A Party Completely at Sea

Democrats adrift in yesterday's ideology

by Vincent Fiore
11/16/04

The election of 2004 will be remembered for many things, some of which may play out for years to come. The GOP has broadened its base among minorities and women, and has strengthened its ties to Catholic and Jewish groups. The party has also energized and turned out the Christian base en masse, which all leads to the exit polling sleeper that reflected the number one issue concerning the country today, moral values.

This came as quite a shock for the old media elites, as most among them believed that the issues of terrorism, Iraq, and the economy would decide voters. Perhaps though, no one was more surprised at this than leaders of the Democratic Party.

Having invested much capital in the outcome of this election --- -frequently billed as the most important election in our history ---- Democrats are left with not just a defeat at the polls, but also in need of a major redefining of their platform.

This is not the party of Franklin D. Roosevelt or Kennedy anymore, nor has it been for some time. It is not even the party of Bill Clinton, whose “triangulation” philosophy bought Democrats eight years worth of a reprieve. In truth, since Barry Goldwater’s run in 1964, which not only propelled conservative ideology onto the national scene, but introduced Ronald Reagan to the nation, Democrats and the liberalism that defined them was an ever-waning political movement.

The 2004 election represents a journey for Democrats that started some 40 years ago, highlighted by the failure of Jimmy Carter in 1980, surrendering the House of Representatives in 1994, and losing the Presidency in 2000 to George W. Bush. The salad days of Lyndon Johnson are far and away a relic of what once was.

Today’s Democratic Party leaders will have many discussions among themselves regarding the shift in the electorate, a shift that has been happening right before their very eyes. So it came as a shock that when you consider the political intelligentsia that resides in the party, one-time Clinton strategist James Carville has set aside his usually caustic and partisan musings for some old fashioned reality checking.

At a breakfast hosted by the Christian Science Monitor on November 8, Carville fired a shot sure to be heard around the country:

“We have to come to grips that we are an opposition party now, and not a particularly effective one. We’ve got to reassess ourselves. The underlying problem here is, there is no call to arms that the Democratic Party is making to the country," Mr. Carville said. “We've got to reassess ourselves. We've got to be born again."

Along with Carville at the same breakfast was longtime Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg and chief Kerry strategist Bob Shrum, who knows a thing or two about losing elections. While all three conceded that Republicans are winning elections on many issues facing today’s voter, Shrum could not refrain from reasserting that part of the Democratic platform that Carville was attempting to steer the future of the party away from.

"Some of the stuff I read is not going to happen," Mr. Shrum said. "The Democratic Party is not going to be better at competing with the Republican Party at being anti-gay. And frankly, I wouldn't be in that party. I would leave that party."

Anti-gay? Yes, one of those“moral values issues that Democrats could not compete for on November 2. What Mr. Shrum fails to recognize, possibly out of demagogic habit, is that the majority of all voters want marriage defined as between one man and one woman. This would include long time Democratic support constituency groups like blacks, Latinos, union households, women, the young voter, and the low income voter.

So what Bob Shrum should have said, if he wanted to be accurate, was that the Democratic Party was not going to be better at competing with a majority of the U.S. voting population at being "anti-gay." But the 2004 election was not won by Bush because he ran as being intolerant to minority groups or was specifically anti-gay, anymore than the majority of Americans are. Though the old-school curmudgeons that still call the Democratic Party home would have you think otherwise, Bush won by presenting better solutions to the issues than John Kerry did, and by promoting his beliefs on the moral issues questions that most Americans felt are worth preserving. This defies the hedonistic purview that has ruled a large part of the Democratic Party since the 1960s, and fights to stay relevant today.

At that breakfast meeting, Carville also said "We can deny this crap, but I'm out of the denial. I'm about reality here.... We are an opposition party, and as of right now, not a particularly effective one. You can't deny reality here."

Indeed. It will be instructive to see if the Joe Liebermans and Evan Bayhs and Blanche Lincolns of the Democratic Party are either looked to for advice, or cast aside for the more immediate gratifications of the Howard Deans or Bob Shrums of the party.

Will Democrats continue to listen to the shrillness of a Maureen Dowd, or Carole Simpson of ABC News, who recently compared Bush “red states” to pre-1864 slave states?

America is fundamentally better served with a multi-party system, as it forces parties to compete for the vote and forces voters to examine a divergence of opinion. I believe that ultimately, the Bayhs and Lincolns, and apparently the “born again” Carvilles of the Democratic Party will win this fight, but not anytime too soon.

For the Democratic Party, it is a party at sea, and completely. For the benefit of the country and the process of democracy, let’s hope they find a friendly star in the near future to steer by and cast aside the bitter and selfish feelings of this past year’s election.

Their survival as a viable party depends on it.