One Democrat Searches for the Soul of His Party

by Larry DeWitt (see other De Witt articles)
November 20, 2004

I. Telling Ourselves the Truth About Ourselves

We Democrats have to begin with a bottom-line admission to ourselves: WE LOST the 2004 election, therefore, there is something wrong with us that needs changing. The Republicans do not have to change their strategy because they are winning--at the national level, in the Congress, at the statehouses, and everywhere else that the parties contend.

Democrats have lost 7 out of the last 10 presidential elections. And the only reason Carter won in 1976 was the public was punishing Ford and the Republicans for Watergate--so it was not so much a win for us as a loss for them. So we have really only won--in terms of competing on the playing field of political philosophy--two elections in the last 40 years! This means that THERE IS SOMETHING WRONG WITH DEMOCRATS. It is not the Republicans who are broken. We are the ones who have to change. Our nation does not accept our vision and our values. So we have to redefine what it means to be a progressive in a nation in which liberalism is no longer a popular option (if it ever was). To give you the short answer up-front, what this means is that the Democratic Party needs to become a populist party again rather than a liberal party. (I have discoursed at length on what this means, and why it is essential to our party's future, in a prior column, "Identity Group Politics and the Future of the Democratic Party.")

The Republicans won in 2004 despite having a presidential candidate and a vice-presidential candidate who are about the worst possible candidates one can imagine. Our economic future has been squandered by irresponsible deficit spending; our international allegiances are in a shambles; our President embarrasses us every time he opens his mouth; the Vice President is a petulant and unattractive personality; the outgoing Attorney General frightened the be-Jesus out of millions of Americans; and we are mired in a disastrous war. They beat us with a team of second-raters who have done a lousy job of running the country. That tells us something, not about them, BUT ABOUT US. It tells us that Democrats are in deep trouble. The 2004 election was only somewhat close because the Republicans were hobbled with an albatross of an Administration. If they actually put forward a set of appealing candidates in 2008, Democrats won't have a glimmer of a chance.

The Democrats start any presidential race by conceding huge parts of the country to the Republicans. Of the red-states, 29 of them are so red that Democrats do not even bother to field a campaign there--we concede them without a fight. There are 11 states that are a toss-up, where by definition we have to fight the Republicans. And even though there were in the end 18 blue states, only about 6 of them are blue enough that Republicans don't bother to compete there. In other words, Democrats have to fight Republicans for votes even in the blue-states, while the Republicans can take more than half the nation for granted without having to defend their voting base. This puts the Democrats in the position of a football team who must play the entire game only in their half of the field--such a team cannot win many games in the long run. Or as the President of the Democratic Leadership Council, Bruce Reed, puts it: "If Democrats are going to be born again as a majority party, we have to speak to the whole country again. . . . When we Democrats choose not to compete on three-quarters of American soil, we have no margin for error in the presidential elections--and we're almost sure to be a permanent minority in Congress. Meanwhile, Republicans squeeze us on the turf we still hold. A majority party must be a national party, not a regional one."

II. The Third Way

Now we have three options; three approaches to turning this all around:

1) We can insist we were right all along and stay the course, confident that the voters will come to their senses in the next election cycle;
2) We can wait and hope for the Republicans to self-destruct due to their supposed extremism that, we like to assume, puts them out-of-touch with average Americans; or
3) We can change something about us that will make Democrats more attractive to at least some of those red-state voters who are presently voting against us.

This column is an exploration of the third way. I am trying here to ask the question: what can our party do to appeal to enough red-state voters to tip the electoral balance back in our favor? I will not argue in detail against the other two approaches, but I must offer a few observations in passing.

First about the supposed extremism of the Republicans and their potential to self-destruct. Some of us made this exact same argument starting in 1980 when Ronald Reagan was elected. We were SURE that America would not tolerate the extreme right-wing attack on public policy that the Reagan Administration represented. Well, we were totally full of crap. Reagan defeated us overwhelmingly in 1984 and went on to lead a conservative revolution that is still steam-rolling along. We only got a Democrat elected in 1992 because the economy was in a real shambles and because the Democrats moved dramatically to the political center with Bill Clinton and his Democratic Leadership Council philosophy. So if you are waiting for the Republicans to self-destruct, don't hold your breath--I have been holding mine since 1980 and I am about to expire from the effort.

Now, as to staying the course. There is an old saying: the definition of insanity is to keep doing the same thing and expecting a different result. As a general trend, Democrats have been steadily in decline since 1980. Maybe it is time to do something different.

So, we need to change. But how?

III. What Makes for a Good Democratic Candidate?

Before we look at issues and policies, we must reflect for an embarrassing moment or two on the matter of our candidates. Here is another fact of history to ponder: the last time Democrats elected a non-Southern president was when John F. Kennedy squeaked-by Richard Nixon in 1960. That was 44 years ago! We have not be able to elect a patrician Northeastern liberal in 44 years. Is that perhaps a clue that nominating John Kerry in 2004 was not the brightest move the party has ever made?

Well, what about Al Gore? Why didn't that son-of-the-South win? Do we really have to ask? Al Gore was a Southerner in about the same way that George W. Bush was a Yale scholar--in name only. Gore was not a real southern candidate--he had no manure on his shoes. He grew up in Washington, D.C., was the son of a Senator, and was a politician from his cradle, and is a patrician from his toes to his bald spot. Bill Clinton was entirely different--a fatherless boy from the dirt of Arkansas with a mother who played the horses. And yet, he was smart, and well-educated, and thoughtful, and soulful. But he always managed to still seem to be an ordinary fellow, not a patrician. The contrast is deeply instructive.

Carter failed as a President and as a candidate for re-election because he did not understand the secret to Reagan's success--his likeability. Clinton was likeable. Even though some of his charm was the charm of a cad, we liked him anyway. He was our version of Reagan. Gore was not likeable in the same way, and Kerry, God bless him, was a disaster in that regard--now I'm sure he's a fine fellow in truth, and I'm sure his family and his dog like him just fine, but as a political candidate we cannot sell his brand of personality. It's not fair perhaps, but if fairness is what you seek, you are praying in the wrong pew--politics is not likely to often be about fairness.

