Posted on 09/07/2003 6:24:40 PM PDT by Texas_Dawg
As Democrats eye their prospects for 2004, it's hard to disagree with the analysis of one of the party's pre-eminent pollsters, Stan Greenberg: "Democrats have been struggling to assert an identity, constrained by their narrowing base, bedeviled by Republican mischief, and muted by the party's own caution about Democratic principles."
Talk about prescient -- Greenberg penned that in early 1989.
That the charge sounds so much like the postmortems of last fall's election results can be read two different ways:
First, notwithstanding Bill Clinton's popular two-term presidency, life has not improved for the Democratic Party since 1989. Indeed, squint a little bit, and the party's fortunes can be seen as a steady downward slide from their post-Watergate peak in the mid-1970s -- a slide that has grown steeper in recent years.
Or, the fact that Clinton could begin a two-term presidency just four years after Greenberg's dire pronouncement suggests that the pall now hanging over the Democratic Party could vanish much the way George H.W. Bush's hold on the presidency did just over a decade ago.
Not surprisingly, most Democratic activists opt for the glass-half-full perspective. "I think these things go in cycles," said Gerald McEntee, president of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees and organized labor's premier political strategist. "I'm old enough to have lived through a couple of cycles, and I don't think the numbers suggest... that this is the end of the Democratic Party."
Likewise, Anna Greenberg, daughter of Stan and now a vice president of the polling firm he founded, said, "The [Democrats'] actual situation is different than when you read about the Republican fundraising juggernaut. We're still at 50-50; partisanship is even [in national opinion polls]. If you look at the underlying dynamics, they have not changed."
Longtime political operative Harold Ickes, who was deputy chief of staff in the Clinton White House, is only half joking when he says that there is a simple way for Democrats to avoid becoming a permanent minority party: "Win elections." In assessing his party's prospects for doing just that, Ickes added, "I'm not doom and gloom."
And Anna Greenberg isn't the only Democrat playing down the Republicans' vaunted money machine. "Yes, they have a lot of money. They always have more money. Democrats are used to doing more with less," said Ellen Malcolm, president of EMILY's List, which works to elect Democratic women who support abortion rights.
Another fount of Democratic optimism, Marla Romash, who was deputy chair of the Gore presidential campaign and now runs her own political communications firm, said, "If you look at the way things are going, here and abroad, there are plenty of openings for Democrats" -- questions about President George W. Bush's veracity in making a case for a pre-emptive strike against Iraq, the U.S. death toll in Iraq, and Bush's stewardship of the economy, to name three big ones.
A few Democratic activists, however, actually look at the Democrats' glass and see it draining. "What we're facing is a Republican Party with a minority message on the verge of becoming a majority by practicing a higher order of politics," argues Simon Rosenberg, a former television producer and a veteran of the Dukakis and Clinton presidential campaigns. Rosenberg, who founded the New Democratic Network, a centrist political fundraising group, explains, "They're more sophisticated. And they not only have set short-term goals... but have invested over 30 to 40 years."
In Rosenberg's view, the Democratic Party's focus is dangerously narrow and old-fashioned. "The Democratic infrastructure is still obsessed with turnout, even though their base is now in the low 30s" as a percentage of voters, he said. Rosenberg argues that Democrats need to devote much more time, attention, and money to bolstering the party's long-term prospects. "Do we want to look at this in the face and acknowledge the slowly melting ice cube," he asked, "or just pretend that there's nothing wrong?" Rosenberg is part of a growing chorus that believes Democrats and liberals need to replicate not only the campaign-trail savvy of the Republicans but also the GOP's large network of think tanks, and radio and television shows that give conservatives intellectual vitality as well as a permanent megaphone. A few such leftist counter-insurgencies are just now getting off the ground.
Leaky glass, half-full glass. Either way, the Democratic Party faces fairly daunting obstacles to achieving a quick return to power in 2004 and to mimicking conservatives' network of supporting institutions.
What Might Have Been Democrats would certainly be entitled to a funk, should they care to indulge in one.
