edited by José Cerda III
North Carolina Treasurer Richard Moore: In North Carolina, we're
one of the few places, particularly in the South, where we Democrats are
still in control of everything, and have been. And we've done that with
many of the DLC themes -- fiscal conservatism, commonsense government.
But it's becoming increasingly tough to fight the perception of Washington.
There are some issues out there that I think we can fight back on this
next election cycle, and which I hope are shared with the presidential
candidates. One is the issue of jobs and the economy. And the way that
we get at that is by addressing what's happened with pensions over the
last couple of years and by what's happened on Wall Street. A lot of people
feel they were screwed over.
You can do it in a way that does not attack business. It's all about
fairness, it's all about common sense, and it's one of those instances
where the Republican Party has said one thing, but if you look closely,
they did something else. And that something else was doing nothing at
all until WorldCom finally blew up.
The second is homeland security. Cops, firefighters, and first responders
are tremendous leaders across small-town America. They're angry, they
really are angry. They feel like they've been given a lot more duties.
I was the head of our state police for four years, and the people that
I used to work with feel like the Democratic Party and President Clinton
were there with innovative programs, with the COPS program, with community-oriented
policing.
Now, they're seeing all that money being taken away and used for political
purposes again, and not helping people. And really, I don't think you're
ever going to get them to stand up and beat their chests and say they're
Democrats, but they really are strong, quiet leaders, who are angry.
The third thing is what guest speaker David Brooks talked about today
at lunch. To hear someone in this town talk about what's going on at a
Pentecostal Church was really quite rewarding. We have got to do something
to stop people from feeling like the Democratic Party is anti-religion
and anti-faith. And what really brings it home with my peers is being
the father of young children. It's all about raising your children.
One of the reasons that people are retreating into these religious communities
is that they really do feel like it's a cocoon to keep their children
away from the smut that's on TV. And how we, as a party, get tied to that
is very frustrating for me, but we do. Somehow, we are the party of Hollywood.
And I don't know how we talk about it, but we're tied up with it, and
it's killing us.
Arizona State Senator Gabrielle Giffords: I'm a state senator
from Arizona, and in the last six, seven years, I've been touring military
bases around the country, including in Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and Alaska.
This may seem unusual for a young female state senator, but I originally
became involved in a civilian support group for the 162nd International
Guard Unit in Tucson, and then was asked to be its chairman, and later
to help start a similar group in Phoenix, too.
Supporting our local military bases is a critically important issue,
particularly with the base realignment and closing that's coming up in
2005. And what I find talking with the commanding officers at these bases
is so interesting. When they figure out I'm a Democrat, they'll pull me
aside and say, "You know, actually, the Democrats are much more supportive
of our issues than the Republican leadership."
Woody Allen has this great line about 90 percent of genius being just
showing up. I think that's something that Democrats need to do. We need
to be consistent; we need to be there all the time. At the Pima County
Fair down in Tucson, we had a large banner that said, "Support Our
Troops." And while people passed through the fair, we had them sign
up to send a message to the troops, and it was something that we presented
to Davis-Monthan Air Force Base.
It's also a way for the general public to equate Democrats with supporting
our local bases. They need our support right now, particularly with the
decrease in funding that's headed our way. And it's not a difficult thing
to do.
Montana State Auditor John Morrison: I want to talk a little bit
about the cultural issues. I think they're very important, not only in
my part of the country, but in the South and the American heartland.
In Montana, in the year 2000, we lost the governor's race, the Senate
race, and the congressional race by four points. We lost the White House
in our state by 25 points. I think it's fair to say that without the presidential
race, we would have had a Democratic governor, senator, and member of
Congress from Montana.
It wasn't just the coattails of people voting Republican, it was people
who were going to the polls in Montana and identifying our candidates
with Al Gore's positions on social and cultural issues.
Indicative of these results was the fact that, after the election, poll
data showed that a majority of people with incomes of less than $30,000
a year voted Republican in a state where Democrats lost by four points.
That's cultural issues. You take away the presidential race, and we're
allowed to focus more on local issues.
In 2002, we picked up seven seats in the state legislature. We picked
up a majority of our public utility commission. Democrats won the governorship
in Arizona, New Mexico, and Wyoming. And that's partly an effect of these
same cultural issues.
So I identify what I call the eight Fs. You know, I was talking to my
wife about these, and my nine-year-old daughter said, "Dad, what
are the F-words, again?"
These are the F-words: firearms, faith, forestry, freedom, family, farms,
fiscal responsibility, and the flag. Now, let me just talk about three
of those.
Firearms: This is obviously a divisive issue throughout the country.
And on this issue, what Tip O'Neil said is right: All politics are local.
I don't suggest that people in New York make the same arguments about
firearms, or take the same positions, that we do in Montana. We need to
be conscious of our people and their values. You know, in Montana, gun
control consists of not missing the target.
All I ask is that we, as a national party, recognize that our presidential
candidate cannot wave red flags in front of the bull on the issue of firearms.
We have to respect that the Second Amendment is an important value in
the West, in the rural parts of America, and in the American heartland.
Faith: 90-plus percent of the people in this country say they believe
in God. Too often, our party's position on faith is dictated by our liberal
elite, which believes that -- number one, they may be agnostic or atheists
themselves, but number two, they believe that any expression of faith
is somehow an imposition on anybody who has a particular faith, particularly
a faith other than Christianity.
But 30 percent of the people in this country -- and I think a higher
number in my state -- say they're Evangelical Christians. And I think
it is ridiculous for the Democratic Party to surrender Christianity to
the Republicans.
Forestry is really just symbolic for public land policy. In the American
West, we have the highest percentage of federal lands. And those people
who are watching the politics of the West most carefully are saying that
there's a sagebrush rebellion going on. There are people in the West who
used to vote Democrat, their parents voted Democrat, their grandparents
voted Democrat, but they are now voting Republican because they resent
top-down management of federal lands policy.
