Democratic Values

Agreed, but the Republicans are way better at it, which was my point. No innocent babes here.

 

Would you really be happy if the Democratic Party becomes the better mudslingers?

Personally, considering Michael Moore's outrageous lies that pushed moderates and undecideds into Mr. Bush's camp, I'd say becoming better mudslingers will hurt Democratic candidates and push the Democratic Party further into a minority status.

 

Mudslingers? No.

Push polling Republicans with wedge issues? Yes.

BTW, your charcterization Moore is mystifying.

 

Democrates should just let Bush appoint Justices that will over turn Roe vs Wade. That will help to motivate 10s of millions of voters in the futer to vote for the democrates for years to come.

 

Ya think so, huh? What percentage of the people who voted for Bush this time around do you think are pro-choice?

 

What does an ancient Greek philosopher have to do with this?

 

I think Robert Reich put what Will is getting at very well here... http://www.robertreich.org/reich/20041103.asp. I posted his NPR commentary in the Okay, Dems, now you have hindsight... thread on page 2 as well, if any of you missed it. Excellent stuff.



Keep D&D Civil!!

 

I've been thinking that what the Democrats need to do is transform themselves into Eisenhower Republicans or even better Teddy Roosevelt Republicans. The Dems are never going to win in "moral values" contest, at least regarding the hot button issues of abortion and gay rights, but the Repubs by emphasizing those issues and framing their whole agenda around a narrow view of Judeo-Christian values could alienate many in their party now.

I think there is a huge opening out there for Dems to start picking up off fiscally conservative but socially moderate Repubs who become disgusted with the lack of fiscal accountability and transparency in the current admin and its obsession over abortion and gays.

The grand Dem coalition of socially conservative blue collar labor and farmers with socially liberal urbanites and environmentalists has been fractured while the Repub. grand coalition of primarily rural southern social conservatives with primarily suburban and western and midwestern fiscal conservatives has held together but fissures are evident. IMO if the Repubs are going to put social moral issues at the top the Dems. shouldn't try to match them in pandering to it but try to outflank them by picking up disaffected Repubs with a moderate social message and fiscal responsibility.

This will certainly costs them the more socially conservative labor and farmer portions of their base but given the demographics shifts in populations and as the suburbs git more urbanized this might be the formula they need to return to power.

 

Thanks, Deckard. Nice link.

That makes a lot more sense than bringing ancient Greek philosophers like Democrates into the mix.

 

Democrats Need a Red-Blooded Candidate to Stanch Losses (registration)
Ronald Brownstein:
Washington Outlook

Maybe Democrats will find a way to argue about the reason for the sweep by President Bush and congressional Republicans last week. But the answer, and the lesson, appears about as clear as these things ever get: The Democrats need to widen the electoral battlefield.

In the congressional and presidential races, Democrats maintained the core of their support in the blue states that Al Gore won in 2000. But at both levels, the Democrats made scant headway in the red states Bush won last time.

That left Sen. John F. Kerry with too narrow a margin of error for reaching 270 electoral college votes and congressional Democrats with too few options for reversing the GOP majority. It also allowed Bush, far more than Kerry, to take the offense and erode the edges of the other side's coalition.

"We were not pressuring them in as many places as they were pressuring us," said Steve Elmendorf, Kerry's deputy campaign manager. "We were never really in play in a whole bunch of states Bush had won four years ago, and he was pushing us hard in states we won four years ago."

From this pattern, the lesson seems unavoidable. Democrats need a nominee who can effectively compete for more of the country than Kerry did — especially socially conservative regions such as the South and rural Midwest. That would give the Democrats more paths to an electoral college majority. A nominee with more appeal in the red states might also create a climate that enables the party to seriously contest more House and Senate seats.

The red and blue map of electoral results vividly captures the point. If Bush, as is likely, holds his lead in New Mexico, Kerry would have been reduced to three enclaves: the Northeast and New England, the upper Midwest (where he held Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota) and the West Coast.

