Which is why I shake my head at those who say we are better off without non-liberals who they call "Republican-lite."  I don't particularly like it when the ideological extreme in the GOP tries to purge its office-holding slate of non-ideologues which makes me doubly-displeased when those in my own party start insisting on ideological purity.  That is in no way the proper stance for the purported party of tolerance.

The Democrats once had a Congressional majority because they forged an alliance between Northern liberals and Southern conservatives.  The Republicans now have a Congressional majority because they have forged an alliance between cultural conservatives and free market, national security types who may be quite secular and libertarian on social issues.

What should a new Democratic coalition look like if it has a prayer of retaking Congress?  Those who have a knee-jerk distaste for Harry Reid might say that we should forge a civil liberties coalition linking diehard liberals and libertarians, but I don't think the numbers add up for that to work.

Instead, I think we should look at the New Deal coalition, which brought people together based on a new understanding of the relationship between government and the economy.  We should look at Bill Clinton, who said, "It's the economy, stupid."

The new Democratic alliance should be between liberals who believe in progressive economic ideals and those who can be helped by progressive economic ideals, but who may be culturally more conservative than the current Democratic mainstream.  This is not to say that liberals should give up cultural liberal ideals, only that they should be more tolerant of deviance on social issues than on economic issues.  

This type of alliance will make the Democratic Party competitive in at least some of the Mountain, Heartland, and South regions.  "Competitive" does not mean guaranteed to win, it just means not guaranteed to always lose.

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2004/0412.sirota.html

The way a majority party wins is by reflecting the diverse interests that make up these United States. For most of 60 years, the Democratic party has done so from southern conservatives to northeastern liberals. While it is nice that we have strong ideological principles, the fact of the matter is most people are not liberals. Again, do we sell out our souls for votes? Absolutely not, but as the cliché goes "Lead, Follow, Or Get Out Of The Way."

Second, how much of Bush's support was based solely on his role as CINC during at time of war?

Third, how much of Bush's support was based on flawed economic theories that have been popularly packaged?

I don't know the answer to any of these questions. Most of the answers to these and other questions about the election are unanswerable. That's what makes it so easy for media pundits to bloviate. No matter what answer they invent, they cannot be proven wrong.

I suspect the next two years will tip Iraq and the economy against Bush and the Republican party and Republicans won't able to blame Kerry or Clinton or Carter. Analysis of "what went wrong" is both necessary and inevitable. We also need to be cautious before we accept solutions to a problem that may not exist. The self destruction of Bush's Iraq and economic policies plus a more articulate candidate could easily be the only "solution" needed to win in 2008.

Those caveats aside, I agree with your central point southerndemnut. The only criteria that matters in an election is winning. Structural changes at the DNC and dumping Shrum and the old guard are essential to rebirth of the Democratic party. We need new blood and we need it now.

I agree with your conclusion that we need to compete in all 50 states, but I think Chris has pointed out that we can have different strategies at the national and state levels. I don't have a clue what it will take to win at the state level in the south. I have seen signs that we have candidates as well as state and local organizations that can win against the tide in the red states. I suspect they had better count on developing state and local strategies instead of depending on help from the national party.

What Chris has pointed out is that Democrats may very well be smarter to develop a western strategy instead of a southern strategy. I think we water down our natural message by attempting to appeal to southern conservatives and inevitably end up coming across as Republican-lite. By developing a national strategy based on a western strategy we can take stronger stands on kitchen table economic issues like health care and the minimum wage.

Off the top of my head I'm vague on the details, but I believe that Salazar and his brother both won in Colorado without running away from either abortion or gay marriage. I think we can develop moderate rhetorical talking points on these and other social issues that can win in the mid-west and the west, but would still not appeal to southern voters.

Ironically, we may be able to actually broaden our base by moving "left" with a western strategy. I think we need to take stronger, more principled stands on issues that draw a clearer line between the Democratic and Republican party. Another kitchen table issue that we may be able to reclaim by not catering to the south is "right to work". It is my impression that right to work is so firmly ingrained in the south that it is a hopeless issue. I think this could be a strong working class issue in other parts of the country.

I am in total agreement that we need to taylor our message so that it appeals to the "middle", whatever that is. I think to a large degree that involves rhetorical changes and battling against defamatory mischaracterizations by Republicans.

I'm all in favor of a pragmatic utilitarian analysis of issues southerndemnut. I've taken some heat for suggesting that on religious and gay rights issues, but I think we need to have an honest and open discussion of all of our options, without regard to ideological purity or sacrosanct liberal shibboleths.

We also need to find a way to educate and inform the public about what's going on.  The only explaination to the election is that people are uninformed or delusional.

