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Monday, Nov 23, 2009
They can only win power back the hard way, the way the Republicans did over the last three decades -- by merging the energies of movement and party, stitching together alliances, mobilizing ideas and running attractive candidates.
During the 2004 election campaign the Democrats demonstrated a (for them) unprecedented ability to move activists into practical politics, to raise money and discipline themselves. It was an impressive -- and insufficient -- effort. Still, the commitment they mobilized soon moved Howard Dean into the Democratic leadership on a platform of building up the party's withered infrastructure. One measure of Dean's success was that by the time the party made its choice, all his rivals were beating the drum for internal reform as well. No sooner was Dean in charge of the party than he began to deliver -- to universal applause. Even Democrats who deplored what they consider his foot-in-mouth disease were thrilled that, at long last, the national party had started to put in place, state by state, a funded national staff. It shouldn't have been a breakthrough to ensure that the party mustered permanent staff in transparently pivotal states like Ohio. Incredibly, it was.
At the moment, the Senate Democrats are off to a rollicking comeback, taking the Senate floor yesterday under Minority Leader Harry Reid to blast back at Republican tyranny over Congress by brandishing an obscure rule to insist that the Senate debate the prewar intelligence hanky-panky it somehow has failed to investigate. The Democrats may not know what to do about the war -- a thorny conundrum indeed -- but at least they are refusing to let GOP malfeasance off the hook.
But the next steps will be more challenging still. The Democrats have to offer a national face for next year's midterm elections. House races in particular are local. Americans may deplore the party in power, but they also deplore the party out of power. "The mess in Washington" doesn't look to them like a mess with a single author -- it looks like a mess for which both parties are culpable. Democrats have to offer convincing reasons for tossing out the party in power. Lacking those reasons, enough of the electorate may simply decide to sit on their hands and keep the Republicans in charge of all the levers of power.
The Democrats' most impressive sign of life is that, across the center-left political spectrum, they now recognize a need to put forth a national program -- their own "Contract With America." It's far from sufficient to talk incessantly about the value of "reframing the debate," as if the losing party suffers primarily from flimsy public relations. It won't do any longer to thrash away against "the mess in Washington." They have to look like a remedy for the mess. While American politics are stubbornly local -- the views and tones that win elections in New York are not necessarily the ones that win in Nebraska -- Democrats have to find their own heart of brightness.
One formidable barrier they face is their own inertia -- the weird, self-reinforcing passivity that makes them look spineless and inauthentic, too calculating by half. They need more of the daring that Reid showed this week.
(The unanswerable and decisive argument put forth by the Republicans in 2004 was that even if you didn't always agree with Bush, at least you knew where he stood. In countless ways this mood failed to correspond to the truth, but never mind -- Bush played a decisive president on TV, and that was enough to make up a critical margin of minds.)
On Iraq, the Democrats cannot permit themselves to stay their own wobbly course. With the country torn up about the ongoing debacle in Iraq, the Democrats have to sound like a governing party for a change. They have to recover from their appalling collapse of 2002-03, the one that led the party's senators to split down the middle on Bush's war resolution. As November 2006 draws closer, semi-dissident Republicans will make gestures in favor of partial troop withdrawals. If Bush continues to languish in the polls, they will pretend not to be from his party.
Democrats have to face the fact that Bush's recklessness has produced a situation in Iraq where there are no good options. Still, they should, at the least, renounce permanent bases and peg troop withdrawal to the achievement of substantive goals. The time is long past when the Democrats can delude themselves that they'll ingratiate themselves with the country by intoning in chorus that they support the troops while ducking the debate about how to do precisely that.
On the economy, with all the Republican debts coming due, Democrats have to stick up for rolling back Bush's tax cuts for the wealthy.
On the court, Bush having nominated a more judicious version of Antonin Scalia, the Democrats have a rendezvous with filibuster. Friendly extremism in the pursuit of states' rights is one hell of a vice.
The only way the Democrats can win back at least one house of Congress is to look and sound like fighters. And the only way to look like fighters and sound like fighters is to be fighters. Whining about the Republicans' structural advantages -- real as they are -- will not do. Whining about media skew and inattention -- real as they are -- will not do. Bush is not only a lucky politician but the chief of an apparatus of rule. He has three more years in the White House and it will take more than the force of gravity to bring the whole corrupt, thoughtless, mendacious lot down.
