Democrats search for winning agenda
Democratic insiders from across the party are growing worried about their inability to convert dissatisfaction with Republicans into support for Democrats in the mid-term elections. "This is an enormous opportunity - if anybody had any idea what the Democrats stood for," Stan Greenberg, a Democratic pollster, said this week.
Nancy Pelosi, Democratic leader in the House of Representatives, and Harry Reid, her Senate counterpart, will try to address the lack of a winning agenda for the November election today with a discussion of what they called their party's "commitment to fighting for a new direction for America".
But their planned critique of the US healthcare system, the high costs of education and petrol and broad economic insecurity - as well as Democratic proposals to address them - are unlikely to quell unrest within the party.
National Democrats have focused their message in large part on what they call the Republican "culture of corruption", prompting Republican complaints that they have few positive ideas to offer.
While Mrs Pelosi and Mr Reid have unveiled proposals on national security, energy independence and government ethics, they have failed to energise candidates or capture the public's attention.
Many strategists say the party needs something akin to Newt Gingrich's Contract with America - a 10-point plan he used to rally the Republicans in the 1994 campaign - which saw the Republicans take control of the House for the first time in 40 years.
"People need to know you stand for something," Tom Vilsack, governor of Iowa, said yesterday. "I don't know that they're necessarily looking for a 40-point plan . . . but they want us to focus on a couple of issues."
While support for President George W. Bush and the Republican-controlled Congress is low, Mr Greenberg and other pollsters see evidence that Democrats have failed to capitalise on that weakness. "It's not a straight route from their failure to our success," he said.
"Democrats have not closed the deal," John Zogby, a nonpartisan pollster, agreed. "They don't have anything to say to anybody that matters much about anything," he said last week.
Party insiders have struggled for months to craft an election-year agenda. A plan to unveil a national message late last year was delayed when party leaders decided not to interfere with the deepening Republican weakness - brought on by the war in Iraq, the mishandling of Hurricane Katrina, high petrol prices and Washington scandals.
They point out that Mr Gingrich's contract was unveiled just six weeks before the 1994 election.
"As we get closer to the election, we will continue to remind people what we stand for and what we will do when we take over the House and/or the Senate," said Jim Manley, a spokesman for Mr Reid.
Several groups have set out to draft their own proposals. The Democratic Leadership Council, a centrist group Mr Vilsack chairs, is nearing the end of its year-long "American Dream Initiative" chaired by Hillary Clinton, the New York senator and frontrunning Democratic presidential candidate.
Groups that sit further to the left are also at work. The Campaign for America's Future, a liberal activist group, gathered in Washington this week to press for what they called a "progressive agenda . . . that puts government back on the side of the people and transforms the direction of this country".
Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor of The Nation, the liberal magazine, agreed that "Americans need to hear alternatives", and drew loud cheers from the crowd when she called for a prompt withdrawal of US troops from Iraq and an increase in the minimum wage.
But Mr Greenberg, at the same forum, said Republicans' poor handling of issues such as the war, the Medicare prescription drug programme and hurricane recovery had made it more difficult to offer the kinds of liberal alternatives that rely on government solutions. "The rubble created from their failures has increased the challenge for us."
(6/14/2006)
- Holly Yeager, Financial Times |