Bush (again pending New Mexico) won literally everything else across the giant L that runs from the mountain states and Great Plains through the South. If you stayed south of Illinois, you could drive from California to Pennsylvania without crossing a state, and conceivably a county, that Kerry carried.

That dominating performance across the heartland — mirrored in the congressional results — put weight behind the judgment of Karl Rove, Bush's chief strategist, when he said: "It's no longer a 49-49 country; it's 51-48 and maybe a little bit better" for Republicans.

If there's any solace for Democrats, it's that Bush hasn't built a coalition so broad that it's out of reach. The 29 states that Bush has carried both times equal 274 electoral college votes. The 18 Gore states that Kerry won plus the District of Columbia provide a base of 248 electoral college votes. Indeed, Democrats have now carried those 18 states in four consecutive elections. The party wouldn't need to move much from red to blue to squeeze out its own narrow majority in 2008.

But that will require a nominee who is able to expand the playing field. As a nominee, Kerry did many things well. But as a Massachusetts senator with a generally liberal voting record, especially on social issues, he labored to get off the runway in the states Bush carried last time.

Kerry reached 48% of the vote in just three of those states: New Hampshire (the sole state Kerry recaptured), Ohio and Nevada. In 21 of the 29 Bush 2000 states, Kerry was held to 43% of the vote or less.

Partly because his own base was so strong, Bush was able to mount challenges for more Democratic terrain. Bush gained 48% or more in six states that Gore carried. Although Bush still fell well short in the Northeast, he significantly improved his performance in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. Only in five of the 18 Gore 2000 states was Bush held to 43% or less.

In some of those states (such as those in the Northeast), Bush's showing may be a post-Sept. 11 high point for the GOP. But overall, the numbers should warn Democrats that unless they can force Republicans to spend more time and money defending their strongholds, the GOP will continue to encroach on their base.

In the battle for Congress, the Democrats' need to expand into red territory is even more urgent. Democrats control about three-fourths of the Senate seats and three-fifths of the House seats in the states won by Gore and Kerry.

That's about the same percentage Republicans control in the states Bush won twice.

But because Bush won more states, that leaves the Democrats with too narrow a base, especially in the Senate, which magnifies the influence of the Republican-leaning small states. Without a bigger battlefield, the Democrats are doomed to lasting minority status in Congress.

For Democrats, these two problems are intertwined. Democrats probably can't regain much congressional ground in the red states until they elect a president who can improve the party's image there. The need is greatest in the South, where the GOP's crushing, 18-seat advantage in the Senate and 40-seat spread in the House provide the margins of majority. Reversing the solidifying Republican hold on the South and the other red states won't be easy for the Democrats under any circumstance. But it probably will be impossible without a candidate who has broader regional appeal than Kerry.

That imperative seems certain to raise the 2008 profile of Democrats who have won elections in regions the party needs to put back into play — such as governors Tom Vilsack of Iowa (the rural Midwest), Bill Richardson of New Mexico (the desert Southwest) and especially Mark R. Warner of Virginia (the South).

Kerry ran admirably against a formidable incumbent during wartime. But the clearest lesson of his candidacy is that Democrats may be unable to win the White House unless they pick a nominee from outside their natural geographic base.

 

Maybe a Democrat can win in the South

The region looked all but impregnable for Bush. But some say the right Democrat could make electoral inroads.

By Patrik Jonsson | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor

LIZARD LICK, N.C. – On this tiny crossroads along a fading Tobacco Row, a visitor from the North can get a quick glimpse into why the Democrats are losing ground in the struggle for the region's hearts and minds.

After President Bush's sweep of the South, some commentators have wondered aloud about this "uneducated" region and its propensity to vote against its own interests: After all, it sends the most soldiers to die in battle, yet exhibits the most gung-ho patriotism; it's the poorest pocket of the country, yet it voted against a candidate promising a big expansion of government health insurance.

But if intelligence is measured by capability for abstract thought and grasp of paradox, Mark Pierce, a Lizard Lick contractor, is a Rhodes scholar. He says there's a time-worn wisdom to the vote. Of the Northern coastal elite, he says: "I think it pretty much shows their own ignorance when they badmouth middle America."