Now, this is not necessarily a brief for a Southerner at the head of our ticket in 2008--although that wouldn't be a bad idea. My point is, the very last thing we should do is nominate, say, someone like Hillary Clinton to represent our party. That way lies disaster as far as the eye can see. No doubt, Hillary's candidacy would make deep-blue liberals feel much less blue emotionally; but she would begin from a position of alienating much of red-America. We cannot afford to run any more political races in which we start by giving the Republicans a 29-state head-start.

But there might be other options. A look at the electoral map has suggested to some an alternative "Southwestern strategy." And this might work, if we are smart enough to understand what is required. In very broad terms, Southerners vote Republican because of social values issues and Southwesterners vote Republican more out of a libertarian instinct of distrust of government and all its works. This is why a prickly fellow like Barry Goldwater could be both one of the most reactionary members of Congress on many issues, but also why he was the only prominent Republican to speak out in defense of allowing gays to serve in the military, and against the half-way measures of Bill Clinton's "don't ask, don't tell" policy. This is also why John McCain is so successful as a Senator from Arizona, even though he often sticks his finger in the eye of other leaders in his party. So if Democrats want to pursue a "Southwestern strategy" just keep in mind that this would require having someone like John McCain as our candidate--something many of my liberal friends would be unwilling to contemplate.

So, with my tongue only partially in my cheek, my formula for the ideal Democratic candidate would be: someone with Bill Clinton's personality; Joe Lieberman's politics; John Edwards' family; Wesley Clarke's resume; Barack Obama's biography; Jimmy Carter's morals; and a first name like Billy Bob (or a persona and politics like John McCain's, if you want to try a Southwestern strategy). In other words, we need to craft a candidate who can appeal to broad swathes of red-state America. Well, then, who are these red-voters, and what do they want from us?

IV. Who Are the Red State Voters, and Why Don't They Like Us?

Well, let's look first at some demographic data from the 2004 election, and try to identify possible targets of opportunity for us (then we can go from there to look at specific issues). (All data are from CNN's exit poll reports. There are lots of other interesting data available from CNN, including the factors on which the Democrats beat the Republicans, in case you are interested.)

Now, here again, the object of this exercise is not to congratulate ourselves for those demographic cohorts who vote with us, the object is to focus on those who do not. So we should not waste time patting ourselves on the back because 88% of black voters voted Democratic. Much more important is the fact that the Republicans increased their share of the black vote by 2%. We lost 2% of the African-American wing of our coalition to Bush and Co. Why? Well, it looks like these were socially conservative religious voters who finally let their religious sentiments tip them over into the Republican fold. There is an important message in that one statistic. It tells us that our coalition is beginning to crumble at one of its most secure foundation points. That spells big trouble in the future unless we do something to head-off this trend.

Another big part of the traditional Democratic coalition is female voters. We still won women, overall, by 51% to 48%. But the more salient number is that Republicans increased their portion of women voters by 5% overall, and, even more worrisome, 59% of married women with children voted Republican compared with only 40% who voted Democratic. We are losing the soccer-mom vote. That too has ominous implications for our future. Why are women deserting us? I suspect it has something to do with either not trusting the Democrats on national security, or with social values issues (more on this in a moment).

Latinos have been another key part of our coalition. We won them overall, 53% to 44%. But, again, the pertinent statistic is that the Republicans increased their Hispanic vote by 9%. This trend too is moving in the wrong direction. Why? It seems that religiously-conservative Hispanics have started voting their moral sentiments instead of their economic self-interest or their traditional party identification.

Jews are another key constituency for Democrats. They are a long-loyal part of the Democratic coalition originally put together by Franklin Roosevelt in 1932. And while Democrats won the Jewish vote overall by 74% to 25%, the Republicans increased their share of the Jewish vote by 6% in this last election. Why? Because, I suspect, Bush's hard-line in the Middle East is popular with many Jews and, perhaps, because there are an increasing number of socially conservative Jews whose sensibilities about civil society resemble more closely those of Joe Lieberman than they do those of the Democratic party in general.

Religion is a key issue in American politics, no matter how much some liberals might wish it were not. Brown University political scientist James Morone has written a fascinating new book called Hellfire Nation: The Politics of Sin in American History. His key insight: "after three and a half centuries--for better or worse--we remain Puritans all." For better or worse, only 10% of the electorate are non-religious. We win among these voters by 67% to 31%. And, for much worse, the Democratic Party has somehow become identified with this minority within our minority, so that many religious voters see the Democrats as unsympathetic to their religious sensibilities. Catholics and Protestants (who comprise 81% of the electorate) both voted against us in this election. That ought to tell us something.

Married people voted Republican, single people voted Democrat. But since two-thirds of the electorate is married, their constituency weighs more than ours. We seem to be on the wrong side of this divide.

We did increase our percentage of the gay vote by 2%; but since gays were only 4% of the electorate, this didn't do us much good.

Fifty-three percent of voters said they approved of the way Bush was handling his job, and they voted overwhelmingly Republican. Forty-six percent of voters did not approve of Bush's job performance, and they voted overwhelmingly Democratic. Unfortunately, 53% is a bigger number than 46%, and so we were on the wrong side of this divide too. This tells me that bashing Bush is not a very effective strategy for Democrats--it just warms the already-blue voters and turns off the red ones.

On the qualities voters thought most important in their candidates, Bush won overwhelmingly on: Religious Faith; Honest/Trustworthy; Strong Leader; and Clear Stand on Issues. Kerry won overwhelmingly on: Cares About People; Intelligent; Will Bring Change. Unfortunately, Bush's qualities were the important ones to 53% of the voters, while Kerry's qualities were the important ones to only 40% of the voters. The message seems clear enough to me: we have to improve our appeal on the qualities that Bush beat us on.

