Posted on 11/04/2004 9:48:13 PM PST by Former Military Chick
Washington — On Wednesday morning, Democrats across the country awoke to a situation they have not experienced since before the New Deal: We are now, without a doubt, America's minority party. We do not have the presidency. We are outnumbered in the Senate, the House, governorships and legislatures. And the conservative majority on the Supreme Court seems likely to be locked in place for a generation. It is clearly a moment that calls for serious reflection.
I had the honor of working for both Al Gore and John Kerry. I believe America would have been fortunate to have had them in the Oval Office. That neither won is not primarily a commentary on them. Nor were their defeats really the result of the mistakes, attacks and tactics that pundits are so endlessly fascinated by: Al Gore's sighs in debates or John Kerry's slow response to the Swift boat veterans; Bill Clinton's campaigning (or lack thereof) in 2000 and 2004; the handling of the Elián González and Mary Cheney controversies. Any time Democrats spend in the coming weeks discussing the merits of our past candidates' personalities or their campaigns' personnel will be time wasted.
The overarching problem Democrats have today is the lack of a clear sense of what the party stands for. For years this has been a source of annoyance for bloggers and grass-roots activists. And in my time working for Al Gore and John Kerry, it certainly left me feeling hamstrung.
Democrats have a collection of policy positions that are sensible and right. John Kerry made this very clear. What we don't have, and what we sorely need, is what President George H. W. Bush so famously derided as "the vision thing" - a worldview that makes a thematic argument about where America is headed and where we want to take it.
For most of the 20th century, Democrats had a bold vision: we would use government programs to make Americans' lives more stable and secure. In 1996, President Clinton told us this age had passed, that "the era of big government is over." He was right - the world had changed. But the party has not answered the basic question: What comes next?
It's not the sort of question that gets answered in the heat of a national election. A presidential campaign feels like running full speed across a tightrope. If you're working on its message, you spend your days sitting around conference tables in poorly lighted rooms, surrounded by spent pizza boxes and buzzing Blackberries, with the clock ticking down on another day and another speech. This is not the place to devise a new thematic direction for the party. What you wind up offering are quips and quibbles, slogans and sound bites, and heaping portions of poll-tested pabulum.
The press also seems to overstate what staff changes can do within a campaign. Much was made of the "who's in, who's out" reports about the Kerry team, with reporters devising narratives about a supposed "shift to the middle" or a "lurch to the left." While new advisers can alter tactics and form new messages, efforts on their part to create a larger vision will fail. That has to happen long before the primaries - and it requires that the party knows where it is going.
Throughout the campaign, voters told reporters and pollsters that they wanted a change, but didn't "know what John Kerry stands for." Our response was to churn out more speeches outlining the details of policies that Senator Kerry would then deliver in front of a backdrop that said something like "Rx to Stronger Health Care." Of course, it turned out that Americans weren't very interested in Mr. Kerry's campaign promises - perhaps because they no longer believe politicians will follow through on their commitments. They wanted to know instead how he saw the world. And we never told them.
Misguided as they may be, the Republicans have a clear vision of America's future. Confronted with their ambitious agenda we have not chosen to match it. Instead, we have adopted Nancy Reagan's old antidrug motto, "Just Say No." As in "Stop George Bush's Assault on the Environment," "Repeal George Bush's Tax Cuts for the Wealthy" and "End George Bush's Policy of Unilateralism." These are good stands. But they are not enough. And the Republicans ended up defining John Kerry because we did not.
I don't pretend to know exactly what the party should do now. But I do know that we better start answering some important questions. What is our economic vision in a globalized world? How do we respond to the desire of many Americans to have choices and decision-making power of their own? How can we speak to Americans' moral and spiritual yearnings? How can our national security vision be broader than just a critique of the Republican's foreign policy? If we sweep this debate under the rug, four years from now another set of people around another conference table will be struggling with the same issues we did. And America cannot afford the same result.
Long after midnight in November 2000, I stood in the rain in Nashville and listened to the Gore campaign chairman, William Daley, tell us there would be no victory speech. On Wednesday, long after midnight, I stood in the rain in Boston listening to John Edwards tell us the same thing. I'm sick of standing in the rain.
Andrei Cherny, the author of "The Next Deal," was director of speechwriting and a special policy adviser to John Kerry from February 2003 to last April.
they sold their soul to the devil and he's a greedy lil sucker...
As I posted on another thread, concerning these weasels: "We are Transparent Liars and Frauds. We have to learn to become Opaque Liars and Frauds."
