With the once seemingly invincible Republican machine sputtering under the weight of incompetence and scandal, now is the time for Democrats to leap out from our caves and finish them off. We have sat back long enough watching them destroy themselves, America now hungers for a positive alternative to their collapsed and corrupt policies. Furthermore, Bush has pushed his party so far to the right, saddled them with a hugely unpopular war and draconian social policies dictated by a minority of overzealous evangelicals that the prize of the vast middle is just lying there waiting for somebody, anybody, to claim it.
Yet who will deliver that message and will it be in a language that anyone can understand?
Everyone these days has a theory as to why the Democratic Party refuses to actually stand for anything anymore. New York Times columnist David Brooks recently asserted that there are two camps of Dems: the virulent Bush bashers (see John Kerry) and the more-forward-thinking populists (see John Edwards). Conversely Matt Bai in his recent Sunday New York Times Magazine profile of Hilary sees the Democratic rift as between “insiders” and “outsiders.” Outsiders, he explains, are the perpetually angry “netroots” liberal bloggers who froth at the mouth every time the inside-the-beltway “appeasers” make nice with the evil Republican monolith. Senator Obama recently weighed in on the Daily Kos defending the insiders and, as Hilary did before him when she addressed the DLC, asked the hotheaded outsiders to please stop attacking every Democrat who does anything more than lament and obstruct. For my money Salon’s Daou report has done the best job giving color commentary on the struggle for the soul of this Party.
I don’t believe that the dichotomy is so simple. To me, the real problem with the Democratic Party today is that it is a body politic without a head. We have several prospective Presidential candidates for ’08 all acting like NASCAR drivers: nobody wants to be in the lead early, instead they all prefer to draft off the bumper of somebody else. The problem is they’re not just racing each other. The more important race is for the future direction of this country and even though many top Republicans these days are scraping paint off the walls, in perilous danger of crashing, the Democrats aren’t even in the race.
Our sights should be on the mid-term elections and how big a bite we can take out of the ass of the Republican majority. We need to start telling people today how we will govern tomorrow. To that end, we need an interim leader, one without Presidential aspirations, who is willing to become the lightning rod for the rabid pitbull that is the Republican attack machine. Newt Gingrich was the Republicans’ John the Baptist, the one who opened the door for Bush and company to take over all three branches of government. Nancy Pelosi or Howard Dean seem like our only choices and I like them both. Why on earth won’t they step up to the plate with a concrete set of easy-to-understand principles that most all Americans can rally behind?
The crisis became most apparent to me watching Jon Stewart interview Howard Dean. Stewart, like me, is clearly a Dean fan so he lobbed the softball question of what do the Democrats stand for. I held my breath waiting for a response but was once again disappointed. Weeks later, when Senator Chuck Schumer was Stewart’s guest Stewart tried again and again didn’t get a concrete answer. Politics isn’t rocket science. Just model your plan of attack on what’s worked in the past. To that end I look to Gingrich’s “Contract for America” and the rise (before the fall) of Karl Rove.
If Democrats all had a simple list of talking points the way the Republicans do then the triangle that Peter Daou talks about on Salon.com between the blogosphere, mainstream media and the Democratic party would close and we would finally find a voice that would once again resonate with working Americans.
Here’s what I wrote about our mess a few month’s ago:
“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. ANWAR and our national parks are off limits to rapacious development. We will also curb 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.”