HOW TO CARRY THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA

How to Build a Better Democrat: Fire the consultants, find some core values and speak from the heart, and then maybe one of the candidates will have a chance against Bush (Joe Klein, May. 11, 2003, TIME)

[T]he Democrats have excelled at futility for more than 30 years. They have elected two Presidents during that time, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. Both were Governors of Southern states. Neither was a well-known party leader. Neither ran on what many Democrats would consider a traditional--that is, liberal--agenda. Carter was the first born-again Christian President; Clinton once owned a pickup truck with AstroTurf carpeting in the back. Carter won because he seemed a simple, honorable antidote to the excessive dishonesty of the Nixon era. Clinton won because he was far more talented than his opponents--George H. W. Bush and Bob Dole--but also because he rejected his party's orthodoxy on crime (especially the death penalty), welfare reform, free trade and fiscal conservatism. One could argue that the only winning strategy for Democrats in the past nine presidential campaigns has been camouflage.

Which brings us to 2004, another election the Democrats should lose. They are facing a popular incumbent who has just won a war. George W. Bush is everything Democrats have not been--bold, decisive, uncomplicated, a man of real convictions who has not been afraid to take unpopular positions. Furthermore, unlike his father, this Bush is a political animal. He has a clever team. If the Democrats do happen to find a winning issue, you can be sure that Karl Rove, the President's strategist, will figure out a way to trump or co-opt it (as he did with education and Medicare prescription-drug benefits in the election of 2000). And the Democrats enter the fray with all the shape and substance of fog. "People have no idea what we stand for," says Stan Greenberg, a Democratic pollster. "They have a vague sense that we were against the war in Iraq and a vaguer sense that things were somehow better economically when we were in power. Beyond that, nothing."

For these reasons and others, some Republicans are quietly predicting that 2004 will be not just a Bush landslide but also a transformational election--an election that creates a new Republican majority, just as the 1936 election created an enduring Democratic majority for Franklin D. Roosevelt. There is a problem with this notion, though. The last transformational election was not 1936 but 1968--the year that Richard Nixon created a new political reality by exploiting Southern white resentment of the civil rights movement (and of Vietnam War protesters). The solid Democratic South became the solid Republican South, a truly momentous event in American political history, and the pendulum has been swinging right ever since. The laws of politics, to say nothing of physics, would indicate that a second conservative transformation, an election that moves the center of gravity even further to the right, is unlikely.

In fact, despite the hot Republican rhetoric, it's difficult to imagine what else conservatives can conserve on the federal level (although the world would be a better place if monstrosities like last year's farm-subsidies act were repealed). The past two years have shown a renewed public appetite for a stronger federal presence--not merely in the pursuit of terrorists but also in the regulation of Wall Street and corporate boardrooms, and perhaps in the stimulation of an economy that the Federal Reserve Bank has indicated may be approaching a deflationary contraction. The brutal cutbacks looming on the state and local levels may also have an impact on the political climate. There will be fewer police, fire fighters and teachers. There will be more potholes. Civilians may remember how valuable government can be. We could be on the cusp of an era where government is regarded once more with mere skepticism, rather than the out-and-out disdain of recent years.

And so, yes, the Democrats do have a chance in 2004. A chance, but they will have to become something different from the Democrats we have come to know and ridicule. They face challenges on three different fronts: patriotism, optimism and confidence. They will have to convince the public that they are as committed to national defense, and to the judicious use of military force, as the Republicans are. They will have to shed their congenital pessimism. They can't just rant against the Administration and hope for bad news to confirm their prejudices. They will have to propose firm, reasonable policy alternatives that are easy to understand and defend. If they oppose the Bush tax cuts, they will have to lay out, in some detail, what they would do instead.

Finally, they will have to change the mingy, defensive, consultant-driven style of recent campaigns. They will need a candidate who is easy in his skin, who sounds different from other politicians--freer, perhaps; funnier, certainly--and who is confident enough to risk broad, bold themes that capture the national imagination rather than parsing the special yearnings of enough demographic slivers to win the election. Camouflage will not be enough this time. [...]

There is much that we don't know about this election. There may be another terrorist attack, or not. The economy may sag, or not. The President may try one too many cowboy tricks, or he may simply be seen as the guy who got us through a tough time. The country post-Sept. 11 may be entirely different from the country before the outrage occurred. It may be a more serious electorate, less tolerant of political boilerplate, more favorably disposed toward serious governance and ready to make sacrifices for the common good. Or not. If the world stays quiet and the economy picks up, the Democrats may face an unbeatable incumbent in 2004, no matter how hard they try. All the more reason to act as Democrats haven't in quite a while: Speak your minds, dream a little, tell people some truths they don't want to hear. Get angry. Be funny. But, above all, provide a real alternative. The Republicans offer smaller government. The Democrats, at their best, offer serious government. A direct clash on those principles would be an argument worth having, and one the country badly needs.

It is the mark of the true believer that you consider your party's best hope to lie in returning to first principles. But it's odd to hear this argument from Joe Klein, who early on pegged Bill Clinton as just the kind of guy who could get elected president by discarding such liberal baggage and running as a "New Democrat". Equally weird is his argument that the GOP has no room to its Right--this at a time when the federal budget is $2.3 Trillion; such conservative initiatives as Social Security privatization, school voucherization, and the faith-based intiative have yet to be enacted; and social issues like abortion, cloning, the death penalty, guns, drug legalization, homosexuality, immigration, affirmative action, slave reparations and the like are still hot button issues. Just consider for a moment the agenda a Democrat would have to run on if he/she decided to play to the orthodox Left on all these matters:

(1) Increased spending & no tax cuts

(2) Oppose entitlement reform

(3) Oppose education reform

(4) Oppose alternatives to current social welfare programs.

(5) Pro-abortion

(6) Pro-cloning

(7) Anti-death penalty

(8) Anti-gun

(9) Pro-drug

(10) Pro-gay rights

(11) Pro-affirmative action

(12) Pro-immigration

(13) Pro-reparations

Are we starting to get some sense of why the only Democrat presidents in recent years have been "conservative" white Southern Christians?

SEVERAL REVIEWS TOUCHING ON THE TOPIC:
-The Strange Death of American Liberalism
-Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus
-The Emerging Democratic Majority Posted by Orrin Judd at May 12, 2003 9:30 PM