As has been authoritatively reported, there is an unparalleled amount of angst coursing through Democratic veins these days, both in Washington and around the country, about what the party needs to do to reverse its recent string of defeats.
“Change” seems to be the consensus answer -- but that's where the consensus begins and ends. The increasingly heated debate over who should be the next chair of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and how he or she should be chosen is only the most dramatic feature of the agonized self-examination. But Democrats are testifying everywhere, from Capitol Hill to Washington barstools to the op-ed pages of The New York Times and, heaven forfend, The Wall Street Journal.
They are holding forums and asking questions, trenchant ones like: Is liberalism dead? Is Howard Dean crazy? Where can we find the next James Carville or Paul Begala (or, better still, the next Newt Gingrich or Karl Rove)?
There are calls for defiance in the face of defeat -- or concessions in the face of reality.
House Democrats this week got a lecture on how to frame the issues in the big privatization fight that's on deck. They intend to position themselves as protectors of Social Security and accuse the administration of trying to privatize the retirement program simply as a prelude to eliminating it. Their metaphor coach suggested that they talk about the deficit as the “baby tax,” as it'll be up to today's kids to pay it off later.
One priority is this toning of the message, a nail here and a screw there.
But a consistent undercurrent in all the discussion is the assumption that what ails the party is not its ideas or its values but an inability to communicate those ideas effectively or to compete with the high-powered GOP message machine. And despite all the calls for change, it appears that the changes desired are small ones indeed, having to do more with style and strategy rather than with substance or ideas. Democrats talked about the need to communicate better, to talk more about values and faith, to convince more people that Democrats are tough on terrorists, and to be more aggressive. “It's not like we are going to change our core values,” remarked one Hill Democrat.
That's both the good news and the bad. Steadfastness does have political currency, but it's a little suspect when you're on a losing streak.
The obvious advantage to that approach is that it may be based on a set of principled positions, inoculating Democrats from charges of flip-flopping. An equally obvious disadvantage, however, is that more than anything, Democrats need to dazzle voters with at least one new idea that will force them to reconsider, or maybe clarify, what it means to be a Democrat.
“A minority party can only become a majority party by surprising people enough to realize that it is better than they thought,” says Bruce Reed, president of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC). “The last two campaigns have been short on such shock therapy. Next time we have to surprise people by becoming an insurgent reform party again, as we did in '92.”
If that's happening, it'll come as a surprise to a lot of people. And while there has been relatively little finger-pointing and public recrimination among Democrats after the election-day debacle, there are still serious intraparty questions about whose party it is and who's to blame for the recent losses:
John Kerry?
Howard Dean?
George McGovern?
Dean's decision to seek the chairmanship of the DNC has set off another round of rancor about what kind of face the party needs. Reed, writing in The Wall Street Journal with DLC founder Al From, says Democrats “need to come to terms with the main reason we lost in the red states: Too many Americans doubt whether Democrats will be tough enough in the war on terror … . We need to be the party of Harry Truman and John Kennedy, not Michael Moore.”
And The New Republic, which supported the war in Iraq and then recanted after things went south, has come out forcefully against Dean.
“The single greatest challenge facing the Democratic Party is its dire need to reestablish its credibility on national security,” the magazine's editors believe. “Reestablishing this credibility does not mean embracing [George W.] Bush. It means forcefully elucidating alternatives. Dean has shown little interest in doing so, and, during the primary, his instincts led him to cater to the antiwar movement on the party's left.”
As party bosses meet in Orlando, Florida, this weekend to begin the process of choosing a new party leader, the anxiety over the choice was already roiling many loyalists. Operative Howard Wolfson suggests that the party just throw open the process to Democrats everywhere, and not just members of the DNC.
He wrote in The New York Times: "Fifty-seven million Americans voted for John Kerry last month and more than 2.7 million Democrats contributed to the party during this last campaign … . Yet only a tiny fraction of Democrats will determine our party's new leader … . My proposal is simple. Permit anyone who has voted in a Democratic primary or participated in a caucus and has contributed in some way to the party -- either financially or through volunteering -- to vote for the next leader via mail or Internet."
But more important than who the Democrats want to head their party is what they want that party to be about. And “change” is not enough of an answer.
Terence Samuel is the chief congressional correspondent for U.S. News & World Report. His column about politics appears each week in the Prospect's online edition.