It's important that our party respect the sovereignty of those parts
of the country that have federal land on them, and allow them to empower
themselves to manage the land and its resources in a responsible manner.
These values have been hijacked by the Republican Party. But these values,
these eight Fs, are not Republican values. They are the values of the
West, they are the values of rural America, and they are the values of
the American heartland. And I hope that our national party will not destroy
us on these issues.
Georgia Labor Commissioner Michael L. Thurmond: Two thousand and
two was a difficult year. We lost the governor's race and the U.S. Senate
race, but I was reelected. We had a huge white backlash, particularly
in southern Georgia, because Governor Roy Barnes changed the Georgia state
flag and removed the Confederate battle emblem from it.
I had white Republican and white Democratic opponents. And in my campaign
against the Republican, in which the Sons of Confederate Veterans and
others went out to defeat Governor Barnes, we generated 53 percent of
the vote.
We ran our campaign on a very important issue. By 2001 and 2002, the
economy had sputtered out in Georgia. We lost more jobs in 2002 than any
other state in the nation. That's why in 2002, we bet the house on the
economy and jobs.
This recession is different from any other in modern American history,
and let me tell you why. It doesn't respect a person's position. Historically,
layoffs impacted about 25 percent of college-educated persons. In Georgia
right now, about 43 percent of the people who've been laid off and are
receiving unemployment benefits are college-educated. The busiest career
centers for unemployed Georgians are in the suburbs of Atlanta and some
of the major cities.
What we bet this campaign on was that by promoting jobs, access to training,
education, and free employment resources, we could not only energize the
base, but also make inroads into the suburban areas of Atlanta, in particular,
and Augusta and Savannah as well.
We have a major opportunity because of this recession. It's basically
a white-collar recession. One of the largest demographic groups that's
being impacted is college-educated white men.
Also, large numbers of Americans who were making $80,000, $90,000, $100,000
a year, are now earning $20,000, $25,000, and $30,000 a year. The job
message shouldn't be focused only on the inner city and rural areas. The
job message now resonates with those higher-income, higher-educated people
who have been negatively impacted by the recession.
Virginia's Governor Mark Warner: Let me give you a little bit
of a framework of just how Republican Virginia is. Virginia has not voted
for a Democrat for president since 1964. Every aspect of Virginia state
government was controlled by the Republicans prior to my election. The
majority of our congressional delegation and both federal senators were
Republican. My predecessor, Gov. Gilmore, was chair of the Republican
National Committee. This was a state where, coming out of the box, Democrats
started anywhere from eight to 15 points down.
We tried to put a different kind of campaign together. We tried to make
it not a left-right, but more of a future-past campaign, based upon how
every part of Virginia could benefit from what I think -- at least until
President Bush -- has been our greatest asset, the growing and knowledge-based
economy.
I tried to sell a personal story in the campaign, that I was the first
person in my family to graduate from college and live the American dream.
I went into a lot of communities in rural Virginia, where a Democrat hadn't
done well for ages, with the notion that, if the folks in rural Virginia
were going to listen to my economic opportunity message, that message
had to be based on the idea that their kids didn't have to leave home
to get a good job, they could actually have opportunities in south and
southwest Virginia.
But I couldn't be knocked out of the block on the social issues before
I could even make the case to them. So, early on in the campaign, we tried
to take a number of the social issues off the table. Not that I retreated
on issues like choice or guns, but I simply said I didn't think they were
the most important issues in the campaign. I angered some folks, particularly
in the Democratic Party. I reached out very strongly to gun owners. We
had a major "Sportsmen for Warner" campaign all across rural
Virginia, where these great blazing orange signs, with a rifle, and a
shotgun, and a fishing pole, that said, "Sportsmen for Warner."
But trying to win some of the cultural issues and not be knocked out
of the box on them before you could deliver a message about economic opportunity
was key. And we ended up winning in rural communities that a Democrat
had not won for 10, 20, 30 years.
Pollster Mark J. Penn: The one thing I'd inject into the discussion
is a bit more urgency. During the last election, we went from being an
evenly split country, where we'd been 49-49, to losing five points. Those
five points came almost entirely from white men. White men went, in the
last election, from negative nine to negative 29.
Another frightening development is that for all the talk about independents,
independents have now leveled off. There are now more people who identify
themselves as Republicans. And in the nearly 30 years that I've been polling,
it's always been 6 percent more Democratic than Republican. That is almost
reversed at this point. I would say that from the high watermark of 48
percent Democratic in 1960, we're probably approaching close to 25 percent
now.
And so, in my mind, the problem is not Democrats looking like Republicans.
Voters are able to distinguish Democrats from Republicans. I think the
problem is that Democrats are increasingly looking like old Democrats.
And to the extent that they are, people are fleeing the party in almost
record numbers. We need Democrats to look more like New Democrats again.
That has been the successful formula in the last number of years. So
we ought to be aggressive about pushing back on the notion that the way
to win elections is simply to be more different than the Republicans,
which is a code for, we need to be more liberal.
That's pretty much the process that we see going on. This process is
going to continue until Democrats have answers on two fundamental issues:
defense and taxes. If you go back to when President Clinton won, he had
answers to crime and welfare. The similar issues today are defense and
taxes. We're about negative 60 points on defense.
But I think we could win an election on the economy. We could win an
election if candidates went back to the formula of growth. We could win
an election if candidates get rid of class warfare. We could win an election
if candidates feel good about being New Democrats, and say so, and push
off against what you see here with Dean returning to Democrats as being
weak on defense, or what you see with some of the other candidates as
making big government programs the hallmark of their campaigns.