They had high hopes for holding the White House in 2000 and, two years later, for holding the Senate and recouping some losses in the House. Instead, they are watching the Republicans make history: Not only does the GOP control both houses of Congress and the White House for the first time in half a century, but the party regained the Senate and gained ground in the House in an off-year election, even though midterm contests tend to hurt the party holding the White House.
At the state level, 2002 ended a half-century in which Democrats held more legislative seats than their GOP rivals. Democrats went from controlling one more state legislature than Republicans to controlling five fewer than Republicans (12 have divided control). And although the GOP's hold on governors' mansions has slipped, Republicans still occupy most of them -- 26 to the Democrats' 24.
Democrats can't get over the feeling that this is all one gigantic mistake. They can't help but remember that Al Gore won the popular vote in the 2000 presidential contest and that, with a swing of a measly 94,000 votes out of more than 75.7 million cast nationally last November, Democrats would now control both the House and the Senate.
And Democrats invariably argue that Republicans have been eking out victories not on the strength of their agenda but through happenstance and demagoguery. In the happenstance category is the popularity that accrued to George W. Bush in the aftermath of 9/11 and in the buildup to war with Iraq. In the dissembling category goes everything from overselling the threat posed by Saddam Hussein to making meretricious promises on such traditionally Democratic issues as education, Social Security, and Medicare. And, they argue, Bush has used his party's narrow victories to promote policies far more radical than what the public supports.
But each GOP victory, no matter how narrow or how won, has allowed Republicans to acquire a disproportionate grip on power, which in turn is being used by the GOP to try to consolidate those gains. Controlling the House, Senate, and White House gives Republicans enormous advantages in setting agendas, attracting and rewarding supporters, and having access to the national microphone. And Republicans have not been timid about exploiting those advantages.
"Republicans spent too long in the wilderness not to use committee assignments, the advantages of incumbency and its enormous fundraising opportunities, aggressive recruiting, [and] their control of the calendar to build on that success," said Republican pollster Bill McInturff. "All of those things Republicans are shrewdly and competently using to continue their success."
House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas, for example, is relentlessly pressuring the trade associations and interest groups that line K Street to replace Democratic lobbyists with Republican ones -- to guarantee that the GOP will receive greater support not only in legislative matters but also in fundraising. In 2000-2002, DeLay used a network of five fundraising committees to raise nearly $13 million, according to Democracy 21, a foundation-supported group trying to curb the influence of money in politics. That sum includes $1.5 million in soft money that a DeLay-affiliated committee raised to help Republicans win control of the Texas House in 2002 for the first time in 130 years. Most of the corporate contributors to the Texas-focused fund "weren't Texans at all, but out-of-state businesses trying to win favor with House Majority Leader Tom DeLay," the Houston Chronicle reported.
Democrats complain bitterly about how the Bush administration has improved on the age-old game of mixing official business with campaigning -- on the public's tab. They point to Bush's Top Gun reprise on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln to announce Saddam's defeat and to his deal to have the Department of Health and Human Services pay more than half a million dollars for trips to 2002 political events. That price tag, reported by the General Accounting Office, is roughly five times what Clinton spent during a similar period.
Meanwhile, in the Texas Legislature, with encouragement from DeLay and White House political strategist Karl Rove -- both Texans -- Republicans are using their new majority to try to upend tradition and throw out the congressional district map that a federal court drew up just two years ago. The goal is to convert Texas Democrats' current two-seat majority in the state's House delegation to a five-seat majority for Republicans.
Nationally, with the public still relatively evenly split between the two parties, the balance of power at the federal level may still hinge on jump balls. But each time the Republicans win, they come back into the game a few inches taller. Going into the 2004 elections, Democrats face enormous vertical challenges, including some of their own making.
The new campaign finance law -- pushed principally by Democrats and now being challenged in court -- imposes new restrictions on campaign contributions that stand to hurt Democrats disproportionately. Republicans, by contrast, have an unprecedented fundraising dynamo in President Bush, who is widely expected to raise at least $200 million and to be able to dole out substantial sums to state parties in support of Republican congressional candidates.
