Where's the party?

DEMOCRATS WOKE UP on Wednesday morning to a cold rain and a colder reality: Despite the hopes raised by historic turnouts and illusive early exit polls on Tuesday, the Curse of 2000 would not be reversed. No amount of lawyering in Ohio or anywhere else would change the fact that George W. Bush, shrugging off all the rage and reason Democrats hurled against him, had won an undeniable, if undeniably slight, majority of the popular and electoral vote. All those "Re-Defeat Bush" stickers looked pitifully dated in the new light.

Now the Democratic Party finds itself in a familiar place, in search not only of national leadership but of something even more basic: a compass point. The tactical lessons of the ground-war defeat will be hashed over from now until 2008. The harder, more immediate, questions have to do with fundamental principles. What do Democrats believe in? How should they act as the opposition party? What, if anything, can they do to recapture middle America?

To assess the challenges facing Democrats in the wake of Bush's victory, we asked five astute observers to offer their views on where the party of Jackson, Roosevelt, and Clinton now stands, and where it goes from here.

Liberals: Go red, not right

By Harold Meyerson

FOR THE LIBERAL WING of the Democratic Party, campaign 2004 was a breakthrough, a landmark, almost a liberation. Election 2004, however, was a disaster.

Mind you, this was not the year when the Democrats turned left. The party did not revive any big government programs -- indeed, John Kerry's health care proposal managed to outline how to greatly expand coverage without creating any new bureaucracies. The party did not write a US-Out-of-Iraq platform, and I found few if any liberals who spoke ill of John Kerry for not demanding immediate withdrawal. (The electoral realism of liberals in the 2004 cycle has been underappreciated.) Democratic candidates almost universally came out against same-sex marriage. So why did liberals feel so good right up until about 8 p.m. Eastern time on election night?

The answer begins with Internet technology and campaign finance reform. Groups like MoveOn gave liberals their own political voice. And organizations like America Coming Together, created because the McCain-Feingold Act stripped the Democratic Party of many of its longtime voter mobilization responsibilities, gave liberals a vehicle through which they could help mobilize the Democratic base. With so many new, friendly, and, in some cases, semi-open-source organizations working together in common cause, liberals felt a sense of ownership towards the broad endeavor to dump Bush. What's more, the Democratic establishment welcomed them to the fray -- and I daresay the Democratic establishment would dearly love the 527s that turned out so many Democratic voters to stick around.

The problem, of course, was that the Republicans turned out even more of their base voters than the Democrats did of theirs. The Democrats did not lose because voters were flowing from blue America into the red zones, but because the red zones voted at a somewhat higher rate (which is why the percentage of self-described conservatives rose from 29 in the 2000 exit polls to 34 in this year's). The challenge for liberals, and Democrats generally, is how to do better in the more culturally traditionalist climes of red America.

Certainly, abandoning economic populism would be the wrong way to go. Last Tuesday, 52 percent of Floridians voted for Bush while 72 percent voted for an initiative raising the state minimum wage. In Nevada, Bush got 50 percent support and a similar minimum-wage measure won 68 percent backing.

But candidates are not initiatives. They speak, they emote, they relate to voters -- or not. And it's important to realize that George W. Bush did not defeat John Kerry in small towns across America because Bush persuaded them that privatizing Social Security was a great idea. He won because his strategy was to bond with them on issues of cultural traditionalism and because it was easy to demonize John Kerry as a cosmopolitan from central casting. Bush-Rove politics is identity politics at its purest, and Democrats can't compete unless they can speak the language.

So abandon economic progressivism? That's no way to build support in the working-class South and Midwest. The Democrats do need to develop a serious national security policy for a world of loose nukes and radical Islam. They do need to promote the careers of the red-state Democrats in their ranks who can wrap the values of tolerance in the language of faith. They may even need to distance themselves a bit from their friends in Hollywood. And they certainly need to make those red states a little bluer by building janitors' unions in the barrios of Texas and Miami. Growing red-state Democrats -- not least, at the level of presidential nominees -- will make liberals, and Democrats, feel a little less blue.

Harold Meyerson is editor at large of The American Prospect, a Washington Post columnist, and political editor of the L.A. Weekly.

The Clinton factor

By Elaine Kamarck

A FORMER ALTAR BOY and practicing Catholic loses an election because the largest bloc in the electorate -- people who thought moral values were the most important issue -- voted against him? In an election year with a war that's going badly and an economy that's sputtering, this came as quite a shock to many and it is already generating an enormous amount of explanation.

It used to be that Democrats had a bad rap because people thought we were the party of big government and high taxes, the party that cared more about criminals than crime, the party that gave away your tax dollars to welfare moms. Now the rap on the party is that we are somehow not the party of religion and morals. One friend of mine overheard a supermarket conversation in which the woman ahead of her was maintaining that Kerry would close the churches.

So when did the rap on Democrats change? Could it be that the coalition of the moral came together in 1998 when a Democratic president's affair with an intern burst upon the national scene? Since then, the most explosive sex scandal in the 20th century has been the 800-pound elephant in the Democratic living room that no one wants to talk about. In the 2000 election Americans told pollsters that the moral condition of the country was on the wrong track and Al Gore did six percentage points worse among married women than Clinton had done in 1996. Hmm. . . . One doubts that married women were deserting the Democrats because of their positions on gun control.