Find a better messenger: More charismatic. More down to earth (not married to Heinz ketchup). More moderate (from a part of the country that is more mainstream, South, Mid-West, or Mountain-West). More centrist, but more principled at the same time. More attractive politician with real executive experience and accomplishments to speak of. A real vision for America: a new american dream or something to that effect.

Better and more compelling message: Try harder to connect with real values of the voters who decide elections. More outward spirituality (a Democrat cannot win if he is not proud of his faith, because America is very religious). Be for major and popular good things: medicare, national healthcare, education, social security, and a strong and patriotic national defense. Stop fighting for gun control it doesn't work and abortion on demand during the whole pregnancy without restriction. Make a real point of trying to argue we would try to unite our the whole nation in a way that that the GOP has chosen not to. Take some major stands contrary to Democratic party orthodoxy and make it clear consistently that this is the case, this helps people who are not necessarily democratic voters take a second look.

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I have to reiterate a point that can't be said enough. No matter how centrist and sensible and patriotic a democrate is, they will be branded a total a lily-livered America-hater with no moral core by the wingnut media juggernaut. It is an effective tactic that has been killing us for years and I wish we would make fighting that machine priority one. Instead, I see us praying to the void that if we move a little more right maybe then people will like us more. The more we move right the more we lose our core beliefs AND the more right THEY move and look at where we are. Will it take an American Inquisition before we plant our feet and stand up for freedom?

The way you describe these problems indicates a PR problem rather than an interest group problem.

I think it's important to point out that interest groups represent people. The reason we have interest groups in the first place is that a large group of people joined together to take a particular position. Every time we dis-associate ourselves from an interest group we are also dissing the people in that group.

I agree we need to take a look at some fringe issues. I'm not sure how we get agreement on which issues are fringe and which issues are fundamental.

This sounds like an accurate description of the Republican party. Exactly what groups or issues are you suggesting we do endorse?

To win, a party has to fight elections successfully.  Fighting has two elements - defense and offense.  The Democrats are reactive, seldom take the offensive, and end up fighting on battlegrounds selected and framed by the Republicans.  You cannot win the Presidency that way.  

So, firstly, they need to learn how to frame the battleground before the Republicans do; how to attack rather than just defend.

How to do this?  Select men or women who are tough, honest and straightforward, with the emphasis on toughness (integrity, clarity, unafraid to tackle anybody).  

Decide on a program which represents enough voters to be have critical mass appeal. This can be done by holding conventions in each state, followed by a national convention about 2 years before the election to hammer out a national program.  This allows bottom-up ideas to find room in  the tent and not just top-down ideas.

Then, fight in all the states - get all voters out, in order to achieve a majority of votes (fighting mostly in so-called  battleground states is short-sighted).  Have key blue states adopt battleground states, and pour resources into their adopted states.

And make sure the selected candidates commit to stick to the program, and are capable of selling it simply, without the weak vacillation that Kerry showed in 2004.

I think this mentality has very much been the operating principle of too many of the people in Washington who are nominally known as "Democrats". Their absolute first priority is their own re-election. To the degree that circumstances mean that they are more likely to win as a Democrats, they run as Democrats. If law and custom didn't require them to run as one party or another, I doubt that they would identify themselves with any party at all.

A political party, if it is to be something more than a club for mutual fundraising and a legal formality, must have some kind of political purpose. A point of view, an underlying philosophy - some kind of reason to exist, some common glue. Its candidates should rather be Democrats and lose than be anything else and win.

This isn't about ideological purity. It's a necessary condition for obtaining and using political power. Look at Clinton's first two years, how often he was fighting with other Democrats. How much more might have been accomplished if the party, from bottom to top, had had a clear consensus about what it would do - and not do - upon gaining power?

Of course the American political system requires us to create broad coalitions before elections. But there must be some kind of honest and explicit core. The flipside of this custom of two parties is that you can guarantee that your opposition will try to make people identify you with whatever element of that national party is least popular where you are running. The Democratic strategy for far too long has been to stand for very little, very quietly, so "Democrat" officeholders could run away from it as far as possible. I can't support that approach. Not only does it not work very well anyway, but it's toxic. The cost of holding that one Senate seat for Zell Miller is the loss of faith and active participation of voters everywhere else in the country. It's not worth it.

Sorry, but listening to Kerry throughout the campaign,, I always wound up asking what we stood for. I still don't know what this party stands for in 2004.

Before we focus on future elections, don't you think we need to reform the party line? I think a good start would be to steal back the language that the neo-cons bastardized: liberal, leftist, progressive, socialist.

