The Democrats are delusional, as usual.
The Democrats are still operating as if the country exists in the Industrial Age. It still hasn't dawned on them that the Information Age is a completely different beast.
In the past the Democrats held power purely based on their control of the information outlets. With the democratization of information, information has been freed from the confines of filtering by the news media. The process is far from complete, and alternative media is still in its infancy, but it is a powerful and influential infancy.
If the Democrats are going to run on the platform of higher wages, rolling back the prescription drug laws, and unimplementing parts of the Homeland Security Act, the Democrats are in for the following surprises.
1) The best way to raise wages is to give incentives to businesses to grow. Economic expansion. Cutting off the supply of illegal immigrants will also help increase wages. Open boarders are one factor in depressing wage growth in the private sector, by forcing legitimate workers to compete with illegal workers for slots, in which illegal workers carry an added bonus of being able to accept lower than minimum wage rates.
2) Artificially imposed wage increases decrease the purchasing power of the dollar and increase the rate of inflation. Being paid more does a worker no good if it means they can buy less.
3) Senior citizens will have grown accustomed to the new prescription benefit, and according to Fred Barnes, it is costing far less than projected. For those of you who don't like the plan, consider the cost of having to deal with senior citizens who skimp on their medications because they can't afford them. The medical costs of caring for senior citizens in emergency situations may be avoidable if they're able to obtain their medications at a low enough cost.
4) Homeland Security is a losing issue for Democrats. In 4 years, Americans have been told repeatedly that the Bush Administration is a fascist regime that abuses the powers granted in the Act. In that time, no additional terrorist attacks have succeeded on our soil, and the powers exercised by the government under the HSA have been relatively mild and unobtrusive. While everybody has heard about FBI agents allegedly visiting the homes of people who checked out "certain" books from the library, nobody actually knows somebody who was so visited, accosted, and interrogated to the degree that the urban legend suggests.
The Democrats are royally screwed if this is the outline of their 2006 platform.