What about specific issues then? Well, here is the list of the top seven issues, along with the percentage of the electorate who said these were the top issue for them, and the percentage who voted for the two candidates.

Notice that Democrats won on Education, Iraq, the Economy/Jobs, and Health Care. Together these were the top issues for 47% of the electorate. Bush won on Taxes, Terrorism and Moral Values. These three issues alone were the top issues for 46% of the voters. The problem is that Bush's combined margin on his issues was greater than our combined margin on our issues (by a million votes). We lose again. But the important point here too is to look at the categories in which Bush was strong, and try to craft policies and positions for Democrats that might narrow these margins. So rather than patting ourselves on the back because we beat Bush on the Economy/Jobs, let's ask instead how we get a better score on Moral Values, Terrorism, and Taxes.

Frankly, I don't think there is much we can do about taxes: we can never beat the appeal of an unprincipled pander to the voters on tax cuts--the Republicans will always out-bid us on this issue. The best we can do is point out the irresponsible nature of this policy and the burden it places on future generations from the colossal deficits it creates. But this is rather like telling children they should eat their vegetables and cut-back on the ice cream. True, but not usually too effective.

There are a few things that might be said about improving our standing on terrorism, but here again, it is hard to out-macho Bush in this category. My advice to my party during the campaign--advice that met with anger bordering on hatred from my liberal friends--was that the only way Kerry could win on this issue was to neutralize it. And the only way he could neutralize it was to take exactly the same position on the war on terror (and indeed, on Iraq) as Bush. That would have freed us to try to make the election about something else. But in order to keep liberals from bolting the party (where, exactly, could they go?) Kerry tried to finesse the issue of Iraq with a policy that straddled between a hard-line attack-mode and traditional liberal internationalism. This contributed, inevitably, to the perception of Kerry as a weak leader (Bush trounced him 87% to 12% on this metric).

So, where I think our targets of opportunity are is mainly in the area of Moral Values. And "moral values" are not all that hard to understand, if we try. In fact, it's not that hard to figure out what red-voters want from us by way of a different posture on moral values, if we make the effort to listen to them. Liberals, of course, don't want to listen. They want to argue about "whose moral values?" and "what does moral mean?" and "the moral majority is neither," and all the rest of it. All of which has one aim: to avoid facing the truth about the position of the Democratic Party. Which is, that the majority of American voters perceive us as not sharing their moral values. And all the liberals' complaints about the contested nature of "moral values" look to middle-America like nothing so much as Bill Clinton complaining that it all depends on what the meaning of "is" is.

V. Positioning Ourselves to Win: Or, How to Win Friends and Influence People

First, we need to make another of those general bottom-line points. Politics is the art of the possible, it is not the art of the pure or the perfect. By its very nature, politics requires us to compromise our principles in order to win elections. Not only that, but politics is in part reality and in part rhetoric. Sometimes rhetoric is more important than reality (think the presidency of Ronald Reagan). If this offends your sensibilities, then you who ought to go away and let the adults play this game.

So part of our agenda here will be to position ourselves rhetorically, and part of our agenda will be to change some of our policies substantively. My advice to my party is that positioning is probably more important than substance. And, again, if you hear this as saying Democrats should be hypocrites, and this offends you, then you are playing in the wrong sandbox.

First, as to positioning.

We need to wean the voters from the idea that the right is virtuous and the left is not. But we cannot do this by demonizing the right (by crowing the false conclusion that they are all religious fundamentalists, for example), or declaring that they are somehow dupes who vote Republican because they are too dumb to know any better. We can only win them over by speaking in an authentic way to their needs and concerns, and helping them see why the way they are trying to address those needs and concerns are dysfunctional. This means, among other things, that we have to be openly, overtly, and believably religious (think Jimmy Carter). We simply cannot afford to nominate a conflicted candidate on this score, which is what Kerry was in that his own local priests and bishops were in effect declaring his religiosity suspect because of his position on abortion.

The very last thing we Democrats should ever do in an era like the present one--with its overarching fears about terrorism--is nominate a candidate who has even a whiff of anti-war sentiment about him, as Kerry did. (This is only one of the reasons that Howard Dean would have taken us down like the Titanic.) It simply does not matter that Kerry was right about the Vietnam War. And it turned out not to matter enough that he was first a hawk and then a dove. Our party is still perceived as weaker on national security than the Republicans, and in times of fear, we simply cannot afford the luxury of this perception.

Consider the sensitive question of race. We are losing the white voters, and have been for a long time. First we lost the white men, and now we are losing the white women too. And now we are even slipping among blacks and Hispanics. All for the same reason, in my judgment. We are too closely identified with elements of black culture and leadership that produce alienation among middle-class, white voters. Let me give you an example of how we shoot ourselves in the foot on the issue of race.

Bill Cosby recently has begun touring the country speaking out, as a black man, about the dysfunctional state of some aspects of inner-city black culture. His is a call to moral and social responsibility, and a rejection of the moral decay that is all too vividly on display in gangsta culture in America. When he started this crusade--which has middle class white voters secretly saying to themselves "about time"--liberals pounced on him, as only liberals can do, devouring our own. Liberals became indignant over Cosby--a rich, upper-class, black, lecturing to poor, lower-class blacks. In other words, we used class as a shield to avoid dealing with the truths he was trying to tell. Which caused white middle-class voters (and lots of black middle-class voters too) to think to themselves: "there go the liberals again, always defending degenerates and criminals." We cannot afford this kind of stupidity if we expect to win national elections.

The fix is relatively simple. We need to make sure we never let Al Sharpton (or any of a hundred others like him) within a thousand miles of a party speaking platform, and we need to have Barack Obama and Bill Cosby as black leaders speaking for our party. Remember when Bill Clinton dissed Sister Souljah? It was his way of making this same maneuver. We need to learn from our master.

