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The road ahead for Democrats is bumpy (Tony Blankley, May 28, 2003, townhall.com)

To the Democratic Party, I say, look in the mirror: Do you see Robert Taft, Wendell Wilkie or Ronald Reagan? The Democratic Party is at a crossroads, similar to where the Republican Party found itself in 1940: increasingly ineffective as a reactionary, old guard opposition party, flirting with mimicking successful governing party positions, and unconscious of the possibility of applying its abiding principles to the changing world of the near future. In 1940, after eight years of reactionary opposition to FDR's New Deal and internationalism, the GOP rejected the old guard presidential nomination candidacies of Robert Taft and Arthur Vandenberg, and nominated Wendell Wilkie -- the recently former Democrat who endorsed FDR's internationalism, while criticizing his Tennessee Valley Authority domestic radicalism.

For the next 40 years the Republican Party nominated presidential candidates who endorsed most of the liberal FDR programs and agenda (with the exception of 1964, when they nominated Barry Goldwater), but said they could manage it better and a little cheaper. When the Democrats stumbled (Harry Truman in Korea, Lyndon Johnson in Vietnam), the Republicans would pick up the White House -- but they remained in Congress and in the hearts of the public -- the minority party, until 1980. And even then it took another 14 years before they took back the House of Representatives. Me-tooism, as those 40 years came to be known, permitted Republicans in safe House, Senate and state seats to hold on to their offices -- but at the cost of ever winning the nation's mind and heart to Republican principles.

Today, the Democrats face the same dilemma.

The tragedy of the Republican Party is that it did not run Taft in '48 or '52 when he would have won and restored the two party system. By settling for liberal lite, in the form of Dewey/Ike/Nixon, they put off the reclamation of the Party until 1964 and put off victory until 1980, allowing the Left an extra thirty years to damage the country.

The difficulty for the Democrats is that they squandered their Taft, when Bill Clinton ditched the New Democrat rhetoric he ran on--which represented an opportunity to turn the Party into a basically conservative party, as Tony Blair did with Labour in Britain--and governed instead as a garden variety liberal. Now they face a similar decision to the one the GOP had in '64: they can keep dipping into the same well that has rendered them a minority party or they can seek to restore the Party to first principles, but following the former scenario they might win, while following the latter means a period of years in the wilderness, waiting for the country to move back to the Left. And this latter is a particularly dicey proposition for them because they are not a party of ideas but a coalition of interests groups, and there's no guarantee that they can keep the loyalty of those groups if they are out of power and unable to serve their interests. Will unions, blacks and Hispanics still be voting overwhelmingly Democrat twenty years from now if they've been getting nothing in exchange, especially if the GOP makes some effort to woo them away? When the GOP restored its conservative ideology it hardly stood to lose its conservative base, but what is the ideology that holds the Democrats together? How do the unprincipled return to first principles? Posted by Orrin Judd at May 29, 2003 1:32 PM