Via Ezra Klein, an American Prospect article by Geoffrey Nunberg that has this fairly clever bit of advice for liberals:
Republicans will try to pin a big-government label on the Democrats, but the appropriate response to that is not to apologize for government, as some liberals have recently done, but rather to call the Republicans’ bluff. Kerry just once might have responded to Bush’s charge that he was a big-government liberal not just by denying that his health-care plan was a government takeover but by bearding Bush on his government-bashing. “Just which government programs are too big?” he might have said. “What should we do away with? Social Security? Medicare? The Food and Drug Administration? The Securities and Exchange Commission? The Environmental Protection Agency?”
Maybe it’s politically effective, maybe it’s not—only one way to find out!—but it’s certainly something I wish Bush and other “small-government” conservatives would hop up on stage and answer.
