archived: 3 - 9 Apr, 2005         Back                 Next

THEM DEMS 

UPDATED:  April 5, 2005 

                        CIVIL WAR? 

Are Democrats on the verge of a civil war between the DLC and progressive Democrats?  Junkie Editor Michael Carmichael addresses the subject from the perspective of progressive Democrats in his column today.  It is a must read.   

After receiving Carmichael’s submission for today, this article appeared in the Washington Times: 

The Democrats' postelection war about what they should stand for is heating up again, with centrists challenging liberals to "real fights" within the party about staking out a tougher position against terrorism.

In an attack on the party's dominant left wing, anti-war base, and a warning for new Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean "to do no harm," the centrist-leaning Democratic Leadership Council said it is "a delusion to think that if we just turned out our voters, we could win national elections."

Instead, the DLC called on the party to dramatically change its message to "recapture the muscular progressive internationalism of Roosevelt, Truman and Kennedy and convince voters that national security is our first priority."

"To win back the White House in 2008, our party must change. We must be willing to discard political strategies that may make us feel good but that keep falling short. We must finally reject the false choice between exciting our base and expanding our appeal, because unless we both motivate and persuade, we'll lose every time," said DLC founder Al From and President Bruce Reed in a new manifesto for their party.

Their criticism has been heard many times during the past two decades in their continuing battle against the party's liberal establishment. But this time, they say, it will take a divisive, all-out political civil war to scrub the anti-war orthodoxy out of the party's agenda.

"Shoring up our weakness will not come without real debate -- even real fights -- over national security and domestic priorities," they said in the DLC's Blueprint magazine.

The sooner these fights take place, the better, they said.

"We should not shy away from them. It's far less important that Democrats come together now than on Election Day. And we are far more likely to be together on Election Day if we battle out our differences now."

In an "open letter" to their party last month, 17 DLC members led by Sen. Evan Bayh of Indiana said Democrats had "to make clear to the American people that winning the war on jihadist extremism will be the Democratic Party's first priority this year and every year until the danger recedes."

Although they acknowledged that for many anti-war Democrats "Iraq remains a difficult issue," they said, "It is essential that partisan enmity not obscure America's vital interest in helping the newly elected Iraqi government succeed."

But party liberals last week dismissed the DLC's advice as warmed-over Republicanism.

"I can't tell the difference between the positions the DLC puts forward and Republican policy," said Jack Blum, counsel for the liberal Americans for Democratic Action.

"I've read this before and I am not carried away by it. Nobody in the Democratic Party, and that most especially includes the liberals in the Americans for Democratic Action, opposes fighting the terrorists."  -- Washington Times 

Are Democrats really prepared for the consequences of a civil war?

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                        BILL BRADLEY 

TPJ continues its quest to bring readers various points of view of the Democratic Party.  Former Senator Bill Bradley has authored an analysis of the Democratic Party that merits the most serious consideration.  TPJ has emphasized critical points for special consideration: 

Five months after the presidential election Democrats are still pointing fingers at one another and trying to figure out why Republicans won. Was the problem the party's position on social issues or taxes or defense or what? Were there tactical errors made in the conduct of the campaign? Were the right advisers heard? Was the candidate flawed?

Before deciding what Democrats should do now, it's important to see what Republicans have done right over many years. When the Goldwater Republicans lost in 1964, they didn't try to become Democrats. They tried to figure out how to make their own ideas more appealing to the voters. As part of this effort, they turned to Lewis Powell, then a corporate lawyer and soon to become a member of the United States Supreme Court. In 1971 he wrote a landmark memo for the United States Chamber of Commerce in which he advocated a sweeping, coordinated and long-term effort to spread conservative ideas on college campuses, in academic journals and in the news media.

To further the party's ideological and political goals, Republicans in the 1970's and 1980's built a comprehensive structure based on Powell's blueprint. Visualize that structure as a pyramid.

You've probably heard some of this before, but let me run through it again. Big individual donors and large foundations - the Scaife family and Olin foundations, for instance - form the base of the pyramid. They finance conservative research centers like the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute and the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, entities that make up the second level of the pyramid.

The ideas these organizations develop are then pushed up to the third level of the pyramid - the political level. There, strategists like Karl Rove or Ralph Reed or Ken Mehlman take these new ideas and, through polling, focus groups and careful attention to Democratic attacks, convert them into language that will appeal to the broadest electorate. That language is sometimes in the form of an assault on Democrats and at other times in the form of advocacy for a new policy position. The development process can take years. And then there's the fourth level of the pyramid: the partisan news media. Conservative commentators and networks spread these finely honed ideas.

At the very top of the pyramid you'll find the president. Because the pyramid is stable, all you have to do is put a different top on it and it works fine.

It is not quite the "right wing conspiracy" that Hillary Clinton described, but it is an impressive organization built consciously, carefully and single-mindedly. The Ann Coulters and Grover Norquists don't want to be candidates for anything or cabinet officers for anyone. They know their roles and execute them because they're paid well and believe, I think, in what they're saying. True, there's lots of money involved, but the money makes a difference because it goes toward reinforcing a structure that is already stable.

