My friend Tom Freedman, the Kerry campaign consultant and former Clinton White House adviser, says Democrats have a brand problem.
He's dead right. To too many voters, the Democratic Party brand means weakness, reluctance to pursue American interests, ambivalence about family, and indecision about right and wrong.
Freedman asked focus groups to pick a car that represents the two parties on national security. For Democrats they chose the VW bus, for Republicans, the Hummer.
Far too many Americans believe the Republicans own freedom, family, and strength.
The Democrats' brand problem is a killer -- and not just in presidential elections. Exceptional Senate candidates -- Brad Carson in Oklahoma, Tony Knowles in Alaska, Inez Tannenbaum in South Carolina, and Erskine Bowles in North Carolina -- never really had a chance. Their party did them in. Bush won their states by 32, 27, 17, and 12 points.
John Kerry didn't create this problem. It's been part of our four-decade Democratic slide from super-majority party after Lyndon Johnson's 1964 record victory to minority party today.
It wasn't always that way. When I grew up in Indiana in the 1950s, Democrats were identified with strength -- some even called us the war party. We were also the party of the common man and mainstream American values. The Republicans carried the baggage of weakness, isolationism, and aloofness.
But Democrats have never really recovered from their neo-isolationism during and after Vietnam and their embrace of cultural relativism in the late 1960s.
There were particular low points along the way -- such as when a White House conference on the family broke up during the Carter administration because it couldn't agree on the definition of a family.
In 1992, Bill Clinton set out to redefine the Democratic brand. He was partially successful.
With his New Democrat formula, he changed the party's image on the economy from redistribution and tax and spend -- to growth and opportunity and fiscal discipline.
With welfare reform, his tough stance on crime and teen pregnancy, and his insistence that opportunity and responsibility go together, President Clinton put Democrats on the right side of the cultural divide and didn't let the Republicans box him in with wedge issues.
With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War, voters turned their attention to domestic concerns. Democrats' perceived weakness (most Democrats voted against the first Gulf War in 1991, for example) seemed less important.
But for all the good Clinton did, the party never really changed. His own misbehavior rekindled the values issues. September 11 changed America forever and brought the Democratic Party's ambivalence over America's use of force back to center stage. Many party leaders, particularly in Congress, were never particularly comfortable with Clinton's New Democrat approach and, since his retirement, the party has at best tepidly embraced the only formula that has elected and re-elected a Democratic president in six decades.
By this election, many of the old pre-Clinton stereotypes had re-emerged -- and for all their talk about the middle class, Democrats couldn't get it to vote for them.
Until we redefine the Democratic brand, our political slide will continue. Here's how we can begin:
- Adopt a new politics of national purpose, making it our main mission to come up with bold, new, paradigm-breaking solutions to the biggest challenges facing our country and using the New Democrat approach as the guiding philosophy for shaping those solutions.
- Become the reform party again. Republicans control every aspect of our government; they're responsible for the status quo. We need to be the party of change, protecting our principles, not our programs.
- Become a real party of inclusion -- by allowing some who disagree with us on cultural issues into our tent. If Republicans can have pro-choice speakers at their conventions, we ought to allow pro-life speakers at ours. We need to have enough faith in the strength of our own beliefs to hear people with differing ones.
- Make it absolutely clear that we side with parents trying to raise kids and with America in the war against terrorism. Hollywood doesn't speak for us on values, and Michael Moore and his blame-America-first crowd do not define us on patriotism and national security.
- Listen to the good people who live in the heartland, and give Democrats who get elected in red states a large role in shaping our party's future.
A four-decade problem will not be corrected overnight. But if we begin now, at Tom Freedman's next focus group voters may identify us with the new Ford Escape, a hybrid SUV designed for power, family, and the future.