Next, let's consider the whole question of "family values." We need to start by always and forever praising families and marriage. We should associate ourselves first with these ideals. We need to look for non-invidious ways to express this support in specific policies certainly--such as "family friendly leave," etc. But we need to make sure we become associated in the public's mind with the wholesome ideals of intact families. To the extent that our liberal values require us to defend other forms of social arrangement (as they do) we need to first and always make sure we find a skillful enough way to do so that we do not inadvertently send a message that we favor singles, or couples living together without marriage, or other "deviant" arrangements. My best advice in how to do this is to use a wry and slightly world-weary sense of humor in acknowledging that all of us fail and come up short in the eyes of the Lord, but that we are all, in the end, children of God. Something like that.

As to divorce, specifically, we should decry it. Broken families lead to child poverty, emotional trauma, psychologically scarred citizens, social dysfunction, etc., etc. These are consequences that liberals ought to care about. These are forms of social injustice. My god, can't liberals ever get that freedom sometimes leads to suffering and injustice? We should not always and automatically be knee-jerk defenders of liberty. We should defend healthy, life-affirming, compassionate, fair, outcomes. And we should attack every thing that leads to child poverty and neglect (like divorce).

Consider an instructive example of how Democrats keep missing opportunities to associate themselves with family values, in ways that honor traditional Democratic principles. In the 2000 Republican presidential primary campaign religious right-winger Ralph Reed stood out like a sore (blue) thumb on one issue: he was adamantly opposed to Bush's suggestion that Social Security be replaced by a system of personal accounts. Why? Because he understood that the Social Security program is designed as a system of family-based social welfare benefits that, among other traits, provides a bonus for families in which only one spouse works in the paid economy. Since Reed wants to encourage a traditional conception of the family in which the husband works and the wife stays home to care for the children, this led him, quite reasonably, to recognize that Social Security supports this traditional model of the family much better than the "every dog for himself" system of individual, personal accounts favored by most Republicans. So here is a Republican crying out to make a temporary coalition with Democrats in support of one of our core achievements, Social Security. But we spurned Reed's advances because we are so obsessed with defending women's rights to work outside the home that we could not consummate this marriage of temporary convenience. Look, the traditional family is dead and gone. Women are not going to be forced out of the workplace if we join hands with Ralph Reed in defense of Social Security. This was a golden opportunity for us to drive a wedge into the Republican coalition, while identifying ourselves as pro-family, but we muffed it because we are too focused on placating single working women and too dismissive of the concerns and values of the soccer moms who are now voting Republican.

Finally, in the largest terms, we have to stop insulting the people we want to appeal to. We have to stop complaining of people who vote Republican that they are somehow stupid; or they don't understand what real values are; or they are hypocrites; or they are being tricked into voting Republican; or that Republicans cannot possibly represent their interests; or that they are all religious zealots, etc., etc., etc. You cannot win the hearts and minds of folks who are not with you by insulting them and demeaning their character and intelligence.

I was surprised in 2002--when I returned to the university environment for the first time in about 30 years--to discover how very many of my fellow graduate students are conservatives. Not religious fundamentalists, but conservatives anyway. In my masters program the fellow students tended to be in their late 20s. Many of them vote Republican because, it seems to me, they are offended by the selfish indulgences of the me-generation, with which they associate liberals, and because they respect religion and the military and they believe that Democrats do not. In my doctoral program the students are older (many in their 40s), and at least half of them are likewise conservatives--for more philosophical reasons, having to do with distrust of government and its works. They, like much of the nation, have become cynical about government and since liberals are the party of "big government," they are cynical about us.

Anyway, right after the election I happened to eavesdrop on a small group of these older red-voters chatting among themselves. They were discussing Maureen Dowd's column from that day. They were cackling with glee over it, because, as one of them put it, "every time Maureen Dowd publishes another one of these smug, condescending columns complaining about how stupid conservative voters are, more people lock-in their commitment to the Republican party."

Whenever many of the columnists from the left in America write about the election, and red-state voters, they always manage to explain-away the fact that Americans consistently reject their point of view by hurling insults at the party and candidates that the majority keeps voting for. This makes liberals feel good about their pre-existing attitudes and values. Righteous indignation is a fine intoxicant, I agree. But Maureen Dowd's columns will never gain us a single vote from the red-voters, and, to the extent they become aware of them, they will only alienate them further from the liberal cause.

Consider, for example, this rhetoric from Dowd's New York Times column of November 18, 2004, and ask yourself "is this really designed to win friends and influence people among voters who voted for Bush and Cheney in 2004?":

So, can you picture some red-voter somewhere in America slapping themselves on the forehead and saying, "My God, I didn't realize these ole' boys were so craven. Why I think I'll go right out and register as a Democrat!"? So what is the purpose of rhetoric like Dowd's? Is it to make the Democrats' case more effectively so as to persuade persuadable voters to join us? No. It is to make liberals feel that warm liquid sensation of righteous indignation so that they can avoid facing the fact that there is something wrong with them. It is a rationalization for making no change in the liberal agenda. But remember: if you keep doing what you've always done, you'll keep getting what you've always gotten.

And as much as I love Molly Ivins--if I were President I would appoint her the nation's Philosopher Laureate--does this post-election analysis from her column of November 5, 2004 really help us:

Most of my liberal friends love this kind of stuff. They sop it up like all they have to do is drink deeply enough from this endless pool of bitter and smug condescension and all will be right with the world once again. We need to dump this kind of rhetoric--it doesn't help our cause.

And what about Michael Moore and his agitprop movie Fahrenheit 911? How many red-state voters were in the theaters and, viewing the film, suddenly resolved to vote for Kerry? Or was it that those theaters were filled with the already-converted--liberals cackling with glee over the obvious righteousness of their already-made choice? Did Fahrenheit 911 really help the Democrats' cause? How many middle-Americans in middle-America never saw the film but saw a smug, scruffy Michael Moore representing the Democrats on TV? What do you suppose Moore's antics netted the Democratic cause? If you guessed a negative number, you are probably right.

