Not to insult my future place of employment's cofounder or anything, but Robert Reich is counting his chickens a bit early here:
“Just say no” has been a winning strategy for Democrats. Social Security privatization looks dead. Ditto with “progressive indexing” of Social Security benefits. CAFTA (the Central American Free Trade Agreement) is on its last legs. Tax “reform” is a nonstarter. But if the Democratic Party is to win back the Senate or the House in 2006 and the presidency in 2008, it needs a positive agenda.
Err, not so fast there. CAFTA passed (or will do so as soon as the lockstep Republican House considers it), though, to be fair, not before the magazine was printed. Nevertheless, Reich shouldn't have assumed it's defeat, and that he did shows how overconfident Democrats are getting in the wake of recent successes. But tax reform isn't a nonstarter, it just hasn't started. And as for saying no, Democrats really didn't do that. If we'd voted down privatization, that would have been a simple "no". What we did, rather, was fan out across the country and propose the alternate policy of no cuts, a continuation of guaranteed benefits, and a fiscally sounder program.
As it happened, the country agreed with our vision of Social Security, and a critical mass of Republicans read those polls and fled the President's idea. But Social Security is as good as it gets for Democrats; it's our strongest issue and one of the Republic's most cherished programs. Tax reform won't afford us the same advantages. And there, as here, we'll have to argue for our vision of taxation, similar in structure to what we have now but different from what the Republicans will want implemented. And there, as here, we'll be attacked for simply saying no and lacking ideas. But that won't be true. We'll be defending the ideas we've always believed in, the ideas that have become American policy and Republican targets. Republicans can label it "just saying no", though it's really a bunch of sore losers trying to reopen a battle they long ago lost. Democrats shouldn't buy into the spin.