For the Democratic Party, finding a winning formula in the South suddenly seems vital, albeit fraught with difficulties. Yet political strategists say making some inroads is not an insurmountable task.

"If a Democrat like John Kerry comes out to southwest Virginia and he tells everybody out here he's going to give him a $1,000 check, they'd never vote for it," says Dave "Mudcat" Saunders, a rural strategist for the Democratic Party. "Until you get through the culture, they won't trust you and they won't believe you."

Democrats have failed to win a single Southern state in the past two presidential elections. Ten years ago, there were 17 Democratic senators from the South, but only four are returning to Washington in January. Experts see the region voting against liberal progressivism in favor of a more Jeffersonian ideal of a country of small property owners, ready to do battle to protect its values and ways.

Despite the odds, some political experts say the New South offers a unique opportunity for Democrats, as a land not at all monolithic. Humbled Democratic adviser Paul Begala last week suggested that the party would do well to swallow its pride, turn away from Washington, and scour the South and Midwest for capable and charismatic governors to help turn back the march of Republicanism.

"The South clearly has converged with the nation in many respects. We've closed a lot of gaps and we've gained more jobs than any other region," says Ferrell Guillory, director of the Program on Southern Life, Media, and Politics at University of North Carolina. "But where there still remains a difference is on cultural factors ... and Republicans more than Democrats have captured that difference."

This political powerhouse that is the South, has come to symbolize everything that is either wrong or right with politics in America today. When Democrats cast their eyes across the Mason-Dixon line after John Kerry's defeat, many surely see a foreign population - more likely to oppose abortion, gay marriage, and gun control. Even the thousands of newcomers who arrive in the South each year often share the region's ideals.

"It seems the Democrats can't quite figure out how to appeal to this kind of bedrock heartland vote without betraying some fundamental principles," says Dixie sociologist John Shelton Reed, author of "My Tears Spoiled My Aim."

Figuring out the South is seen as a key to grasping an electoral majority, but not everyone says this requires impossible compromises. To Saunders, it's more than just "moral values." It's about understanding today's happy-go-lucky confederacy of evangelicals, small business owners, farmers, and immigrants. Many Democrats, he says, "think it's all about the causes, yet it's really all about the culture."

The Evangelical vote turned out to be hardly larger than 2000. But other things are going on in the South, including the rise of an entrepreneurial class benefiting from tax cuts. At the same time, Southerners, so many of whom grew out of a Democratic tradition, don't share a hatred of government. "Even the affluent suburbanites aren't just right-wingers," says Mr. Guillory in Chapel Hill. "Now, they may go to the new nondenominational megachurch, but they also want a good public school and they want their roads paved and they want their kids to get into the good state college."

Alabama's white males may have voted almost to a man for Bush. But "one of the failings of the Democrats is to treat the South monolithically and to believe that North Carolina is Alabama and Virginia is Mississippi," says Andy Taylor, a political science professor at North Carolina State University in Raleigh. "If you take the states of the old Confederacy, at least two of them - Virginia and North Carolina - are more affluent, cosmopolitan, and have more of a post industrial, high-tech, service-based economy. And in these states it won't take that much, in the right circumstances, to get a Democratic presidential candidate to win."

Competing in the region may also require some home-grown candidates - think Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. That means governorships. "We vote for people who live close to us, people who are like us, or people who stand out," says Robert Freymeyer, a sociologist at Presbyterian College in Clinton, S.C.

Democrats have some stars. North Carolina Gov. Mike Easley, who was easily reelected Tuesday along with a revived Democratic majority in the House, is a good example, says Guillory: "Easley's a prosecutor who put people in jail, fought the drug traffic, crashed his NASCAR into the wall, goes to church every week, and yet he's a genuine Democrat."

Whichever party wins, says Saunders, "People are going to start being nice to us now and giving us proper respect."

 

60 million americans disagree.

 

Well, one out of five ain't bad.