DO WE REALLY NEED TWO PARTIES THAT BELIEVE IN FREEDOM?:

Something to Talk About (Matthew Miller, 9/04/03, NY Times)

What American politics urgently needs, in other words, is not a new left, but a new center. Democrats need to refocus domestic debate around a handful of fundamental goals on which all Americans can agree -- goals that in turn become the new basis for setting fiscal priorities and tradeoffs.

Yes, there will be fights over details. But if we first ask what equal opportunity and a decent life in America mean, can't we agree that anyone who works full time should be able to provide for his or her family? That every citizen should have basic health coverage? And that special efforts should be made to make sure that poor children have good schools?

Fixing these problems will take federal dollars, an amount of cash that is mistakenly viewed as "unaffordably liberal" under existing terms of debate. In fact, an agenda that covered the uninsured, subsidized a new living wage of $9 an hour and adequately compensated teachers would cost less than two cents on the national dollar, or 2 percent of the nation's gross domestic product.

Such new angles of vision are necessary if we're to get serious about America's biggest domestic problems. But the first step is for Democrats to climb out of their decade-long crouch. Republicans have been allowed to frame the conversation for so long that the terms of public debate have become surreal. After all, Margaret Thatcher would have been tossed from office if she'd proposed anything as radically conservative as Bill Clinton's health plan -- which still would have left several million people uncovered and had the private sector deliver the medicine.

As Democrats start sprinting toward their primaries, the candidate who can take what the Republican Party denigrates as "wild-eyed liberal dreams" and reframe them properly as simple common sense will have the best chance to beat President Bush -- and of deserving to.

Facing the impending decimation of the Party in November 2004, liberal commentators have adopted the idea that this is their 1964, when a candidate returns his party to first principles and, though he loses badly, motivates a generation of activists. The problem with this theme, as Mr. Miller notes, is that none of the Democratic candidates is truly in favor of classic Democratic (Statist) solutions to problems. Where Barry Goldwater was associated, fairly or not, with a willingness to use nuclear weapons to end the Cold War and wholesale opposition to the New Deal, there is no contender today who is willing to advocate these two rather basic refoms of Mr. Miller's: universal health care and a universal living wage. Sure, they all oppose any effort to privatize Social Security or use vouchers in public schools and they all support some kind of hike in taxes, but none are willing to advocate the tax levels that would be required to pay for all of this, nor the trade protections that would be required to keep jobs here if everyone made $9 an hour. All of us who value a vvibrant and competitive two-party system have to join Mr. Miller in hoping that the Democrats find their Goldwater, someone willing, even eager, to return the Party to its noble New Deal/Great Society past. Americans already have their party of freedom, The Republicans, what's lacking is an alternative party of security--why not let the Democratic Party be that party again?

Posted by orrinj at September 4, 2003 8:27 PM