#12 The party of Pelosi and Kennedy and Maria Tereza's BoyToy is crippled above all by its condescending, sneering attitude toward religion and the military culture. This problem cannot be remedied without a wholesale change in leadership, because if you don't understand intuitively the concepts of faith, loyalty, duty, and honor, no one can explain them to you.
It goes without saying-- though I;ve been saying this ad nauseam for four years-- that the Dems need to get serious, and hawkish, about national security. But on the domestic front, the Party of the Working Man is also screwed, at least with their present platform and leadership.
Suppose they try to get religion and go hard populist a la Huey Long, Tom Watson and other classic southern class warriors. They may well pick up some of Rove's four million sidelined evangelicals, but they will certainly lose at least that number of middle-class suburbanites and exurbanites. It is precisely these educated, white-collar professionals who are most suspicious of government intervention and who account for most of the recent migrants to the rapid growth states in the sunbelt and the rapid growth exurbs outside Chicago, Dallas, etc.
IMHO the Dems cannot win the "values" debate with a bicoastal pro-gay, aging feminist elite. Instead, they should make the most of their social liberalism ad combine it with economic libertarianism. Attack Bush hard on his coziness with corporate welfare recipients. Attack the scandalous protection of the BabyBells under Michael Powell's FCC. Make Eliot Spitzer the poster child for your attitude toward Wall Street.
And combine this with a radical approach to solving the health care mess: mandatory insurance required of every individual, along with caps on punitive damages in malpractice suits and limited access to vanity procedures and most elective surgeries. These changes would lower rates across the board and make health insurance affordable. They should play the health care card, and hard, because it's a national problem that causes grief to everyone, from auto executives to small business owners to contractors and workingmen.
Finally, they need to get serious about winning in the high growth states. Pretty soon, Texas and Florida each will have more votes than New York. COlorado will have more electoral votes than Wisconsin, and Arizona, NM and Nevada more votes each than Iowa. Libertarian + laser-like focus on solving he health insurance mess is a winning formula in these states.
Screw Pennsylvania, Michigan, Ohio and the aging, shrinking rustbelt. Whoever gets the allegiance of the sunbelt yuppies and small businesspeople + the active and ex-military + hispanics will have a lock on the states that are growing fastest and that will set this nation's domestic agenda in this century. |