A Modest Proposal for the Democratic Leadership

As our demoralizing string of losses has made excruciatingly clear, we once feisty donkeys are in trouble up to our asses. We need to immediately and radically re-introduce ourselves to the American public as what we truly are – the party of the Middle Class. Everyone already knows that the Republicans are a party now held captive by the ultra-rich and the fanatic and yet they continue to beat our butts because they are the devil they know. Agree with this administration or not, at least its stand on most issues is as simple to understand as a children’s story.

My dream for a revitalized Democratic party goes something like this:

It’s late August and, before the next session of Congress convenes, Howard Dean, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, John Kerry, Hilary Clinton, Barack Obama, Ted Kennedy, Maxine Waters and the rest of the Democratic leadership holes up in Hilton Head, South Carolina, for a week. During that week they hammer out a simple, one-page, seven-point declaration of principles entitled “A Promise for America’s Future.” In it they spell out a centrist, common-sense platform that the vast majority of Americans could rally around.

1.Iraq. As Nancy Pelosi has recently suggested and John Kerry floated during his campaign, we need a date certain to begin pulling out of Iraq. Americans will see that only with us is there an end in sight to Bush’s catastrophic folly. I wrote about this before and need to add here that the naysayers’ argument that the insurgents would just lay low till our pullout makes little logical sense. If they were indeed to play ‘possum for a year or eighteen months, we’d have that long to both prepare the Iraqi army in relative calm and compromise with those Sunnis willing to live in peace with their neighbors, thus neutralizing as much of the insurgency as would ever give up their dream of a Baathist return to power.

2.Terrorism. We demand adequate funding for port and mass-transit protection, something the Republicans have fought against. Declaring our intention to pull out of Iraq, meaningfully engaging in the Middle East peace process, and longer-term projects like funding schools in places like Pakistan and Yemen to provide an alternative to the fundamentalist madrasas will all go a long way to ensuring a safer America.

3. The Economy and the Deficit. In this new global economy we’re going to need to aggressively retrain American workers to compete and win. And we will rollback the Bush tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans so that all America’s children will inherit an America of limitless possibility.

4. The Environment. We promise not to hand down to our children an America less beautiful, clean and healthy than the one handed down to us. ANWR and our national parks are off limits to rapacious development. We will also aggressively invest in curbing our nation’s dependence on oil, both for national security as well as for the future of the planet.

5. Health Care. No American citizen, regardless of income, will be uninsured.

6. Ethics. As Rep. Maxine Waters has suggested, there needs to be a period of time after working for the government for which you cannot do business with the government. Never again will insider companies like Halliburton fleece American taxpayers. And we promise never to place industry insiders in positions of regulatory authority over their former industries.

7. Social Security. We will “mend it, not end it” to ensure it is forever solvent.

I envision the Democratic leaders holding a press conference when they’re done and one by one publicly signing the document. We’re obviously taking a page from Newt Gingrich’s “Contract for America,” and why not. It brought back the Republicans not just from the brink but right into a long-lasting majority. The Democratic twist on this document, however, is that it would not be just for the party elite. There would be a computer nearby, and after they all signed, then they would post the document on the web and anyone who agreed with these seven principles could electronically sign it as well.

Never again could anyone ever say they didn’t know where Democrats stand. And from this base we could start fighting our way back into power to take America back from those that have so perverted and betrayed her noble goals, her shining history.

I’d love to hear what you all think. Who knows, if enough of us think this is a good idea, maybe the leaders of our party will listen.