Analysis of the state of the Democratic party presupposes the existence of a national Democratic party. But the fact is, as Gertrude Stein once said about Oakland, there's no there there. Millions of people call themselves Democrats and several hundred thousand show up at Democratic state and national conventions. A Democratic National Committee raises money. But there's no real national Democratic party. At least nothing like what the Republicans have: a network of conservative think tanks, a boatload of money to market the ideas that emerge from them and spokespeople to sell them. They recruit and train prospective candidates. And they have discipline-they decide on a party line and stick with it. They even have oligarchs-the Republican Powerful who gathered together in 1996 and decided George W Bush was going to be their candidate in 2000. What do Democrats have? We have conferences on "The future of the Democratic party," where we debate whether we should move rightwards to the Republican-lite centre or back to FDR, then we go off and do whatever we were doing before.
The only time there's even a semblance of a national Democratic party is when Democrats come up with a presidential candidate, but Democrats don't actually come up with a presidential candidate. Instead, several dozen men who call themselves Democrats come up with themselves. Thirty months before election day, they let it be known that they're considering running. Each then starts endless rounds of visits to New Hampshire and Iowa, talks to all the interest groups (unions, teachers, environmentalists, identity organisations), chats with the media, meets with donors in Hollywood and other bastions of Democratic money. Twenty months before election day, a half-dozen such entrepreneurs are still running. At this point, the same old Washington-based Democratic political consultants, pollsters and marketers decide who they want to back. And the race is on.
So the first thing we need is a real national party. Something with grass roots, with the capacity to think new ideas and market them. We need a movement that embraces all the people who have been left out, who have been screwed both by big corporations and big government-people who are working their asses off but aren't earning much more than they did a dozen years ago, who are cynical about every institution in American society but still love the US with all their hearts.
But we can't have a movement unless we also have conviction and courage. Democrats used to have these things. Republicans have no monopoly on being tough against tyranny or hard-headed when it comes to domestic policy. For almost a century, it was Democrats who waged war (Wilson, FDR, Truman, Kennedy and Johnson) and it was mostly the kids of Democrats who got killed in wars. And for 60 years it's been Democrats who have managed the economy well-cutting taxes to prevent the economy from sinking and cutting deficits when they get out of control, as in 1993.
It takes no conviction to move to the centre. You want to be a typical candidate, you campaign from the centre. But if you want to be a leader, you define the centre. You don't rely on pollsters to tell you where the centre is, because you can't lead people to where they already are.
I'm sick of hearing that 40 per cent of Americans vote Democrat and 40 per cent Republican, so the real action is with the 20 per cent in the middle. In fact, as we all know, most Americans who are eligible to vote don't. And even those who do have no strong party loyalty. They watch three months of attack ads on television and vote for the person they despise the least. In this last campaign season, Republicans outspent Democrats three-to-one. So it's not surprising Republican candidates seemed marginally less despicable.
In US politics today there are those who can inspire and those who can't. Amongst the former is John McCain -he doesn't care too much about the polls, he loves his country, and he has a fair degree of contempt for Americans who are powerful but who don't really give a damn about most other Americans. The same goes for the late Paul Wellstone.
Finally, Democrats have to do their politics with a sense of humour. All the negativism is a bummer. Who wants to join a funeral procession? The world is not going to hell. In fact, we're far better off than we were 20 years ago or 50 years ago-largely because of reforms Democrats championed. I'm glad I'm not a Republican; they hate government, and now they run it.
So let's celebrate what we can be: Let's have a tax cut for working families; universal, affordable health care; a vigorous environmentalism based on renewable energy. And a call to altruism; college students are doing more community service than in the 1960s.
Message. There was no national Democratic message in the months leading up to the mid-term elections in November. Every Democrat running for Congress talked about the giant Bush tax cut, but they cancelled each other out because they said opposing things. Six Senate Dems up for re-election trumpeted their support for it. Most other Dems campaigned against it-some because it will break the budget, others because it's unfair. Almost all Dems running for Congress talked about Iraq. But again they were all over the map. Most supported the president. A few did so wholeheartedly (Max Cleland, Dick Gephardt). A few (Kennedy, Wellstone, Gore, about 30 Democratic House incumbents) didn't want to give the president blanket authority to go to war in Iraq and offered eloquent testimony why. None fitted into a 20-second television commercial.
Of course, Dems did their usual fulminating about social security but it was not a unified campaign. Some wanted partial privatisation, most rejected it, some said the Bush tax cut threatened social security, a few resurrected Clinton's idea of "USA accounts" on top of social security.