VI. So, How Does This Translate into the Practical Politics of Specific Issues?

Let's look, finally, at some specific changes in the liberal policy agenda. The changes I am suggesting here--indeed, the rhetorical positioning as well--are all expressions of my general view that the Democrats need to move more in the direction of becoming populists and away from the position of being liberals. (See again my essay "Identity Group Politics and the Future of the Democratic Party.") There are lots of issues we could look at. Whatever issues we choose, the guiding principle ought always to be the same: Democrats need to craft positions that are more appealing to socially conservative red-state voters. So here are some examples of ideas for how that might work in practice on a few issues. These are not necessarily the most important issues out there, and the list is certainly not exhaustive. It is intended to be illustrative. I have selected issues that I think illustrate most vividly the principle I am urging. There may be some issues on which it will be hard to identify a "socially conservative" position. If so, that probably means these are issues on which the Republicans are not presently spanking our bottoms.

Crime: Liberals seem to have a genetic inability to be tough on crime. We think that the tolerance that is one of liberalism's virtues has to be extended even to the moral gangsters of society. Our liberal hearts bleed for criminals too. So liberals feel somehow obliged to defend criminals against the criminal justice system, instead of focusing on the suffering and injustice done to the victims of crime. If we are truly the advocates for the afflicted, who on earth is more afflicted than the victims of crimes? Why are these poor souls not our priority concern?

Here is what I suggest we consider: do away with the Miranda warning, and all the technical excuses criminals can use (like the over-broad use of the exclusionary rule, for example) to avoid prosecution. We ought to make it easier to arrest and convict these predators on the social order. Stop defending the predators and start defending their victims if you want red states voters to think you represent their values.

The Arts: The problem here is that we are identified in the minds of red voters as being advocates of causes that offend their sensibilities, when all we have been trying to do is be advocates for free speech. But red voters do not see the abstract principle involved, they see us defending artists who dip a crucifix in piss, and then insist that this pretentious crap is art that must be funded by the taxpayers through the NEA. Conservatives take the lead in calling this crap what it is, and liberals get caught defending it. If we want to be politically successful, it should be Democrats who express their outrage over this type of thing. We should defend freedom of expression where and when this value is truly in play. We should not be so stupid as to mistake for a constitutional principle the spectacle of an artist feeding at the public trough while expressing his contempt for the public by offending their sensibilities.

Violence in American Culture: America is in many ways a deeply sick society which glorifies all forms of violence and human degradation in order to feed the greed of the moral monsters who produce movies, video games, and music, among other manifestations. These people and their works are the enemies of the human spirit. All liberal souls should recoil at their greedy excesses and we should shun and shame them and find ways to lessen their impact on our culture. We sure as hell should not be taking money from them and inviting them to sleep in the Lincoln bedroom. I am not advocating government-imposed censorship. What I am suggesting is that Joe Lieberman was right about all this; and Tipper Gore was right about all this; and we ought to strive to change our party's positioning so that we are seen more through the lens of Joe Lieberman than through the lens of the ACLU.

Gun Control: People are naked apes--at best. On a collective level we are just a few breakdowns in the institutions of governance away from all being Bosnia circa 1992. On an individual level, we are monkeys with technology. So we often make very bad decisions, based on our baser instincts and the emotions of the moment. The trouble comes when we make these all-too-human decisions while in possession of technology that can render our mistakes lethal. Such as guns. If we were truly rational creatures, we would ban all guns from our society, period. But we ain't, so we won't. This too is a truth we have to come to terms with. So what we need to do is impose reasonable limits on the availability of guns in our too-violent culture. How do we get there from here?

Well, apparently not by any direct argument that guns are bad and should be banned. Even though the majority of the voters are not gun owners (59% no, to 41% yes) there are enough gun owners among voters (about 30 million) that the 63% vote for Bush among this group indicates some serious lost votes for Democrats. This cohort of voters, for example, is why Gore lost West Virginia in 2000. And a single state, even West Virginia, in 2000 would have made Gore president. More importantly, because the Democrats do not compete politically in more than half the states in the nation, this means that Republicans are likely to be over-represented in the Congress and so even if the nation as a whole is in favor of gun control, the Republicans can prevent it because of their head-lock on the Congress. Thus we saw, during the midst of the 2004 campaign, the Congressional Republicans allowing the existing ban on assault weapons to simply expire without debate. This law had been in effect for 10 years (having been successfully achieved by the Clinton Administration in early 1994). So what happened? Well, in the 1994 mid-term elections the Republicans took over the Congress, and they show no signs of ever giving it back.

So how do we get any gun control measures enacted nationally at all? Obviously, we have to re-position our party as supporters of the Second Amendment and supporters of only limited and reasonable gun control. So, to put it in practical terms, the Democrats should never again nominate a candidate who is not a dues-paying member of the NRA. Then we might have enough standing on the issue with the gun nuts to actually get a ban on assault weapons re-enacted. The hard-line "Bowling for Columbine" approach we have been taking in recent years has left us with precious little real federal gun control (except for some porous "background checks" as part of the Brady bill of 1993--and these checks are probably not long for this Republican world). After all the school shootings, and workplace mass-murders, and crazed snipers, and all the rest of it, if public revulsion over guns was going to be powerful enough to affect public policy, we would already have national gun control by now. Sadly, all this carnage is apparently not enough to flip the votes around. Obviously, we need to try a different approach. Some gun control is better than zero. Do the math.