What's more, redistricting changes over the past decade, including many made under Democratic control, have resulted in a House likely to be dominated by Republicans for the rest of the decade. Any new congressional map coming out of Texas would enormously deepen the hole Democrats are in. And Democrats' troubles could worsen. GOP pollster McInturff argues that minority status has a way of perpetuating itself. Having assumed in each election since 1994 that they would recapture the House, "Democrats have not really adjusted to a world where they start to face a whole row of defections by their senior members and where, when you're trying to recruit, the best potential Democratic candidates do not want to be in the minority."
In the Senate, which remains competitive, Democrats still must defend 19 seats next year -- four more than Republicans. Nearly one-third of those Democratic seats are in the ever-more-Republican South. And the Democratic presidential contenders seem doomed not only to have their combined fundraising total fall far short of Bush's but also to spend much of their money between now and next spring beating up on one another. Unlike Bush, every Democratic candidate is likely to accept public financing for the primary season and thus will face a spending limit during that time of about $46 million.
In the absence of a Democratic standard-bearer, the centrist and leftist wings of the party continue to squabble. Beyond the Beltway and through the Internet, the most energized faction has gravitated toward former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, whose blunt-spoken anti-war candidacy may be cathartic for Bush-o-phobes but is widely viewed by the punditocracy as potentially alienating the swing voters the party must have in order to win. McInturff goes so far as to argue that Dean's early success will dog the Democratic Party no matter who becomes its nominee. The cynical insiders' view of Dean's candidacy -- a view expressed within both parties -- can be reduced to a slogan: Don't Get Even, Get Mad.
As organized labor -- still the Democratic Party's most powerful ally -- examines the party's presidential race, it remains divided. A dozen unions, most of them industrial unions, have endorsed Rep. Dick Gephardt of Missouri, a longtime labor supporter and free-trade opponent whose campaign appears to be stalling. But the ascendant service-sector and public-employee unions have been leaning toward Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, whom they consider more electable. AFSCME's McEntee said he has been reminding fellow union presidents and other liberal interest groups that to win the White House, a Democrat must appeal to a broad constituency. "You have to cut them some slack and not make your issue the sole reason for your support," he said. Despite being heavily courted by Gephardt, the AFL-CIO's top honchos postponed their endorsement decision until at least mid-October.
Left Behind The professionals in the Democratic Party and its allied groups know that moping is a luxury they can't afford and that anger isn't enough. Most of them reflexively minimize the party's fissures and its oft-alleged lack of a message. "The message part will take care of itself once we get a standard-bearer," insists Ken Strasma, research director for the National Committee for an Effective Congress, the granddaddy of liberal political action committees.
And despite periodic complaining about Republican ruthlessness, Democratic and allied activists readily concede that Republicans have vastly outpaced Democrats in political technology and tactics. "I would have to give them credit for being quicker to figure out" how to use high-tech methods to more effectively reach donors, activists, and voters, said Laura Quinn, a partner at QRS Newmedia, a technology consulting firm that has a major contract with the Democratic National Committee. "If we had been quicker and faster and made the investment to figure out the tools and techniques," she added, "we would not be in the same situation we're in now: behind, out of power, and at a financial disadvantage."
Starting with targeted mailings in the mid-1970s, Republicans have been pioneering methods to cultivate small donors, activists, and voters. Democrats have relied instead on a smaller number of sizable donations. Campaign finance law has long barred large contributions to individual candidates for federal office, but until this year, individuals, labor unions, and businesses could still contribute unlimited sums, known in the trade as "soft dollars," to political parties.
The GOP's approach, over time, has given Republicans a substantial advantage in raising large numbers of small, direct contributions to candidates. Known as hard-dollar contributions, such donations have long been more valuable to candidates than large soft-money contributions. Hard money can be used to campaign directly for a candidate -- through TV ads, for example, while soft money can bolster a given candidate only indirectly -- through party-sponsored get-out-the-vote efforts or ads spotlighting candidates' positions but stopping short of advocating a vote for or against that candidate. The campaign finance overhaul passed last year delivers a double whammy to Democrats: It raises the hard-dollar amount an individual can contribute to a given campaign and bans soft-money contributions to the parties.
