Features

There were certainly reasons to despair after the 2004 election — chiefly, the awful thought that George W. Bush and a Republican Congress could find the means to exceed the egregious irresponsibility, the xenophobia, the sheer partisan pettiness, and the callous disregard for life and law of Bush’s first term. But the election itself, and […]

Is the Democratic Party becoming the New England party? In 2004, the candidates who dominated the Democratic presidential primaries, beginning with the one in New Hampshire, were Howard Dean of Vermont and John Kerry of Massachusetts. In 2004, as in 1988, the Democrats nominated a liberal Massachusetts politician to run against a conservative member of […]

The fix the Democrats find themselves in cannot be attributed to the evil, tricky genius of Karl Rove or the ignorance of the American people. The Democrats face big problems of their own making. Here, Prospect writers look at how the party has mishandled four important issues and suggest new approaches. Self – Interest Heal […]

A California Labor Union leader once described to me the 1966 campaign to re-elect Democrat Pat Brown as governor. “We had a massive campaign to identify our voters,” he said, “we contacted everyone at least twice, and we did a tremendous job of getting them to the polls on election day — where they voted […]

This one hurts big. But progressives have little time for grief or recrimination. George W. Bush claims a mandate for his radical domestic agenda and for his preemptive foreign policy. The dollar has already begun to fall and interest rates to rise. The evangelical right is clamoring for advancing the jihad against gays and choice. […]

So the Democrats are having trouble with the politics of cultural traditionalism? So what else is new? To be sure, the gap in the electorate between the observant and the secular is widening. But it’s just one part of a larger cultural rift that the Republicans have long realized (as far back as Richard Nixon) […]

On October 28, as Democrats scrambled volunteers to Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Florida, Philip Burress, chairman of the Ohio Campaign to Protect Marriage, was so confident of victory that he wasn’t even in the state. Burress had championed Issue One, the anti–gay-marriage amendment, and had secured a place for it on the ballot just as the […]

Ok, I’ve unlisted my phone number, changed my name, and moved to a different (red) state. Now I can safely say it: The Democratic defense of abortion makes me cringe. It’s the stridency, the insistence, the repetition of a “woman’s right to choose.” It rubs me the wrong way — and I’m one of those […]

Anyone purporting to tell you the reason John Kerry lost the election is either fooling himself or fooling you. The origins of any close defeat are necessarily multicausal, and any number of different things could have won it for Kerry. The media chose to focus on the party’s “values” problem. To be sure, that problem […]

It’s time for the Quadrennial Democratic Lament about the false consciousness and dismaying distractibility of the poor. “John Kerry’s supporters should be feeling wretched about the millions of farmers, factory workers and waitresses who ended up voting — utterly against their own interests — for Republican candidates,” wrote Nicholas Kristof in The New York Times […]