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Wed Oct 12 18:02:33 PDT 2005

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HOLD THE CHAMPAGNE
Oct 6th 2005  

The Democrats cannot rely on the Republicans' current woes to deliver
victories in 2006 and 2008

TALK about trouble coming not in single spies but in battalions. For
much of his first term, almost everything that George Bush touched
turned to political gold. He even managed to parlay a badly-handled war
in Iraq into a vote winner. But now almost everything he touches turns
to dust. 

The Democrats are quietly jubilant. They are seizing every chance they
can get--and there are plenty of them--to brand the Republicans as the
party of "corruption and cronyism". They seem to be recruiting good
candidates for next year's elections. Some even wonder whether 2006 may
be their equivalent of 1994--when the Republicans won 52 seats in the
House and nine in the Senate, ending 40 years of Democratic rule.

They should hold the champagne. Parties don't win elections just
because their rivals hit a rough patch. They win them because they win
the battle of ideas, because they think ahead and cook up cogent
policies, because they offer a positive vision of the future. Bill
Clinton did this brilliantly in 1992. Tony Blair did it even more
brilliantly in 1997. But, so far, not the Democrats. 

Can anyone name a single exciting Democratic idea for dealing with
poverty? Or crime? Or reforming the public sector? Or winning the
KULTURKAMPF with Islamic extremism? In fact, can anyone name a single
exciting Democratic idea, full stop? The Democrats have squandered
their years in opposition railing against the Republicans rather than
recharging their intellectual batteries. They may be winning a few
political battles of late--largely because of Republican incompetence.
But they are losing the vision wars. 

The reason for this is as simple as it is potentially lethal: the
Democrats are split down the middle on everything from Iraq to gay
marriage. Centrists believe in working with business, protecting family
values and fighting terrorism. "We believe that the September 11th
attacks changed America for ever," says the Democratic Leadership
Council (DLC), "and defeating terrorism is the supreme military and
moral mission of our time." Liberal activists believe the opposite:
that corporations are bad, family values are hogwash, and the war on
terror a delusion. 

Worse still, the wrong side is getting the upper hand. A new generation
of angry young activists have used their mastery of the internet to
tilt the party to the left. Groups such as Moveon.org[1] (which claims
3.3m members) and blogs such as the Daily Kos[2] (which has thousands
of partisans venting daily) now colour the whole tone of the political
debate on the left. 

The teenage scribblers of the left seem to be turning the Democrats
into a deranged version of Pavlov's dog--reacting to every stimulus
from Professor Rove's laboratory rather than thinking ahead. Look what
has happened in Congress, where the combination of a re-energised left
and a ruthlessly partisan White House is making life miserable for
would-be centrists. In 1994, 102 House Democrats voted in favour of
NAFTA; this year, only 15 voted in favour of CAFTA, a more modest
free-trade deal.

 The teenage scribblers are wedded to a suicidal strategy: they think
that their party's best chance of winning lies not in emulating Mr
Clinton and moving to the centre but in emulating their nemesis, Mr
Bush, and motivating their base. This ignores the most salient fact
about American politics: there are three conservatives for every two
liberals. The Democrats cannot win without carrying about 60% of
moderates. 

THE OTHER DYSFUNCTIONAL PARTY
Is it really that bad? Marshall Wittmann, of the centrist DLC, counsels
against despair about the party's future. He points out that the
anti-Bush left has a built-in sell-by date: Mr Bush will not be running
in 2008. He also argues that the person who defines the character of a
party is its presidential candidate--and the strongest candidates for
2008, such as Hillary Clinton and Mark Warner, are forward-thinking
moderates. 

There are two problems with Mr Wittmann's optimism. The first is that
Moveon et al will still be in full bark against Mr Bush in 2006. That
will not help in a contest where the tables are already stacked against
the Democrats. In the Senate, they will be defending seven potentially
vulnerable seats while the Republicans will be defending five; in the
House, 41 Democrats are defending districts that Mr Bush carried in
2004 while only 18 Republicans are protecting districts that John Kerry
carried. 

 Second, even if a centrist Democrat succeeds in winning the party
nomination in 2008, he or she will have a huge mountain to climb. In
"The Politics of Polarisation", a new paper published by the Third Way
group, William Galston and Elaine Kamarck, two centrist stalwarts, lay
out the topography. The public is profoundly sceptical of the Democrats
on both "values" (only 29% of Americans regard the party as friendly
towards religion) and defence (it is no accident that the Democrats
have won the popular vote only in recent elections--1992, 1996 and
2000--when national security was all but absent from the debate). The
party has also lost ground with two groups of swing voters: married
women favoured them by four points in 1996, but backed Mr Bush by 12
points in 2004; a 16-point lead among Catholics became a five-point
loss in 2004.

The 1990s showed that left-of-centre parties can climb the highest
mountains provided they start early and stick to the right path. Mr
Clinton made his political reputation as a reforming governor who was
willing to think afresh about everything from education to free trade.
No sooner was Mr Blair elected leader of the Labour Party in 1994 than
he started tearing up left-wing shibboleths about public ownership and
rebranding the party as "New Labour". So far the Democratic Party has
been so paralysed by its internal contradictions that it has wasted its
years in opposition. Perhaps it will start laying out a blueprint for
government soon. But time is short.

-----
[1] http://www.moveon.org
[2] http://www.dailykos.com/

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