Republicans' innovations in niche marketing haven't stopped at direct-mail fundraising. In recent years, Republican operatives, with encouragement from White House political director Rove, have been experimenting with ways to harness the power of the microprocessor and the intimacy of the Internet to refine and deepen the GOP's relationship with its donors, activists, and voters.
Republicans have begun aggressively collecting information about individual voters' attitudes and are using computers to assemble political portraits of voters in much the same way that retailers compile data about customers for marketing purposes. Thus, Republicans have advanced beyond the crude demographic pigeonholing of voters by party registration or by the candidate they say they intend to support. That, in turn, has allowed Republican strategists to begin carefully crafting appeals to woo voters who otherwise would once have been written off as favoring the Democratic candidate or as unlikely to vote.
In 2002, Republicans successfully combined their sophisticated ability to identify potential voters with low-tech weapons -- door-to-door voter-registration and voter-turnout drives -- self-consciously patterned after the ones used so long and so effectively by labor unions to the benefit of Democrats. The GOP "72-Hour Project," while dwarfed by similar efforts by Democrats and their allies, boosted Republican turnout beyond Democrats' expectations and tipped the balance in some close races.
Consider the upsets that the new GOP techniques helped produce in Georgia last November. There, Republicans captured the governorship for the first time in 130 years, ousted Sen. Max Cleland, who lost three limbs in the Vietnam War, and defeated the state's Democratic House speaker and Senate majority leader. The key, Ralph Reed, who chaired the Georgia State Republican Party during the elections, later told party leaders was the "huge rural vote that we'd never had before and that we could have never won without." That vote, along with more habitual Republican voters, turned out because of intensive mailings and volunteer work -- 5.2 million missives and more than 3,000 volunteers targeting 600 precincts in the final six weeks. Most analysts also think that rural voters turned out for the GOP because gubernatorial challenger Sonny Perdue capitalized on resentment of incumbent Democrat Roy Barnes for changing the state flag to make the Confederate battle emblem less prominent.
In the view of Democrat Ickes, "One of the Democrats' refuges used to be sitting around and saying, 'Yes, but we know how to get out the vote.' Democrats have slowly awakened to the fact that they're losing [their lock] on this particular area," he said. "We've fallen behind on technology and techniques."
Money Isn't Everything Now Democrats are seeing that confronting their tactical and fundraising deficits in earnest is necessary but isn't enough. Their party must intensify and update its traditional efforts to turn out its base.
For the three Democratic Party committees -- the national and Senate and House arms -- this has meant scrambling to assemble the technology and databases needed to scare up more hard dollars. How they're doing depends on the yardstick. Since late 2001, the Democratic National Committee e-mail list of voters has grown twentyfold to some 1.4 million. The Republican National Committee is rumored to have tripled the 1 million addresses on its list over the same period. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee is "now raising hard dollars twice as fast as it did in the last election cycle," Sen. Debbie Stabenow of Michigan, the committee's vice chair, said in an interview. The committee's second-quarter figures showed that it raised $10.8 million in the first half of this year. In the same period, the National Republican Senatorial Committee raised $14.6 million. And this doesn't count the loose change that Bush's re-election campaign is likely to be able to hand out to Republicans.
But Stabenow said she's living proof that Democrats don't have to match Republicans dollar for dollar to be competitive: "I faced an incumbent and was outspent 2-to-1 in my race and won. You have to have a certain threshold of money, but you do not have to outspend your opponent. Fortunately, it's still about hard work and who you're fighting for."
But liberal activists are plenty worried about the Democratic Party's loss of soft money. A number of prominent individuals and groups have been scrambling to round up soft money -- now that the party can no longer accept it -- in order to make the kinds of indirect, candidate-boosting expenditures in which the party long specialized. Many of these new groups have similar names, similar membership lists, and overlapping leadership.
Ickes and another prominent political pro from the Clinton administration, former White House public liaison aide Mike Lux, are among those setting up groups. Ickes said his outfit will be "a media fund" that will raise soft money to run issue ads beginning next March to bolster the Democrats' de facto presidential nominee. Lux's group, American Family Voices, has already aired a tough TV ad campaign questioning the Bush administration's record in combating corporate crime.
