November 23, 2002 6:49 AM

Democrats adrift

Leadership vs. Dems' dearth of ideas

Normally, I'm not a fan of Charles Krauthammer. This is one occasion, though, when I think he's dead on. In examining why the Democrats so thoroughly bonked the midterm elections, he is closer to the truth than I think even he realizes.

TWENTY years ago, Daniel Patrick Moynihan observed that the Republican Party had become the party of ideas. Moynihan found his own Democratic Party, for decades the font of great new political ideas, to be intellectually spent. The message of the 2002 election is that the Democrats remain brain dead, and that ideas -- lack of ideas -- have consequences.

The conventional wisdom is that the Democrats were defeated because they had no message. This is true. But it makes it sound like a question of political technique. The reason Democrats have no message is that they have no ideas. When prescription drugs is your poster issue, you know that you're in trouble (particularly when Republicans have accepted a prescription drug benefit in principle and the argument is about how best to administer it).

The trouble is that the Democrats created a great and successful revolution with the New Deal, attempted to advance it with the Great Society, and when that failed, they gave up thinking.

Until the Democrats are able to hone their message and come up with solid ideas, they will continue to chase their collective tails. Two years is not a lot of time to reinvent yourself, but that is exactly the task that Democrats are faced with.

This is not Dick Gephardt's fault, nor will Nancy Pelosi (or anyone else) necessarily provide the solutions. I do think Gephardt is correct in his assessment that the time has come for new leadership within the Democratic Party. Let's survey the landscape, shall we?

Al Gore is still lurking somewhere out there. About half of the Democratic party wants him and everything Clintonesque (et tu, Hilary??) to just disappear. I think this does the man a disservice, though. Al Gore, sadly, will be forever linked to Bill Clinton. That has it's good and bad points, and if Republicans have their way, they will accentuate the negative.

To Gore's credit, he accepted the results of the clusterf**k in Florida, when he would have been within his rights to pursue any and all legal remedies available to him. He got shafted, and he knows it, but he took it like a man and decided to move on. He is by all accounts a thoroughly decent human being and an outstanding public servant. Having said that, is he the charismatic leader who will lead the Democrats out of the wilderness and to victory in 2004? Not likely, but keep in mind that Bill Clinton's political future was also pretty bleak in 1990.

What exactly does Dick Gephardt stand for?? For someone who has chased the Presidential rabbit before, he has done an astonishingly poor job of defining himself to the electorate. I'm sure the voters in his Congressional district love him- after all, they keep electing him, but outside of St. Louis...well, it's a blank slate.

Gephardt needs to identify himself with something that will set him apart from the grey party apparatchiks inside the Beltway. He's got to stand for something, believe in something. I'm sure he does, but he needs to let us know what that "something" is.

And who in the heck is John Edwards? Can anyone outside of North Carolina tell me who he is and what he stands for? I will say this for the man: he certainly is photogenic. Yes, that is a horribly shallow way to evaluate a potential Presidential candidate, but it's not like I have anything else to go on.

Edwards needs to define himself to the electorate, and he needs to begin doing that YESTERDAY. He may well be a smarter, wiser, less morally-challenged version of Bill Clinton, but no one in the hinterlands knows that yet. It's time for that to change.

Edwards is an example of the fact that the Democrats' cupboard is not bare. There are people on the left who can, and if given the opportunity will, make excellent Presidential candidates. What the party needs to decide is that the time to begin the fight is now. They must devise a strategy to get the names, faces, and platforms of prominent Democrats out into the ether, so that, come 2004, the voters aren't looking at their ballots and asking, "John WHO??"

There is much work to be done. Time's a-wasting....

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This page contains a single entry by Jack Cluth published on November 23, 2002 6:49 AM.

And you drive on the wrong side of the road was the previous entry in this blog.

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