• "Common" - Who wants to be common? Nobody in America, that's why we give our kids unique names, so they'll stand out and be different. No one wants to be part of the common mass of people, Americans frequently misapprehend their place in the country's economic just to avoid it: they think they're doing better then they are, and they have a hard time understanding that they are a part of the group which will be hurt by Bush-type economic policies that favor the rich. Instead, they're prone to believe that they will be part of the group that will benefit. No one wants to be common in America.



• "Communism" - This is going to sound ridiculous, but "the common good" sounds an awful lot like "communism", and the concept can easily be conflated with "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need." Given that any even mildly progressive or redistributive program (if the redistribution is from rich to poor, that is) will be attacked as "socialist" or "communist" by the Right, Democrats, as the center-left coalition party in our system, are vulnerable to being smeared this way, and "the common good" at least partly opens the door to that.



• At this point in our political and social history, "the common good" doesn't much sound like an American idea, it sounds vaguely foreign, probably European, in that way that "homeland security" rings as vaguely Germanic or Russian.

Obviously, the objection to these objections is that they're not in any way substantive, but about perceptions and connotations -- but isn't that the entire point of coming up with a slogan we can hitch our policies to? The claim is not just that Democrats don't have any policies, which can be easily countered, but that they don't speak well about them, they don't frame them well, and the only way to counter that is to use words and phrases which have the right feel to them, as well as the right ideas behind them.

So, my advice to all is to keep the concept, but jettison the words -- find some other phrase (such as mine, but others will do as well) which doesn't have as much dead weight attached to it.