Making the Democratic party relevant again

What do I think is the biggest problem the Democrats have with winning Presidential elections right now?

THE MESSAGE.

What the hell is our message? How do we reconnect the party, traditionally the party of the working man, with the ordinary people of this country - the gun-owning, TV-watching, churchgoing, basically live-and-let-live people who comprise the majority of the electorate? Well, one thing I know is that we cannot do it with a message that is scattered, fragmented, and tries to make everyone happy. By trying to appease every faction, every special interest, every single ideological purist, we end up with no simple message that we can use to appeal to Joe and Jane Voter. And we will lose, every time, if we don't clearly stand for something.

The Democratic party stands for economic justice and opportunity. All other issues are second tier, and the national party needs not to get bogged down in arguing over details on those issues. The national Democratic party should be concerned with the economic health of the ordinary citizen. The mistake we've made is that we are so determined to be "inclusive" that we make ourselves irrelevant.

The Democratic party started as the party of Jefferson, became the populist party of Andrew Jackson, and then morphed into the party of slavery. They languished out of power for 60 years, with no real core value to define them. they had a brief moment of succuss with Wilson, which came about primarily because of the corruption of Taft and the Republicans (echoes of Jimmy Carter being elected on a wave of public disgust with the corruption of the Nixon administration). The Democrats didn't really have any core value to define them at that time.
They were pretty much what they are now, they only defined themselves by what they weren't - "I'm not a Republican."

It was FDR and the progressive reformers who turned the Democratic party into something worthwhile, a party with core values, that appealed to a wide variety of people, that cut across color lines, and regional lines, and to a great extent across class lines, and the core value was economic justice and opportunity for all. A belief that EVERYONE should benefit from capitalism - not the belief that capitalism needed to be eradicated, the belief that capitalism could be made a more just and fair system that benefited the majority, not a small minority.

Many of the elites in this country have never forgiven FDR for this, or Teddy Roosevelt for beginning the process of regulating capitalism. They've spent the last 70 years trying to return us to the 1890s, the era of the robber barons, the era of unregulated capitalism. Remember, Andrew Mellon was widely quoted as saying the Depression was simply "capital returning to its rightful owners" - the wealthiest Americans did not suffer from the Depression. If the Democrats do not manage to reconnect with this ideal, that all Americans should benefit from regulated capitalism, then we will cease to exist as a major force in politics.

How do we do this? The first step is to get true campaign finance reform - public financing of all political campaigns. You HAVE to get the corporate and special-interest money out of politicians. If politicians are beholden financially to special interests, well, ya gotta dance with them whut brung ya, as Molly Ivins puts it. You can't take money from a corporation who wants to eliminate corporate regulation and then legislate to regulate that same corporation - not and expect a campaign contribution from them next election cycle. If we abandoned corporate money, then we could go back to being the party of the working class, the laborers and small business owners. That's the engine of capitalism, not the few tycoons with the money.

Phil Talmadge had a great article on what went wrong in this election cycle:

Democrats ran a textbook technical campaign. The fundraising was good, the ads, were creative, the literature was distributed, and the GOTV was exceptional. But the campaigns at the head of the ticket, for president and governor, said nothing. They lacked a sense of core values, a soul. If a campaign is an exercise in communication, these campaigns did not communicate. At the national level, we had five major issues--Iraq, health care, the deficit, Social Security, and the environment. Bush was abysmal on all five. Kerry was either equivocal (Wrong war, wrong place, wrong time, but I'll fight it better than Bush!) or silent. Shouldn't the Bush plan for privatization of Social Security have been discussed in Florida, for example? At the state level, we had an unreconstructed right wing Republican running for governor who was allowed to argue that he would be the agent of change in Olympia. Gregoire talked only about her resume and defended her office's screw-ups. She was the agent of the Olympia status quo. Her campaign was largely devoid of ideas.

Where do we go from here?
Progressives must recapture our commitment to core values and have the Democratic Party implement them in the upcoming elections. We must communicate those ideals to the red counties of Washington and the red states.

The development of such ideals ought to take place in discussions by progressive groups over the next few months. I have my own thoughts about what some of those ideals should be (and I don't mean that these concepts should be like a party platform with a little of everything for everybody).

We should re-affirm our commitment to:
*Equal opportunity for all Americans, with particular attention to health care, education, and higher education for our children;
*Civil liberties (no more Patriot Acts);
*Fiscal responsibility (balance our budgets and give people a dollar's worth of service for each tax dollar);
*A foreign policy that lives up to our democratic principles;
*Stewardship of our environment and its resources.

These values can be applied at the natinal and state levels.
The major thrust of the next few months must be the development of a progressive consensus on our core values. Once that is accomplished, we can focus on how to communicate these principles to our fellow citizens, and how to support candidates who embrace them.

The Democratic party needs to abandon this idea of being all things to all people, of allowing itself to get bogged down in minutiae and details of interest only to a fanatical minority. It is time to reconnect with the average voter with a simple and concise message: Democrats stand for economic justice and opportunity. Trying to satisfy those who are so ideologically pure that they become absurdly precious is suicide.

DEMOCRATS STAND FOR ECONOMIC JUSTICE AND OPPORTUNITY.