How do we reform the Democratic Party?

Ruy Teixeira has an outstanding article on what it will take to reform the Democratic Party.

He starts out by explaining what will NOT work. Framing will not work. Our candidates cannot "inoculate" themselves against weaknesses in image on security or cultural issues. The Democrats will not start winning elections by forcing a false unity or by achieving "greater turnout." These are not changes. These are tactical issues which will not do anything to give the mass of voters a belief that by electing our candidates their lives will improve.

Ruy then gives some ideas of what WILL reform the Democratic Party.

OK, what should those changes be? Here are some guidelines. Ed Kilgore argues that:

....[W]e need a Reform message and agenda that (a) meshes with our negative critique of GOP misrule; (b) reminds voters who's in charge in Washington; and (c) reassures voters we aren't just itching to get back into power and substitute our form of special-interest pandering and fiscal indiscipline for theirs.

....James Carville and Stan Greenberg of Democracy Corps agree with this argument, and in their latest strategy memo, lay out the evidence for it. A Democratic agenda that includes budget reform, lobbying reform, ethics reform, and tax reform, they say, could begin to connect the dots for voters skeptical of both parties and help Democrats finally get some tangible benefits from Republican misery.

[I previously commented on Ed Kilgore and the Carville/Greenberg item here.]


Harold Meyerson observes:

....[T]he Democrats have been losing the white working class since 1968. In the eyes of many of those voters, the Democrats became the party of racial preferences, as government became the entity that taxed them in order to give money to blacks. To be sure, Bill Clinton repositioned the party by ending welfare, and won back some of that white working class. And John Kerry did nothing to indicate that he would reverse Clinton's changes.

But still-running 16 points behind Bush on the economy, among [white] working-class voters? Something-not just Kerry or national security or the values gap or even racial politics-is badly wrong.

What's disquieting about the Democratic quiet is that it signals a failure to grapple with this most crippling of conundrums. We are all talking about how to inoculate ourselves on cultural and security concerns. But we are not talking about how better to exploit our advantage on the economy. To a considerable degree, that's because we've lost our advantage on the economy, and we don't know how to get it back or even what to advocate to get it back.

[This is what Thomas Frank is writing about in his book "what's the Matter with Kansas." See the book listed on the right side of this blog. He lays out the problem quite well, but offers no real solution. This reform of the Democratic Party is the solution.]

And Noam Scheiber reminds us: (The New Republic - subscriber only.)

....[W]hat voters mean when they claim that a politician or a party lacks ideas isn't that they lack specific proposals; it's that they lack a larger, animating philosophy. John Edwards, for example, leveled a comprehensive critique of this administration--that it was shifting society's burdens from people who made their living from capital to people who made their living working--that gave individual proposals meaning. Tellingly, most of these proposals lost their resonance once the Kerry campaign appropriated them into its wonkish miasma.

[In my previously referenced comment at the end I stated: "I'd really like to see a Proposal for America's Future based on something like these lines. Have the PR guys write it and keep the policy wonks and the lawyers far away from it. It's a PR document, not a policy document." Schieber's statement confirms my comment. The policy wonks are not telling us what the Democratic Part stands for. They are telling us how to accomplish it, and the "how" is flexible. The animating philosophy is not.]


How to put all this together? Tricky! It'll take some doing and some change on the part of the Democratic party. But, in the end, it'll be a hell of a lot more rewarding than better framing, more inoculation, unity at all costs and redoubling mobilization efforts. Those may be easier and more familiar paths to take--but they lead to defeat, not victory. Personally, I'm ready to win.

Amen, Ruy!