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[OT] democrats finally getting the message
washingtonpost.com
Report Warns Democrats Not to Tilt Too Far Left
[url]http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/06/AR200510[/url]
0601645_pf.html
By Thomas B. Edsall
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, October 7, 2005; A07
The liberals' hope that Democrats can win back the presidency by
drawing sharp ideological contrasts and energizing the partisan base is
a fantasy that could cripple the party's efforts to return to power,
according to a new study by two prominent Democratic analysts.
In the latest shot in a long-running war over the party's direction --
an argument turned more passionate after Democrat John F. Kerry's loss
to President Bush last year -- two intellectuals who have been aligned
with former president Bill Clinton warn that the only way back to
victory is down the center.
Democrats must "admit that they cannot simply grow themselves out of
their electoral dilemmas," wrote William A. Galston and Elaine C.
Kamarck, in a report released yesterday. "The groups that were supposed
to constitute the new Democratic majority in 2004 simply failed to
materialize in sufficient number to overcome the right-center coalition
of the Republican Party."
Since Kerry's defeat, some Democrats have urged that the party adopt a
political strategy more like one pursued by Bush and his senior
adviser, Karl Rove -- which emphasized robust turnout of the party base
rather than relentless, Clinton-style tending to "swing voters."
But Galston and Kamarck, both of whom served in the Clinton White
House, said there are simply not enough left-leaning voters to make
this a workable strategy. In one of their more potentially
controversial findings, the authors argue that the rising numbers and
influence of well-educated, socially liberal voters in the Democratic
Party are pulling the party further from most Americans.
On defense and social issues, "liberals espouse views diverging not
only from those of other Democrats, but from Americans as a whole. To
the extent that liberals now constitute both the largest bloc within
the Democratic coalition and the public face of the party, Democratic
candidates for national office will be running uphill."
Galston and Kamarck -- whose work was sponsored by Third Way, a group
working with Senate Democrats on centrist policy ideas -- are critical
of three other core liberal arguments:
· They warn against overreliance on a strategy of solving political
problems by "reframing" the language by which they present their ideas,
as advocated by linguist George Lakoff of the University of California
at Berkeley: "The best rhetoric will fail if the public rejects the
substance of a candidate's agenda or entertains doubts about his
integrity."
· They say liberals who count on rising numbers of Hispanic voters fail
to recognize the growing strength of the GOP among Hispanics, as well
as the growing weakness of Democrats with white Catholics and married
women.
· They contend that Democrats who hope the party's relative advantages
on health care and education can vault them back to power "fail the
test of political reality in the post-9/11 world." Security issues have
become "threshold" questions for many voters, and cultural issues have
become "a prism of candidates' individual character and family life,"
Galston and Kamarck argue.
Their basic thesis is that the number of solidly conservative
Republican voters is substantially larger that the reliably Democratic
liberal voter base. To win, the argument goes, Democrats must make much
larger inroads among moderates than the GOP.
Galston, a professor of public policy at the University of Maryland,
and Kamarck, a lecturer at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, in
1989 wrote the influential paper, "The Politics of Evasion," which
helped set the stage for Clinton's presidential bid and the prominent
role of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council. In some ways, the
report released yesterday showed how difficult the debate is to resolve.
Their recommendations are much less specific than their detailed
analysis of the difficulties facing the Democratic Party.
They suggest that Democratic presidential candidates replicate
Clinton's tactics in 1992, when he broke with the party's liberal base
by approving the execution of a semi-retarded prisoner, by challenging
liberal icon Jesse L. Jackson and by calling for an end to welfare "as
we know it."
© 2005 The Washington Post Company
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