At my first job interview in Washington 20 years ago, I was asked to write a speech about how to revive the Democratic Party. The topic must have scared off all the other applicants, because I got the job -- and the chance to spend most of the past two decades rewriting the same speech.
Back then, the challenge seemed truly hopeless. Midway through the Reagan era, Congresswoman Pat Schroeder (D-Colo.) said, "There are three things Democrats must do to take back the White House. Unfortunately, no one
knows what they are."
Even after this latest heartbreaking defeat, we Democrats are better off than we were 20 years ago. Of late, we've been losing presidential elections in overtime or by a late field goal, not at the opening whistle.
But the core of our problem is the same today as it was then: From Franklin Roosevelt to Bill Clinton, the Democratic Party made its name by building the middle class. We can't win elections when the middle class doesn't vote for us.
President Bush's first term was a nightmare for the middle class. Families are earning less, paying out more, and getting stuck with more of the tax burden. Their leaders in Washington left middle-class values like work and responsibility behind. Yet on Election Day, the forgotten middle class rehired the very administration that forgot them.
How could this happen? President Clinton told us the answer when he set out to end the Democrats' losing streak 12 years ago: "Too many of the people that used to vote for us, the very burdened middle class we are talking about, have not trusted us in national elections to defend our national interests abroad, to put their values into our social policy at home, or to take their tax money and spend it with discipline."
For all the talk these past four years of a nation hopelessly divided over guns, gay rights, and abortion, let's not forget: Clinton was able to carry a dozen red states in 1992 and 1996, even though he held the same positions as Democrats today.
The challenge is simpler and more profound: We have to earn back the middle class's trust that we will stand up to evil in the world and stand up for the middle-class way of life here at home.
In the 2004 election, Democrats tried to convince Americans that the Bush administration's failures were reason enough to trust us. Voters largely agreed with us about Bush, but we didn't quite overcome their doubts about us.
In theory, those doubts should have vanished long ago. Democrats, after all, are the ones who balanced the federal budget, reduced crime and welfare rates, and built up the military force that Bush now wields to his advantage. The narrowness of this defeat suggests that middle-class doubts about us are not as deep as they once were.
But let's not kid ourselves: 9/11 forces Democrats to prove ourselves all over again. Republicans have captured the flag, and even a decorated war hero couldn't take it back. It took Democrats two long decades to recover from the cultural upheaval of the 1960s and Vietnam. In the wake of 9/11, we have to win the cultural battle all over again.
That's the bad news. The good news is that we have done this before. We don't have to learn to speak in tongues, join the NRA, or start thinking like my evil twin, Ralph Reed. We just need to convince more people that we'll keep them safe; that we believe deeply in the basic values of work, responsibility, family, and country; and that, unlike the Republicans, we have a set of ideas to reward and strengthen those values.
Republicans dominated American politics in the 1970s and 1980s by convincing suburban families that Democrats only cared about the cities they had left behind. Democrats took back the suburbs and the country in the 1990s by addressing the concerns that families in cities and suburbs had in common, such as crime and education.
Now, millions of Americans are fleeing the suburbs for the exurbs, and Republicans have once again convinced them that we don't share their concerns. Families in exurban and rural areas have largely the same dreams and worries as the suburban neighbors they left behind, but they'll never trust us if we can't understand why they live in places we've never heard of.
We don't have to become more liberal or more conservative. We never have to take another poll. We just need to remember that the burden of proof is on us. A minority party can become a majority party only by convincing more people that it's better than they thought.