Tort Reform: America is a lunatic society in which litigation and money have become the universal solutions for all our imagined ills. Thus whenever anyone experiences an undesired outcome in life, our first impulse is to sue someone else and enrich ourselves as compensation for our misfortunes. We all know the story of the stupid woman who dropped her cup of coffee in her lap and thought this sufficient justification to sue McDonald's. We all know the idiots who got fat eating at various fast food chains then sued them for destroying their health. Last week, two 11-year-old Indian boys in Montana ditched their classes in the local public school to go drinking in the countryside. They passed out in the snow and died from exposure. Their parents have sued the school district for $4 million for its failure to educate their children to the dangers of alcoholism. It goes on and on. Including, as a very large example, the scandalous social problem of soaring malpractice insurance driving doctors out of business because greedy lawyers find any excuse they can to sue whenever anyone has a bad health outcome. Liberals are on the wrong side of this issue. The Republicans are right. We desperately need tort reform. But because we have let the Republicans take the lead on this, they will certainly produce a type of reform which protects large corporations and not ordinary people. We must take the lead on this issue, so we can prevent the idiots from suing, while preserving our ability to force corporations to behave in a socially responsible manner. Specially, we need at least three reforms: we need "loser pays" in all civil actions; we need caps on monetary awards for abstract forms of suffering; and we need the ability for courts to levy sanctions against people who bring frivolous lawsuits. (And we cannot nominate a trial lawyer as part of our ticket unless and until we become advocates for these reforms--and I say this even though I voted for John Edwards in the Democratic primary.)

Voting Rights for Felons: Every day's news brings fresh evidence that liberals are nuts. Today's example is the issue of convicted felons and voting rights. Released felons are unable to vote under the laws in 48 of the 50 states (of course Vermont allows it). Liberal advocates for the criminals have decided to sue under the Voting Rights Act, on a premise that could only make sense to a liberal. Since most of the 3.9 million felons are black males, this means that preventing them from voting is racially discriminatory. Thus, the laws preventing felons from voting are racist and should be overturned. Which of course, is just like the old joke about the child who murders his parents and then pleads for mercy on the grounds that he is an orphan. Liberals are endless suckers for this kind of stuff. Please liberals, listen to me: if you do nothing else, stop defending criminals!

On the Middle East: Say as little as possible; do as little as possible; keep our heads down. There is little hope for peace in the Middle East and we should not risk any of our political capital arguing that America's position is too pro-Israel, or any other complaint liberals might have about it. Every time we get involved in this issue we get burned, in somewhat the same way that police officers sometimes experience in domestic disturbance calls. When police try to intervene between a battling husband and wife, sometimes both parties turn on the police and jointly attack the outsider trying to help. That's roughly what happens to us on the Arab-Israeli conflict. The right-wing in Israel hates us because they resent us helping the Palestinians even a little bit, and the Palestinians hate us because they know that in the end we are ultimately pro-Israel. Maybe we should refuse to get involved unless and until both parties come to us and jointly beg for our intervention. We do not have to speak to every injustice in the universe, just those we have some practical chance of doing something about. Liberals need to learn the art of keeping their big mouths shut sometimes.

Immigration Reform: Mid-way through this essay my wife insisted I stop so I could accompany her to the birthday party of our little two-year-old godson, Irvin. Irvin's parents are illegals from Mexico, although Irvin is a citizen, having been born here. Pretty much everybody at the party was an illegal from Mexico, except for all the young, bright-eyed, smiling children, who, like Irvin, are citizens of the U.S. by birth. My wife is Mexican-American and so she has for years now served as a kind of unofficial go-between for this growing immigrant community in our part of Baltimore. She helps them with paperwork; sometimes she accompanies them on medical appointments; most often she helps them with church-related matters, such as translating for them at baptisms and First Communions. One night a week she teaches free English-language classes for them in the local Catholic parish rectory. She even has finally gotten the local parish to come around to welcoming them in their midst. They now even have a Spanish-speaking mass for them and the pastor has at last consented to the idea of a Spanish-speaking priest on the permanent staff.

As I watched these loving, happy families; the kids playing with the balloons hanging from the ceiling, and the youngest ones mischievously sticking their fingers in the cake frosting for a sneaky lick, it struck me that they would be seen by anyone lucky enough to move among them as virtually ideal American families. The love, caring, and community in evidence, melted my heart. They are all hard-working--indeed, that's why they are here, to work hard. They are law-abiding--apart from the small crime of crossing the border without permission. They are even the kind of families the religious conservative say they long to see more of in America--deeply religious two-parent families in which the husband works and the wife stays home to care for the children. They want nothing more than to have a slightly better life from themselves, with the hope of a much better life for their children. They have journeyed here through considerable hardship and not inconsiderable risk, just for this purpose. The parents speak very little English, but the little kids, bright as buttons, are growing up bilingual and will be full-fledged Americans in a few years, indistinguishable from millions of others whose immigrant experience may be slightly more distant in time. They are the immigrant dream of the American ideal, in the flesh.

There are some other truths here too. The reason these people are here in their millions is because we want them here. Employers, especially, want them here, as a source of cheap labor. They want to be here too, because for them cheap labor in the U.S. is a better life than the best they can achieve in Mexico. America implemented a vast immigration reform bill in 1986. Its core principle was to enforce immigration laws by fining employers for knowingly hiring illegals. The idea was similar to an attempt to fight drug importation by eliminating domestic demand. This law, pushed mostly by Republicans anxious to cut off the flow of illegals, has never been enforced. Because we want them here. We just don't want to admit it to ourselves. So we make strenuous efforts to enforce a controlled border with Mexico, knowing that we will fail. Expecting to fail. Wanting to fail. We just can't admit that. So America's current immigration policy resembles nothing so much as America's alcohol policy during Prohibition. We are against illegal immigration--wink, wink, nudge, nudge--like we were against drinking during Prohibition, but if you want to pick up a bunch of cheap day laborers they are as plentiful as beer in the 1920s.

In some ways, this is a perfectly fine immigration policy. Like the gambling going on in the back room of Rick's American Cafe in the movie Casablanca, this kind of semi-open scofflaw activity is okay. All we need do is to make our strenuous efforts to enforce our borders with a modicum of compassion and courtesy and without too much of a heavy hand. In general, we have been following a policy of benign neglect for years now, and it has not been all that bad an approach.

But there are two serious problems with the present "turn a blind eye" approach. We do have to protect these willing workers from exploitation by unscrupulous employers while they are here, and from the coyotes who bring them. And it is a burden on these decent people to always be in an illegal status, looking over their shoulder to see if "la migra" is after them.