It's time for Democrats to take off the rosy glasses that led many to cheer Clinton's return to the campaign trail for Kerry in the crucial final weeks. Too many Democrats, myself included, have waxed nostalgic for Clinton on TV talk shows. For those of us in blue America he was the man who led the Democratic Party out of the wilderness and showed us how to be compassionate and fiscally responsible. But for late-night comedians he is still the subject of regular ridicule. And for red America he is emblematic of a culture and value system that they abhor.

The fact that Clinton never paid a price within his party for his own mistakes continues to give many Americans the impression that we are a party that is as out of the mainstream on traditional moral questions as the Hollywood celebrities who endorse us. The first step to reclaiming the moral mantle is to stop adoring Bill Clinton the rock star and go back to some of the bedrock, forward-looking middle-class policies that made Clinton's presidency successful in spite of his behavior. Kerry appealed only to the lower-middle class; he split the middle of the middle class and lost big in the upper-middle class.

Democrats can talk about families, they can talk about security, they can talk about helping mothers and fathers be good parents. They can talk about the importance of stable marriages to a good society and let states decide if they want to include gays and lesbians in the good society. They can reform the ragged social safety net of the industrial age into a safety net for the information age. They can go back to being, as Hubert Humphrey used to say, the party that protected people at the dawn and at the twilight of their lives. They can do this in new, modern, non-bureaucratic ways and take back the moral high ground.

Elaine Kamarck is on the faculty of the John F. Kennedy School at Harvard University. She was a member of the Clinton/Gore administration and the senior policy advisor to the Gore presidential campaign in 2000.

Congress: No surrender

By Thomas E. Mann

LET ME ACKNOWLEDGE at the outset how wrong I was about this election. For many months I argued that an angry, energized, unified, and well-funded Democratic Party; a negative referendum on the president's performance on Iraq and the economy; and the likely acceptance of Senator John Kerry as a plausible alternative for the White House would produce a modest but decisive victory for the challenger in the popular vote and the Electoral College. Since elections serve as our most fundamental instrument of democratic accountability, I reasoned that public dismay with the direction the country had taken at home and abroad put George W. Bush's reelection seriously at risk.

The Bush campaign succeeded brilliantly in clearing these formidable hurdles by focusing public attention on the president's reputation for strong leadership on terrorism, by aggressively challenging Kerry's suitability for office, and perhaps most importantly, by using opposition to same-sex marriages and a masterful ground game to mobilize religious conservatives. Turnout was the big story of the 2004 election -- with double-digit rate increases in the battleground states -- but Bush, not Kerry, was the prime beneficiary.

The president has already used his victory and that of Republicans in Congress to claim a mandate for an ambitious domestic agenda, built around the idea of an "ownership society," which features a fundamental restructuring of social insurance programs and the tax code. The agenda is designed to make individuals more responsible for their own retirement and health insurance and to shift taxation from investment and savings to consumption.

Both sets of policy proposals entail very difficult and controversial tradeoffs and raise the most profound questions about the social safety net and the relationship between individuals and their government. Yet neither has been subjected to serious policy analysis much less any semblance of public deliberation. As the Bush campaign was virtually silent on what promises to be the core domestic agenda of Bush's second term, it is not credible to claim that this election certified public support for such ambitious policy changes.

During his first term the president boldly pushed a series of tax cuts and a war in Iraq without a shred of electoral mandate. The Republican majority in Congress, viewing itself more as an agent of the president than as a steward of an independent branch of government, largely acquiesced. Ballooning budget deficits and a chaotic situation in Iraq are attributable at least partly to Congress's failure to do its job.

With the new political wind at his back, the president will demand that same level of support from Congress for his domestic initiatives. The Republican leadership in both the House and the Senate seem eager to deliver. Congressional Democrats, their ranks depleted and their spirits crushed after Kerry's decisive loss, will be tempted to simply get out of the way. This would be a mistake, for themselves and the country, as would automatic opposition to any proposal advanced by the president. Instead, they should invite genuine discussion, public debate, and negotiation on key elements of the president's agenda. And if their efforts are rebuffed, they should use every institutional means available to them to prevent the enactment of these proposals and to carry their differences with the president into the 2006 midterm election.

Thomas E. Mann is a senior fellow at The Brookings Institution.

The Wal-Mart factor

By Rick Perlstein

ON ELECTION MORNING I was listening to National Public Radio -- part of what Nation columnist Eric Alterman calls the "So-Called Liberal Media" -- when I heard the kind of thing that drives Democrats like me around the bend. A commentator was explaining that the answer to all of Japan's economic woes was . . . Wal-Mart.

"It could drive smaller retailers out of business, free up land for better uses," I heard -- although I barely heard it over my own cursing. This is not a matter of free trade. It is about the fact that Wal-Mart is a corporate predator, alleged to have broken all kinds of labor, immigration, and anti-discrimination laws. What's more, economists have argued that, far from boosting weak local economies, the presence of a Wal-Mart store in a town kills more jobs than it replaces. Why, I asked my radio, does NPR feel that the dictates of "balance" require them to put on radical right-wing free market ideologues, even when they're telling less than half the truth?