You are joking, right?
No, I'm serious. If the left wants serious power, they should run hard left!
Shout out their belief that they should ban all guns! That taxes should be raised on everyone! That medical care should be run by the government! Tell everyone that we will let the UN and france make our decisions on national security!!! These are the positions americans really hold in their hearts!
If they did that, even the simpletons in the red states could see how wise and good their positions are. They'd vote for them in droves. Heck, the only thing that could get them more votes would be to run the beloved michael moore in 2008!
But luckily for us they won't do that-they'll just go on being milquetoast moderates, never realizing their true potential lies in being as radical as possible!!!!!
shit...this guy gets it. He doesn't know what to do about it and that is because, despite his turn his nose up comments at GOP positions, the GOP position is the right one in 2004. I mean, in 1904, did you have a party exspousing the ideas of 1835? Well now days you have the party of 1935 unable to move forward in 2004.
They are the furthest thing from the 'progressive' party today.
JFK was a life member of the NRA
I believe that democrats from 40 years ago would be embarrassed by what their party has become.<<<<<<<<<
Read Zell Miller's book, A National Party No More, and you will know what the democrats from 40 years ago think. It is rivetting and absolutely right.
Very true. I see them not so much as a party but as a conglomerate of special interest groups with little or no synergy. Their interest groups are of a particular variety - the thing they have in common is that they're all sponges feeding at the government troughs. There they partake of money or special treatment or newly fabricated rights. None of their interest groups are people that, in JFK's words, "...do for their country".
The party positions are defined by polling the various groups to see what they should fill the troughs with.
Soul searching? Even if they do find it, how will they buy it back?
Traditionally their approach would be to levy another tax, but now they lack the majority to pass one.<<<<<<<<
Ok I laughed so hard I almost choked when I read the above. Thanks.
See! There you go. Kennedy was a life-long NRA member.
No doubt he'd be a Republican today.
OK. I get it.
"I don't pretend to know exactly what the party should do now." Give up your communist delusions, come to Jesus, and become Republicans.
Yes he most certainly did. And it scared them.
Uh, oh. Keep this guy quite. He gets it.
You cannot. Not with your majority-atheism. And don't think for a minute that Evangelicals will be fooled by nonsense about Hillary's "deep faith". They remember quite well her Michael Lerner-inspired ramblings and her dabbles with ISLAM. Bush had no such disturbing baggage, and neither will our '08 nominee.
The Democrats cannot answer what Americans yearn most for...to fill with meaning the vacuum that the Left has created over the past 40 years.
Change parties or move to France.
Cute, and do think there are few more Zell Miller's out there that stand up on principle, another Ron Silver.
While I disagree on many issues, he crossed over on the war issues, having set aside his discomfort with the GOP social issues.
That shows the character of a person. We do NOT have to always vote party lines, I myself have voted for a democrat on the local level.
In the end, I was hoping that republicans that were going to vote for Kerry went into the booth and thought, don't agree with Bush on the war but Kerry and the supreme court and they hurried to color in the circle and chose Bush.
Looks to me like they've achieved most of them.
We have fourty years of catching up to do.
QUOTE: "For most of the 20th century, Democrats had a bold vision: we would use government programs to make Americans' lives more stable and secure."
It's no wonder they are clueless. Americans don't grow up dreaming to be on welfare, depend on foodstamps, and most aspire to retire on more than a Social Security check every month. They are still in "Great Depression mode" on domestic issues and in "Vietnam" mode on foreign policy, clinging to a worldview colored by these two very troubled periods.
They warn their voters that a Republican victory will return blacks to slavery, throw old people out on the streets, bring back the sweatshops and turn young single women into concubines. They condemn the successful and defend a pulic school system that teaches children to despise their country and that they will always be one pay check from being homeless. It is clear why they are becoming a Party of the disfunctional, depressed, pessimistic and faithless. The same party that warns that the gap between the haves and have-nots is widening increasingly represents the richest and poorest among us. The vanishing middle class they speak of has changed immensely since their celebrated New Deal was dismantled. A record number of Americans believe in G-d, who they treat as an unwelcome stranger. More Americans are repulsed by abortion, but their candidates are weary or reluctant to concede that the fetus with a beating heart and active brain may actually be a living human being.
What should they do now? Instead of fleeing to Canada or France, they should leave the coasts and spend their holidays rediscovering America's Red Country. That would be a good start.
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