I don't know, maybe its the turkey and wine talking.

Which means on the state level we did much better then on the national level.  If people want to figure out what when wrong and what need to be fixed we need to undersatnd why poeple voted heavily in fovore for Dems on the state level and went repub on the national level.

That is the key.

One could take the "glass half empty" approach and say: we had one of the weakest incumbent presidents in memory, who started a war (going very badly) under false pretenses (subsequently disproven) with a tepid economy, sky-high gasoline prices, and we still lost.

On the other hand, one could just as easily say: we had a sitting incumbent president (itself a considerable advantage) who is commander-in-chief during an ongoing war, appealing to the people's most desperate fears after a national catastrophe, supported by the most ruthless and effective machine in politics, and we still came within 3% of sending him packing.

Likewise, it was terribly painful to lose all those Senate seats, but a lot of them were awfully close: Bowles lost in NC by just a couple percent, Castor lost in FL by just a couple percent, and Vitter just barely got his 50% in LA to avoid the runoff.

I don't think it will take some soul-searching seismic shift for things to start getting better for us; just a slight shift, which could come from a little message-honing, a better condidate, or 4 more years of egregious Republican f*ck-ups. We're a minority party now, but just barely. Everyone is scared that this is the beginning of 10-20 years of Republican dominance of government, but it could also be their high water mark.

Politicians recognized that there was no "there there" in terms of the Democratic Party.  To try to find one's political identity as a politician in terms of the party, was to be constrained by an entity that gave nothing in return. These politicians realized that their own personality ( not party identity), and fundraising gave them more than the party could offer.  We became a paty of candidates rather than a party that chose candidates that represented us. These candidates also realized  having their own flexible platform which didn't need to reference the party's would more easily get them elected.

Voters similarly have recognized that spending effort inside of the Democratic Party has yielded little or no reward.  In fact, the least effectual work seemed to happen with Democratic coordinated campaigns.  And that is why in part (along with changing finance laws) we saw the creation of American Coming Together, etc.

So, I think there is a corollary to this which leads to the point that the role of the party is to get politicians elected.  If the party doesn't offer prospects of success, and in fact decreases changes of electoral success...why would politicians and voters participate?

However, I don't think that necessarily means that the party needs to be on the whole more expedient in terms of politics. It does mean the party needs to be more powerful and has to come up with a much better sense of what it offers the voters and politicians both in terms of the issues being framed, but also --in what I care about most--how the party creates it's own power separate from the politicians it has elected.

In my vision the reason the DNC fight is so important is that it's about how we create the organizing methodologies and technologies that let us build the most powerful base to reach 40% of the electorate that might give us a majority.

This means a Democratic Party that is structurally:

• able to think long term about building it's base as activists and donors. These are not separable, we need to ask for both money and time from everyone

• that expects the base to be motivated by its power and its politics.  We can't expect to build a politics that is ideology pure...we need to build one that moves us forward in resurrecting government and it's role and society.  If we succeed in small ways in that goal we are able to keep a large coalition in place because we are powerful, not because we are pure

• we need to understand that have a large base of donors and activists (millions of folks) we can be divorced from undue corporate influence, offer money and troops to politicians and have a real force to be speaking the voters who are not part of base...and may never be.

I disagree, however, with the claim that election seeking is the sole or "true" role of a party.  Parties typically serve two functions which often are in tension with one another.  On the one hand, as noted, a party seeks to win elections in order to gain control of governmental power.  On the other hand, a party has a set of policy goals which it wants to achieve.

A party might want to create a grand coalition in order to ensure electoral victory, but in so doing dilutes its goals such that voters cannot predict with any precision what the party stands for, and candidates cannot say what his/her party will do once in office.  Or, a party might outline clear and specific policy goals, but be unable to attract enough voters in order to realize them.  (Or, sometimes the two roles are not in tension when one's policy goals are supported by most voters.)

Clearly, as Democrats we want to distinguish ourselves from Republicans.  These are not merely two grand coalitions seeking to gain power.  While I am fundamentally sympathetic to the argument put forward in the first post, the party must also retain some semblance of core beliefs which motivate our coalition.  Defining the scope of the coalition, and now to characterize those core beliefs, is precisely the debate in which we need to engage.  We do not want to appeal to everyone, nor should we; but, we do need to appeal to enough in order to win national elections more regularly.

It is encouraging that, at least so far, we have not descended into our tradidtional circular firing squad.  At the same time, we ought not shy away from this discussion for fear it will forfeit our chance at winning offfice.  Three years and eleven months out from the next election, this is just the kind of discussion we need and this is the time to have it.