Labor unions -- now barred from lavishing huge sums on Democratic Party committees -- are also financing new groups to spread their money and their formidable skill at turning out voters beyond their own membership. "The key thing for the labor movement, that they have to understand, is that 14 million union members" -- nearly the total membership in American unions -- "could vote the right way and we would still not win. We've got to reach out and be part of other groups to put together base that is strong enough," AFSCME's McEntee stressed.
To that end, former AFL-CIO political director Steve Rosenthal, a pioneer in get-out-the-vote techniques now being copied by Republicans, recently launched Partnership for American Families, a labor-financed effort to increase voter registration and turnout, mainly in minority communities. Ironically, despite the ecumenical impulse behind the new labor efforts, intramural antagonisms have led several unions, including AFSCME, to split with Rosenthal and form Voices for Working Families.
Other liberal groups have also concluded that the new campaign finance restrictions mean that they'd better band together to raise money and coordinate efforts if they are to have any hope of blunting the Republicans' fundraising edge.
"We have to find ways to come together to do lots of the pieces of the presidential campaign, because the party will not have the soft money to use. We on the Democratic side are looking for effective ways to do the work of delivering the message and getting out the vote that used to be done by the party," said Malcolm of EMILY's List. Malcolm and her organization, having acquired a reputation for tactical sophistication, are leading several new efforts, launched in July, aimed at bringing liberal-leaning groups together to register and turn out voters.
One such group, America Votes, is an effort to coordinate the existing voter-registration, -education and -turnout efforts of more than a dozen liberal organizations, including the AFL-CIO; MoveOn.org; NARAL Pro-Choice America; NAACP National Voter Fund, the Sierra Club, and ACORN, which organizes the urban poor.
Another such group, America Coming Together, is a political committee designed to vastly expand existing organizations' efforts. Formed by Malcom, Rosenthal, Sierra Club Executive Director Carl Pope, Service Employees International Union President Andy Stern, and America Votes President Cecile Richards, among others, the committee has already raised nearly half of its goal of $75 million from individuals and labor unions -- including a $10 million kick-off donation from investment banker George Soros.
The frenzy of activity on the left underscores that -- with the electorate so closely divided -- the ability to precisely target, register, and turn out potential supporters is critical to the fortunes of both major parties.
Missing The Lawn For The Grassroots Some Democratic activists worry that the obsession with the micro-mechanics of the next election and the vivisection of the voting public are obscuring a longer-term problem for their party. "We have to recognize that one party is seeking to achieve long-term dominance. And it's not really clear what the Democrats' strategy is, or if they even have one," said the New Democratic Network's Rosenberg.
He isn't suggesting that Democrats ignore the immediate future. After all, his political action committee raises money for the campaigns of centrist Democratic congressional candidates. But he has been crisscrossing the country warning his party's large donors that if the party doesn't invest in longer-term strategies, it could find itself marginalized for many years to come.
Rosenberg also argues that the Democrats' old ways of looking at their place in the world are out of date and that it's wrongheaded to think that a winning presidential nominee would be a panacea. "There's a powerful sense of nostalgia for previous days when Democrats had a governing majority," he said. Back in the early 1980s and 1990s, when the party had congressional majorities, Democrats came to believe that to be the majority party, "all you had to do was pick the lock on the presidency," he added. But 10 years after Clinton moved into the White House, "we have nothing, and Republicans have gained significantly. The argument that all that's needed to reorient the party is to win a presidential election is clearly a false premise. Republicans have built a huge infrastructure that is bigger than any one office. We have not had the same set of broad, ambitious goals."
Democrats, he argued, would do well to study the way that conservatives, starting in the 1950s, worked to build a national movement and the way that Republicans plotted their return from political exile after the Watergate scandal. Conservative activists and intellectuals began an array of institutions and publications -- from William F. Buckley's National Review in 1955 to the creation of the Heritage Foundation think tank in 1973 -- designed to nurture a movement rather than a lone candidate.