Then, the announcer gave the identity of the commentator, and I really got mad. It was a former undersecretary of commerce for the Clinton administration -- a Democrat.

This is an election story. One year ago, I reported in an article from Rockford, Ill., that when heartland Americans are asked what they think is going wrong with America, "Wal-Mart" is one of the first words out of their mouths. "They pay their workers substandard wages," one factory worker told me. Interestingly, his boss hates them even more -- for the way they force manufacturing jobs out of the country in their too-ruthless drive to cut costs. Judy, another factory owner, who soon after I spoke to her lost her business, said it was a family values issue: "The moms that used to have a factory job with me and who go home at the end of eight hours . . . and take care of their children and have decent day care, now they're working two jobs at Wal-Mart with no health benefits."

And yet the Democrats are not in a position to capitalize on this sort of broad-based frustration with our nation's present Wal-Mart economy, because they are complicit in it. Here's one example: Hillary Clinton is a former member of the board of directors of Wal-Mart. She should not be able to get within spitting distance of a Democratic presidential nomination until she explains, if not apologizes for, her service on it.

For a party whose major competitive advantage over the opposition is its credibility in protecting ordinary people from economic insecurity, anything that compromises that credibility is disastrous.

Even worse, the Democrats don't need Wal-Mart's support -- but the Republicans certainly do: Eighty percent of the staggering $1.5 million in contributions from Wal-Mart's political action committee, the second biggest in corporate America, went to Republicans. The stronger this corporation is, the better off the Republican Party is. And, this Democrat believes, the worse off America is.

We've already heard a lot about the rise of the evangelical vote in this presidential election. Well, God-fearing middle Americans who also fear for their families' economic security would be far more likely to vote their economic interests -- rather than on matters like gay marriage and abortion -- if the Democratic Party beat a public retreat from a politics that condones or even celebrates the Wal-Martization of America and the world. This is the way forward for the Democrats.

Rick Perlstein is chief national political correspondent for the Village Voice and the author of "Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus."

Sleepless in Boston

By Lawrence S. DiCara

GEORGE W. BUSH'S narrow victory over John Kerry is of significance to residents of Massachusetts for many reasons. First of all, it is indicative of an enormous change in our political landscape. When I started following politics over 40 years ago and John Kennedy defeated Richard Nixon, Pennsylvania had as many electoral votes as California, Massachusetts had more electoral votes than Florida, and Illinois had more than Texas. The numerical formula -- and the makeup of Congress -- changes every 10 years as more people move south and west and the electoral votes follow. North Carolina now has 15 votes and so does Georgia, while Massachusetts has only 12 (compared to 16 in 1960).

Citizens of Massachusetts have been reminded, rather decisively, that there are more red-state people than there are blue-state people. Retro has prevailed over Metro. A decisive majority in this country do not consider it a moral imperative to buy bottled water or pay $3 for a cup of coffee or shop for organic produce. Some of them even smoke. Millions of them go to church every Sunday and actually believe what they hear from the pulpit.

We in the Northeast are being marginalized culturally as well as politically. We are becoming isolated in a culturally gated community of the well-educated and the well-paid. But for the New Hampshire primary, there may be little reason for many national candidates to even step foot in the Northeast.

But that's national politics. In our state politics, the picture is somewhat different. Massachusetts will now be spared the mother of all special elections. Five or six qualified and articulate Democrats will not be battling for the opportunity to fill an empty Senate seat. Not so many dominos will be falling across our political landscape here at home as many would have anticipated, predicted, or prayed for. Those many young mayors and state legislators who coveted a seat in Congress must now wait, and so may the even younger men and women delay running for those seats in the legislature or those corner offices at city halls across the Commonwealth, given that these days incumbents are rarely defeated.

What does this mean for our Republican governor, he who has not only a base in New England but also one in Michigan and a third in the Mountain States? What is the status of his political stock here in Massachusetts, given the overwhelming defeat of the many candidates he supported, some of whom outspent their Democratic opponents significantly? What does it mean that, in a state where voters exhibit independent tendencies, articulate opponents running on the Republican ticket are defeated by large margins -- even by some incumbents who might not be regarded as the strongest members of the Great and General Court? Should Governor Romney, who has so much talent, be spending more time on the home front? Alternatively, should he announce now that he will not seek reelection and start crisscrossing the nation in search of his party's nomination in 2008? The Democratic majority on Beacon Hill must also strategize so they might take advantage of their good fortune. I expect that much high-paid talent will be mulling these questions at meetings to which none of us will be invited.

Lastly, regardless of who we voted for, here in Massachusetts we are tired. Many weeks of late nights watching the Red Sox, and now the election, means that an early winter snow storm might be the only way most of us will catch up on our sleep.

Lawrence S. DiCara is the former president of the Boston City Council, a partner in the law firm of Nixon Peabody, and a frequent lecturer on state and local politics.