Maybe Democratic candidates for the House and Senate did everything they could. Bush is hugely popular, the country is still traumatised by terrorism, most of the free television airtime before the elections went to Iraq and then the sniper; most of the paid airtime went to Republicans. But still, Dems missed a big opportunity to stake out some clear positions and a few big ideas. And if the emerging presidential candidates don't, you can kiss the Dems goodbye in 2004.
Ideas. So what are the ideas? The widening gap in income and wealth is a national scandal that threatens to pull our society apart. At the least, Democrats should demand repeal of the portion of the Bush tax cut going to the top 2 per cent; use the savings to finance a two-year moratorium on payroll taxes on the first $20,000 of income. Eighty per cent of Americans pay more in payroll taxes than they do in income taxes. Make the choice clear: Republicans want a giant tax cut for the rich. Democrats want one for average working families.
Second, we should turn the old Republican line about revenue-sharing on its head. Agree that the states are where the action is. But point out that most states are broke, with the result that school budgets are being slashed and social services whacked. Federal government must do a $100 billion revenue-share for the next two years.
Third, urge that all federal and state employee healthcare plans be consolidated into a single large national plan which can negotiate good deals with healthcare providers and pharmaceutical companies. Then let any citizen opt into it. Premiums will become so low that it will be the foundation-stone of a single-payer plan. Because it is voluntary, it won't fuel the political opposition a single-payer plan would.
On foreign policy, create a new global version of Nato designed to root out terrorists anywhere. Create the best and most elaborate global intelligence operation money can buy. But also recognise that if more and more people out there are willing to kill themselves in order to kill us, we've got to give the poor and cynical of the world something positive to believe in. Debt forgiveness, foreign aid, literacy, immunisation and low-cost drugs for the third world have to be part of a new global effort to fight terror with hope.
Constituency. And where's the Democratic constituency? Not just among the elderly, even though the only thing Democrats say in unison is Republicans can't be trusted on social security or prescription drugs. We must be careful about our reliance on the elderly. Over the next 20 years today's elderly will be replaced by old baby boomers, who'll be the largest, noisiest, and most demanding constituency in US history. Tens of millions of boomer bodies will all be corroding simultaneously, while medical science promises us that we can look young, have sex like rabbits, and party until we drop. Moreover, most boomers haven't saved for retirement. All the equity is in their homes. And house prices will dive when the boomers all go to sell. So brace yourself. We'll be lucky if the Dems (and Republicans) don't sell out to ageing boomers. Increasingly, a fault line in US politics will be generational. Who speaks for the young? Who will inspire them?
As to organised labour, my betting is on the SEIU-the service employees. Its ranks are full of Latinos and blacks. Its leadership is young. It's organising like mad. It's recruiting and training a lot of young people. It's representing just those who are most marginalised in the emerging economy-hotel workers, hospital workers, workers in large retail stores, janitors.
Here's the most hopeful news, and I learned it when I ran for governor of Massachusetts. Idealism isn't dead. Millions of people are yearning to get involved and change the way politics is practiced. It doesn't matter whether they call themselves Progressives, Greens, Democrats, Independents. They want the system cleaned up. They yearn for leaders who aren't afraid to tell it like it is, who have new ideas that are commonsensical. They're deeply worried about where the Bushies are taking the country.
Our democracy is in trouble. Power is in the hands of a tiny group of people who are using the threat of terrorism to impose their crimped vision of a corporate commonwealth. Large corporate entities are more politically potent than they've been at any time in living memory. In fact, we're back to the era of William McKinley.
Parties are means, not ends. I'm a lifelong Democrat and have devoted a huge chunk of my life to the party, but if the party is comatose I'm not going to throw myself onto the tracks to keep it barely alive. The question is: can Dems turn themselves into a national movement to take back our democracy? Can they regain their soul?
To me, the clearest lesson of the November election was that Republicans know exactly what and who they stand for. Democrats don't. And when you know what you believe and for whom you exist, you've got a better chance of winning. It's Democrats like Max Cleland and Jean Carnahan who won't survive. Both voted for Bush's tax cuts and for war in Iraq. Both lost.
If I'm right and we're back in the McKinley era, then we're on the cusp of just the movement I'm talking about. It happened in 1901. It was called progressivism. Teddy Roosevelt gave it force and legitimacy, but it was already bubbling up: women's suffrage, a progressive income tax, worker rights, antitrust, and so on. It formed the foundation for much of the progressive legislation of the last century. Another era of progressivism is on its way. If we Dems see it and feel it, we'll be the party of the future. If not, well, it will bubble up some other way.