"Since they were getting beat," Rosenberg continued, "they reinvented their brand, invested, and devised a better political machine than what Democrats have. Republicans have an unbelievably mature array of institutions that are partisan but not of the party."
Rosenberg's group is trying a few new ideas of its own -- a mentoring program for promising young elected Democratic officials, a large-scale survey and research project intent on identifying a new majority coalition for Democrats, and another project to enhance Democratic efforts to reach out to Hispanics.
Rosenberg isn't singing totally solo: Hillary Rodham Clinton has sounded a similar theme, beginning with her controversial remarks about a "vast, right-wing conspiracy" out to destroy her husband's presidency, and intensified by the publication of repentant Hillary-basher David Brock's allegations of anti-Clinton conservative shenanigans in his 2002 confessional Blinded by the Right.
This fall, liberals -- or "progressives," as they prefer to be called -- are preparing to step up the battle of ideas when Clinton White House Chief of Staff John Podesta officially launches the American Majority Institute. David Sirota, a spokesman for the group, declared, "Government is dominated by right-wing conservatism. And the media is increasingly dominated by an extreme right-wing minority. Americans are far more progressive than their representatives. And what we will try to do is give voice and policy heft to that fact."
Already on board are former Clintonites Bob Boorstin; Morton Halperin, most recently of the Open Society Institute; and Neera Tanden, former policy director of Hillary Clinton's 2000 Senate campaign, who is the think tank's domestic policy director.
Liberals are aiming to reclaim the lowly radio dial as well as the lofty realm of ideas. Wealthy Chicagoans Anita and Sheldon Drobny have launched AnShell Media with $10 million in seed money to produce and distribute programming to counter Rush Limbaugh and Michael Savage. Company officials are often quoted hinting that they will feature a star-studded marquee -- the names of comedians Al Franken and Janeane Garofalo keep being dropped, but no formal announcements have been made.
And late last year, political activist Tom Athans, who is now married to Stabenow, joined broadcast executive and former Clinton administration official Paul Fiddick, president of Emmis International, to form a nonprofit group called Democracy Radio dedicated to scouting liberal talk talent and persuading broadcasting companies that it can be profitable to air such voices. The group launched what it intends to be an annual event, bringing liberal talk-show hosts from around the country to Capitol Hill.
"Talk radio's been a growing influence on discussion of political ideas," Athans said. He noted that his own survey found that nearly 90 percent of the approximately 340 radio talk shows with an ideological bent are conservative.
Looking beyond radio, Gore has been talking with investment banker and mega-bucks Democratic contributor Steven Rattner about lining up investors for a liberal-minded cable network, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
Haunted By Failure But all these progressive/Democratic ventures will have to overcome skepticism about their staying power.
Past talk-radio ventures have been haunted by the failure of some of liberalism's most golden tongues -- former New York Gov. Mario Cuomo and former Texas Agriculture Commissioner Jim Hightower -- to keep a radio audience. AnShell and Athans say the lessons are: Don't hire rookie broadcasters. And do realize that talk radio is as much about entertainment as substance.
As for think tanks, it's instructive to consider the fate of the Center for National Policy, which had its origins in the Democratic debacle that was the 1972 presidential campaign. Acolytes of Edmund Muskie and George McGovern created the Democratic Forum "to debate the traditional premises that had underpinned the party -- no holds barred," recalled Keith Haller, one of the organizers. The group spawned a national magazine and in the mid-1970s sponsored the influential national issues convention at which Georgian Jimmy Carter first attracted notice. "We were outside party structure, challenging their premises on a variety of issues, and really engaging sectors that had not been engaged," Haller said.
Although the group thrived as a sort of White House-in-exile during Republican administrations -- attracting prominent Democrats to its board -- it tended to founder during Democratic ones. It went on hiatus when its leaders were absorbed by the Carter administration, but subsequently took on new life, first as the Center for Democratic Policy after President Carter's failed re-election bid in 1980, then as the Center for National Policy.