To understand how the Democratic Party works, invert the pyramid. Imagine a pyramid balancing precariously on its point, which is the presidential candidate.

Democrats who run for president have to build their own pyramids all by themselves. There is no coherent, larger structure that they can rely on. Unlike Republicans, they don't simply have to assemble a campaign apparatus - they have to formulate ideas and a vision, too. Many Democratic fundraisers join a campaign only after assessing how well it has done in assembling its pyramid of political, media and idea people.

There is no clearly identifiable funding base for Democratic policy organizations, and in the frantic campaign rush there is no time for patient, long-term development of new ideas or of new ways to sell old ideas. Campaigns don't start thinking about a Democratic brand until halfway through the election year, by which time winning the daily news cycle takes precedence over building a consistent message. The closest that Democrats get to a brand is a catchy slogan.

Democrats choose this approach, I believe, because we are still hypnotized by Jack Kennedy, and the promise of a charismatic leader who can change America by the strength and style of his personality. The trouble is that every four years the party splits and rallies around several different individuals at once. Opponents in the primaries then exaggerate their differences and leave the public confused about what Democrats believe.

In such a system tactics trump strategy. Candidates don't risk talking about big ideas because the ideas have never been sufficiently tested. Instead they usually wind up arguing about minor issues and express few deep convictions. In the worst case, they embrace "Republican lite" platforms - never realizing that in doing so they're allowing the Republicans to define the terms of the debate.

A party based on charisma has no long-term impact. Think of our last charismatic leader, Bill Clinton. He was president for eight years. He was the first Democrat to be re-elected since Franklin Roosevelt. He was smart, skilled and possessed great energy. But what happened? At the end of his tenure in the most powerful office in the world, there were fewer Democratic governors, fewer Democratic senators, members of Congress and state legislators and a national party that was deep in debt. The president did well. The party did not. Charisma didn't translate into structure.

If Democrats are serious about preparing for the next election or the next election after that, some influential Democrats will have to resist entrusting their dreams to individual candidates and instead make a commitment to build a stable pyramid from the base up. It will take at least a decade's commitment, and it won't come cheap. But there really is no other choice. – New York Times 

There is great merit to Bradley’s ideas – many of which TPJ has been focusing on for the past two years.   In its elemental statement, the Democratic Party cannot be just a confederation of interest groups, even though interest groups will always be a significant force in the Democratic Party.  Democrats have to build a true Party that not only exists but flourishes in its own right.  

                        FRAMING TRUTH AS AN ISSUE 

Democrats should be advancing “truth in government” as an issue.  Most Americans are taught from birth to tell the truth.  There is no better example than the story of George Washington cutting down the cherry tree, which is still taught to most elementary school children today.  Our educational system is devoted to pursuit of truth and excellence in every field of endeavor.  

The evidence literally pours out of the Bush administration that truth is not valued and hiding the truth has become a virtue.  Here are more examples over the past few weeks: 

E-mails by several government scientists on the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump project suggest workers were planning to fabricate records and manipulate results to ensure outcomes that would help the project move forward. – TBO Online

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An Army intelligence sergeant who accused fellow soldiers in Samarra, Iraq, of abusing detainees in 2003 was in turn accused by his commander of being delusional and ordered to undergo a psychiatric evaluation in Germany, despite a military psychiatrist's initial judgment that the man was stable, according to internal Army records released yesterday. – Washington Post 

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The U.S. military said on Friday it has held since last year an American citizen without charges in Iraq as a suspected top aide to militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, drawing condemnation from civil rights activists.  Thought to be the first U.S. citizen caught as a suspected participant in Iraq's two-year-old insurgency, he was seized in a raid "late last year" on a Baghdad home where weapons and bomb-making material was found, the military said.  . . . The man has not been allowed to have a lawyer, Skinner said.  "I think it's extremely high on the outrageous scale. This is a direct violation of a Supreme Court decision," said lawyer Rachel Meeropol of the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights. – ABC  

In perhaps the biggest revelation of the week, more evidence surfaces that the Bush administration secreted evidence that it ignored evidence that undercut the justifications for war in Iraq: 

The incompetence described in the report occasionally descends into farce, particularly over an Iraqi defector codenamed Curveball, whose fabricated tales about mobile biological laboratories and their influence on US decision-makers were reminiscent of Graham Greene's accidental spy in Our Man in Havana. Despite warnings that he was "crazy", "a waste of time", and that he had not even been in Iraq at the time of an event he supposedly saw, his claims became the subject of almost 100 Defence Intelligence Agency reports and a focus of the National Intelligence Estimate in October 2002. – Guardian Unlimited  

These examples and the plethora of examples over the course of Bush’s administration, demonstrate a government that distorts and fabricates the facts.   

The message for Democrats is simple: 

Restore honesty and truth to government.  

Democrats can use each and every example from Bush’s administration to convey the fact that the Bush administration is deceptive and cannot be trusted.  In fact, trust should be the sub-theme throughout.   

Bush cannot be trusted.  Americans are already reaching that conclusion in regard to Bush’s policies on Social Security: 

Democrats simply have to take the issues of truth and honesty to a broader, and more accurate, perspective. 

NEXT- MICHAEL CARMICHAEL

Last Update: 03/23/2006