But the Republicans have stolen the march on us yet again. Bush has proposed a rather interesting guest-worker program that would allow workers to be here legally for a time-limited period, and to move freely back and forth across the border. There is some value in this because it would allow us to better protect these people from exploitation. There is one serious shortcoming in the Bush plan, however. It would only allow individual workers to legally enter the U.S., their families would have to stay behind in Mexico. It would, in effect, break up healthy, happy families. It is in that sense a profoundly anti-family immigration policy.

Now there are three stupid things that Democrats might do in response to the Bush proposal, and we are almost certain to do one of them. One is to become absolutists on immigration and demand that all these illegals be legalized and refuse to countenance a guest-worker program because the old guest-worker program from the 1960s was thought by liberals to be demeaning. This will be the establishment response on the part of the Latino advocacy community. Or we could agree with Bush because we ourselves are intolerant bigots who do not like these people here (this is the approach recently taken by Maryland's former Democratic governor William Donald Schaefer). Or we could just oppose Bush because he is Bush, and so nothing he comes up with could possibly be anything we could support.

The smart move here again--since we may no longer be able to just wink and nudge--is to champion a guest worker program, but with a proviso that intact families be allowed to stay. We need to couch this upcoming debate as a pro-family debate, and Democrats need to get on the pro-family side of this issue and push the Republicans over to the anti-family side. In that way, we will both do good and be successful.

Abortion: This is the toughest issue for us, because the emotions so overwhelm reason, on both sides. While this is not necessarily where I think Democrats need to concentrate their efforts at change, I am addressing it so that we can see how my ideas might apply to a really tough issue.

First, we should stop approaching our defense of choice on the grounds of some imaginary right to privacy that women somehow uniquely acquire because they have a womb. And, above all else, we should never make a defense of choice on the grounds of the feminist argument that "it is a woman's body, so nobody can tell her what she can and cannot do with it." That argument is our weakest point because it smacks of: 1) selfishness; and 2) moral obtuseness, because it suggests that a "woman's body" is somehow an ethical category that can trump the legitimate moral worries surrounding abortions. When lots of red-state Americans hear the choice position defended in these terms, they are repelled. And I am not talking here about those absolutists who are certain abortion is murder, but about the great majority of voters who are not sure what the truth is here, but they are pretty sure they are offended by the angry fist-waving feminist defense of the right to choose.

Look, we have to tell ourselves the truth about abortion: it is a moral sticky-wicket, and it is far from true that abortion is merely a medical procedure with no moral import. Even ardent feminists, when they undergo abortions, often come away emotionally traumatized by the experience. Because the women who undergo this experience usually understand instinctively that something of moral import is involved. As well they should; because this procedure, whatever else may be involved here, is indisputably about the taking of at least a potential life. And we should never do something like this lightly.

Now, if anything is obvious about the abortion debate it is that America has not achieved a moral consensus on this issue. For some, it is obvious that this is the taking of a life; for others this is obviously untrue. For many of us, we are not sure that certainty is possible either way. In any case, we need to defend choice from the perspective of an understanding of the nature of law in a democratic society. We need to defend it, if you will, from a libertarian point of view and not a "women's rights" point of view. We need to make the following case: in a democratic society, the punitive power of the state can legitimately be brought to bear only where there is a general moral consensus that certain behaviors are not allowed. Thus we outlaw armed robbery, and rape, and the murder of living people, because almost every rational member of society believes these activities are crimes. When we have no moral consensus on a particular type of conduct, the state has no legitimate right to use its police powers to repress that conduct. Thus, we have to move carefully and tentatively on the matter of abortion. We can in fact outlaw certain aspects of abortion--those practices on which there is a general moral consensus, like abortions in the last trimester, or whatever--but we should legislate hesitantly in those areas where consensus has yet to be achieved.

The result of this positioning is that we end up pretty much where we are today: with choice as the default position, restricted only in those situations where there is a substantial consensus for doing so. The long-term consequence of this approach, of course, is that we might end up someday outlawing abortion entirely, if society coalesces around the view that abortion is a form of homicide. And if that happens, we have to be prepared to accept this outcome. But if we can successfully shift the terms of the debate away from an effort by moral absolutists to impose by force of law their moral vision on those who do not share it, to a position where abortion and the restrictions on it become matters to be argued from various bully pulpits, we will have done the best that we possibly can with this issue.

If we do not shift the terms of the debate, but insist on doing battle between one type of moral absolutism (the "women's rights" variety) vs. another (the religious variety) then choice may well lose the struggle, not in the long-run, but maybe well before the next election (depending on what happens with the Supreme Court).

Now, here comes the disheartening practical part: the part where some of us will have to compromise ourselves yet again in order to change the image of our party. Democrats, it seems to me, need to feel free to join this discussion on the side of moral concern about abortions and stop feeling compulsively locked into defending the absolutism of the "women's rights" position on abortion. Many of us who are Democrats are deeply troubled by the spectacle of abortion, and think it in general a very bad idea. We need to be free to start saying so. We need to change the image of our party so that it becomes identified with the moral concerns here, instead of with the claims to absolute rights.

Let me give an even more stark example of how Democrats need to position themselves on this issue. In 2003 Congress passed overwhelmingly (by about a 2 to 1 margin in both houses), and Bush signed into law, The Partial Birth Abortion Ban of 2003. It was obvious it was going to pass. It was inevitable that this minor restriction on abortions (about 2,200 were performed each year) was one upon which there was a sufficient consensus that it was going to become law. But Democrats--enthralled to the absolutist position on choice--felt duty-bound to stand in front of this onrushing train--with the predictable results. Democrats need to stop being absolutists on abortion and start looking for acceptable restrictions that they can advocate and support. If Democrats were even half-smart (which in recent elections we seem determined to prove is not the case) then they would have co-sponsored the partial birth abortion ban and made it a Democratic Party position, rather than letting the Republicans get all the moral credit on this issue. Democrats better wake up and stop being absolutists on abortion and start finding ways to express their moral concerns about it, both rhetorically and in limited policy changes. Otherwise, we will end up with the Republicans winning both the political points and being the sole shapers of our public policies in this area. Which will be the worst of all possible worlds for women. Again, politics is the art of the possible, not the science of the absolute. Whenever Democrats find themselves on the side of the absolutists, that is a stone-cold clue we are doing something wrong.