The center was intended, Haller said, to be the Democrats' answer to the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation -- "a vibrant place to develop policy alternatives -- which is crucially important to the party's long-term success -- unfettered by the immediacy of elections and interest-group demands."
The center suffered after Clinton's election, when its president, Madeleine Albright, and board vice chairman, Robert Rubin, were lured into the Democratic administration.
Over time, the group, which has often struggled for funding, has increasingly distanced itself from its Democratic roots. In the early 1980s, under the direction of Cyrus Vance, it deleted "Democratic" from its name. In the mid-1990s, under President Maureen Steinbruner, it became explicitly nonpartisan, inviting Republicans onto its board in what critics call a futile bid to attract more donations.
In the past few years, the center has sunk into almost total obscurity and was nearly forced to close its doors last year. "It tried to be all things to all people," said Haller, who now heads a company that runs surveys for business and the media. "That's the all-too-familiar political road that has no end. It has lost its raison d'etre, the passion it had in the early years."
Yet the center was recently rescued financially -- largely by its news chairman, philanthropist Peter B. Kovler of the Marjorie Kovler Fund.
Why have liberals so often floundered where conservatives have succeeded in building institutions to bolster their ideas and voices?
Democrats are quick to cite corporate America's willingness to bankroll ideas it finds congenial. Conservatives also benefit from the patience and wealth of a few crusading conservative institutions, such as the Scaife Foundations and the Bradley Foundation, which don't shy from controversial or long-term projects.
Steinbruner said that progressives wrongly assume that the righteousness of their causes is self-evident. "We need to do some serious thinking about what we mean when we say government serves a common purpose," she said. "It's a fairly big and fairly fundamental task, which progressives have not seen as that for a long time."
Also, Democrats tend to lack the kind of fire that was lit in the belly of Republicans after the GOP fell to its post-Nixon nadir in the mid-1970s. For all their recent setbacks, many Democrats seem to believe that time is on their side. In their recent book, The Emerging Democratic Majority, left-leaning political analysts Ruy Texiera and John Judis argue that a host of economic, demographic, and ideological changes could set the stage for a new Democratic majority by decade's end.
By contrast, when the Republicans hit bottom in the 1970s, "there were very serious discussions about changing the party's name to rebrand it," McInturff said. Veterans of the era, he said, still tell stories about the time they found themselves in a room "contemplating launching a campaign under the theme 'Republicans Are People Too.' That's how grim it was."
"Any fair reading of Democratic prospects does not place them anywhere near that," he said.
Hitting bottom, however unpleasant, did strip Republicans of any illusions of a quick comeback and steeled party activists' discipline and resolve in the decades since. Moreover, without changing its name, the Republican Party has succeeded in rebranding itself since the mid-1970s. Democrats, by contrast, having arrived at minority status through a series of near misses, can't seem to shake the feeling that their predicament is a mistake. "We wuz robbed," however, may not make the best campaign slogan or form the best foundation for a rebound.
This is exactly why 2004 will be another landslide for the GOP.
Probably so. But not any time soon and definitely not in 2004.
Which is exactly why I vote for the most electable Republican I can.
What???? The Democrats have principles????
(Oh, yeah. "Win at all costs, no matter what you have to destroy in the process.")
Really? Why? California having a Democratic governor says very little (or maybe, says a lot) about the state of the national Democratic Party.
Of course. But a loss there doesn't change much about the national trends, which are steadily pro-GOP. In fact, a Bustamante governorship might just speed the process towards the GOP eventually making a recovery in California as well.
Yep. And union membership has been plummeting for 2 decades. (Thank you, Ronnie.)
Money?
Issue?
Turnout?
Principle/position? (snicker)
Voter ignorance? maybe.
The voters are becoming less and less ignorant with every election, much to the dismay of the 'Rat party.
You forgot two sources of the "bounce"....
Election fraud and judicial law making. The 'Rats are very good at that!
LVM
I don't want him to win. I've been bashing the McNaderites on here for weeks. But ultimately, I don't live in California and don't buy the argument that its problems have a distinguishably negative effect on the rest of the country. If anything, I think California's problems are great for more pro-business, pro-GOP states.
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