by Meteor Blades
Wed Nov 17th, 2004 at 16:39:53 PST
In addition to calls for boycotting the “red” states or kowtowing to them, plus myriad calls for recounting the votes and digging out possible fraud, a thousand or two Diaries have been written since November 3 on who the Democrats are and what they should become to correct the mistakes of this election cycle in the next go-around.
Harold Meyerson has been one of my favorite activists-turned-journalists since he first started writing and editing at the LA Weekly in the 1980s. He often takes an unlacquered view of American politics, and his whetted insights often can’t be found elsewhere. What he says in the Washington Post piece excerpted below, however, has none of the originality I’ve come to expect from him. I'm not being overally critical. But what he's saying is no more than what hundreds of us who’ve been able to rise out of our post-election hangover have been debating and discussing and shrieking about at Daily Kos and throughout Blogworld for the past two weeks … and, of course, much earlier.
This fact itself says something about the state of the Democrats. No surprise that most Democratic rebels here – whether they backed Howard Dean or not – believe one of the party’s deepest needs is structural reform, starting with the Iowa caucuses on up. And we're frustrated that business-as-usual seems to happening, as usual. But does the party also need, as Meyerson argues, a bold new inclusive message, or would better packaging of the old message serve just as well?
Over the past 14 days, I’ve read a host of comments pressing for improving the funding of existing liberal and left think-tanks cum policy advocates and the creation of new ones (even a formal Daily Kos think-tank) that would provide the Democrats with the raw material for a fresh theme and a fresh purpose. Smart move, obviously. The Heritage Foundation has played that role with Republicans since the 1970s. And, as we are all too unhappily aware, the Project for a New American Century has captured American foreign policy. And if we denizens of the Internetz can fund campaigns the way we just did, why not a few think-tanks as well?What Are Democrats About?
Once more, the theme of themelessness. Cover the Democrats for any length of time and you become expert in campaigns that don't seem to be about anything. They have policies; Democrats are good at policies. But all too often the campaigns lack a message -- a sense of what the candidate's about and what he aims to do.
The insider accounts of the Kerry campaign that are emerging have a sickening familiarity to them. The Boston Globe tells of Paul Begala, who helped Bill Clinton win two presidential races, descending on Kerry headquarters, white board in hand, scribbling a dozen suggested lines of attack against George Bush on it, and imploring the campaign to choose one and stick with it. The papers are full of Kerry aides attesting that they never knew what the campaign's message was, and there are accounts of Kerry himself chafing at the confusion. …
The themelessness isn't simply Kerry's, however, any more than it was simply Gore's or Dukakis's. Time was when the Democrats were the party of economic justice and opportunity, the party that championed emerging constituencies as well as classes: Catholics, blacks, women. They were the party of the many against the powerful, which played a lot better in the electoral arena than being the party of the one against the many. But, with the signal exception of Clinton's '92 campaign -- a brilliant mix of economic progressivism and cultural centrism -- the Democrats haven't been able to persuade enough voters to choose them as their champions for a very long time. And Clinton's ability to deliver on that promise once in office was a sometime thing. Full employment made life better for the people at the bottom of the economy. But the erosion of the decent jobs of the old industrial economy never really stopped (and, of course, has escalated greatly under Bush), and the jobs that replaced them more often than not offered lower pay, fewer benefits and less security. The Wal-Mart economy has grown on both the Democrats' and Republicans' watch. …
Historically the Democrats have been the party of security, but that's an identity they need to reclaim. The challenge of radical Islam demands more of them than a foreign policy of realpolitik; empiricism -- while a welcome counter to Bush's indifference to fact -- is not enough. The challenge of a global labor market demands more of them than a commitment to mid-career retraining; defending the American middle class means creating the kind of global standards that the Democrats created on the national level during the 1930s and '40s, the time of their greatest popularity. That's a daunting challenge, one that requires the Democrats to think and develop a story about the new threats to the American dream. If they do they'll come up with a more plausible list of culprits -- and solutions -- than the Republicans ever will. They may even come up with a new sense of self, with a purpose, with a theme.
But, in addition to coming up with good ideas and good tactics, these think-tanks have another of what Meyerson would call a “daunting” task: How do they actually persuade (or force) a Democratic establishment to abandon its unfocused, focus-group-driven, consultant-fueled campaigns and reintroduce itself to the American people as the party that will make their lives and their children’s lives safer and more prosperous?