Now I grant that there are moral concerns on the other side of this question too. Forcing women to have babies they do not want and will not love and nurture is also a moral problem. I also agree that forcing women to seek "back-alley" solutions to unwanted pregnancies also raises moral concerns. And I care very much about this form of human suffering too. And I am deeply offended by the spectacle of holy-book thumpers who believe God speaks to them and tells them to impose their self-righteousness on others, being indifferent to the suffering they cause actual living human beings in the process, whatever suffering this may avoid for the potential human beings they are defending.

My own moral compass tells me that in many cases it might be better to abort a potential new life than to bring it into this world and then abandon it to a lifetime of cruel indifference and suffering. I am not a moral absolutist about abortion, and most people aren't. But I am morally concerned about the many ethical issues that arise here, and it is that concern, rather than the claim of "rights," that ought to be the focus of our thinking on this issue.

Absolutism is a horrible spiritual disease. But we cannot successfully counter it with absolutism of our own. I do not know what the truth is about abortion. But I do know that the spectacle of one group of absolutists shouting at another group of absolutists, yields the worst of all possible public policies and is the worst of all possible worlds. And if Democrats continue to associate ourselves with the absolutist claims of women's rights, we are not really all that much better than the Republicans if they continue to associate themselves with the absolutist claims of the right-to-lifers.

Gay Rights: My own view here is that gay rights are the most important civil rights issue of our time, as gays are the one minority whom it is still respectable to openly revile and oppress. Even significant parts of our own political coalition (religiously conservative blacks) are still openly bigots about gays. If we believe in civil rights, we must believe in gay rights, and it is much more pressing than African-American civil rights now because gays are today roughly where blacks were in the era of Jim Crow. But, alas, the practical reality is that the push for gay marriage helped defeat the Democrats in 2004. We have to come to terms with this reality. If we wish to be social crusaders, then by all means we should be crusading for full civic equality for gays. But if we want to indulge in the practical business of politics, we have to let-off on the gas-pedal a bit.

What the Democrats should have done in 2004 was neutralize this issue too. The way to have done so was to take the same position as Bush. Kerry should have supported the proposal for a constitutional amendment defining marriage as between one man and one woman, but with a clause authorizing civil unions as part of the package (which, after all, is what Bush said his position was). Then if the Republicans put forward a version of the amendment without civil unions in it, the debate would become over civil unions, not over gay marriage, and this is a debate we could have won--on the traditional Democratic value of fairness, which is one of our core values that resonates with Americans, red and blue alike. Now, practically speaking, I do not for a minute believe that the Republicans have any real intention of enacting a marriage amendment to the Constitution. Like so much else about the Republicans, it is just a gambit to put Democrats in an untenable position so they can pummel us on social issues. I say we should call their bluff by agreeing with them. And even if they aren't bluffing, looking at it in coldly rational terms, we would still be better off to agree on the issue of gay marriage.

The nation is simply not ready to accept gay marriage. Rather than trying to insist they swallow it whether they like it or not, we should have found a way to shift the debate to the part of the issue (civil unions) on which we could win--and, in the process, produce some progress for gay rights. Of course, if such an amendment actually passed, this would make gays second-class citizens under the constitution, something I find repugnant. But what we are going to end up with--thanks to our over-reaching on this issue--is that the Republicans are going to push through a constitutional amendment without civil unions in it, and gays will be at the maximum possible disadvantage. The sad fact of political life is that we sometimes have to choose between two regrettable, but nevertheless distinct, outcomes, in this case: one in which gays are barred from marriage and given no right to civic unions, or one in which gays are barred from marriage but with a constitutionally-guaranteed right to its closest civic equivalent, civil unions. This kind of compromise is certainly distasteful; and I understand perfectly that some people cannot bring themselves to drink from such a bitter cup. But if you cannot bring yourself to play this kind of political hardball, then Karl Rove will continue to snack on your bones at will.

VII. Restoring the New Deal Coalition

Can you see what all these policy positions have in common? They all strive to move the Democrats toward becoming populists and away from being liberals. It is an effort to move the image, and to some degree the policies, away from the besotted liberalism of the 1970s and back toward the economic populism of Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal coalition of the 1930s. FDR put together a coalition that consisted of: blue-collar workers; Southern whites; blacks; Jews; and philosophical liberals. In the 1970s Richard Nixon and the Republicans stripped the Southern whites away; and in the 1980s Ronald Reagan stripped the blue-collar workers away. We need to get some portion of these two constituencies back. There simply is no longer enough of the other parts of the coalition left to win national elections. The white voters in the South, and the non-unionized blue-collar voters pretty much everywhere, have left us. We need to move our party to a position where they can see us again, and see us as someplace they might want to again call home.

There will still be plenty of issues that will differentiate a populist Democratic party from the Republicans. We can still rail against the rapacious robber barons of our day who callously outsource jobs to countries that pay slave wages so they can gobble-up massive millions in bonuses and stock options for themselves; we can still call corporations that re-incorporate offshore to avoid paying U.S. taxes economic traitors; we can still explain to working-class Americans why privatizing Social Security will only enrich Wall St. brokers and not them; we can still demand a more nearly universal health care system in which millions of people are no longer left out; we can still insist that preserving the environment sometimes has to trump profits; we can still become the champions of small business while attacking the Enrons and WorldComs of our society; we can still comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.

There is so much that makes even populist Democrats different than Republicans. There is more than enough difference between populists and Republicans to flip the electorate around and start the cycle moving back in the other direction. But first we have to move in that direction ourselves. We have to position ourselves rhetorically and through policy changes to reflect this change in political philosophy. It will take time to convince the voters that we have had a change of heart. But we have four years to make the case. Time to start trying.