See also: THE PLAN: Big Ideas for America

Strip away the job titles and party labels, and you will find two tribes of people in Washington: political Hacks and policy Wonks. Hacks come to Washington because anywhere else they'd be bored to death. Wonks come here because nowhere else could they bore so many to death.

After two decades in Washington, we have come to the conclusion that the gap between Republicans and Democrats is nothing compared to the one between these two tribes. We should know. When we began working together in the Clinton White House, we came from different tribes -- one of us a Hack, the other a Wonk. (We're not telling which.) We made a deal to teach each other the secrets, quirks, and idioms of our respective sects.

Although Hacks have never been in short supply in our nation's capital, the rise of one-party rule in Washington over the past four years unleashed an all-out Hack attack. Every issue, every debate, every job opening was seen as an opportunity to gain partisan advantage. Internal disagreement was stifled, independent thought discouraged, party discipline strictly enforced -- and that's just how they treated their friends.

The Bush White House was so obsessed with how to profit politically from its agenda that it never even asked whether its policies would actually work. It should come as no surprise that they didn't.

President Bush served as Hack-in-Chief even when he studiously pretended not to be doing so. He came into office promising to be a compassionate conservative, soon left us yearning for a competent conservative, and seems destined to be remembered for presiding over the heyday of the corrupt conservative.

Republicans have learned the hard way that the American people are a lot smarter than either the Hacks or the Wonks imagine. For all the talk in both parties about the urgent need to win one constituency or another, most Americans apply the same political yardstick: They vote for what works. There aren't enough Hacks, even in Washington, to sell policies that don't work -- although that never stopped Bush from trying.

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The Republican political model may have run the country into the ground, but it did succeed in its central objective: flummoxing Democrats. Since Republicans don't really believe in a positive agenda, they win elections by raising doubts about Democrats. The Democrats' rebuttal should be obvious enough: Unlike Republicans, we have ways to solve the country's problems, and sharing those ideas should put all doubts to rest. But too often in recent years, Democrats ignored that persuasive, winning strategy and tried to beat Republicans at their own game instead.

In the 2004 national election, an innocent voter could be forgiven for concluding that the Democrats' unifying principle was not how much we wanted to transform the country but how much we wanted to beat the other side. All we seemed to care about was winning -- and consequently, we weren't very good at that, either. We didn't take a chance on our own ideas, for fear of losing. Instead of truly looking for answers to the country's problems, we hired consultants to look for slogans.

Losing wasn't the only price Democrats paid for that election: We passed up an opportunity to define ourselves to the nation, too. Like Al Gore in 2000, John Kerry had good ideas, but campaigned primarily on what was wrong with his opponent. The last Democratic presidential nominee to put his agenda at the center of his campaign was Clinton in 1996. (Not to belabor the point, but Clinton won.) That means it has been 10 years since the Democratic Party effectively told the American people what we stand for.

If you asked political professionals in our party what is the matter with Democrats, many would say that we're not "getting our message out." Certainly, conservatives have developed a more effective echo chamber, and there's no doubt that presidential elections are won by the candidate best able to convey his campaign message.

But any party that writes off its defeats as a communications problem is doomed to repeat them. The American people are much smarter and more sophisticated than politicians and political professionals give them credit for. Nine times out of 10, what Hacks euphemistically call "a communications problem" has little to do with how well a campaign communicated and everything to do with what it was trying to say. In the wake of the 2004 election, it should not have taken long for Democrats to realize that you can't win an argument unless you make one. Instead, the party's troubles spawned an entire industry of self-help books, speeches, and seminars designed to reassure Democrats that all the old party needs is a new coat of paint.

The leading proponent of this reassurance is Professor George Lakoff, a University of California linguist and author of the best-selling tract Don't Think of an Elephant! Lakoff's book, a compilation of speeches on what he calls "Frame Semantics," has sold about one-quarter million copies since 2004.

Why have so many Democrats snapped up Lakoff's manual? Because it tells them exactly what they want to hear. As might be expected from a linguistics professor and self-proclaimed "metaphor analyst," the book contends that Democrats' biggest problem is the words we use. All progressives need to do to win the political debate, he argues, is to change the conceptual "frame" in which it takes place. According to Lakoff, Democratic arguments are bouncing off the electorate's collective subconscious because conservatives have set the frame and we haven't. To be fair, Lakoff isn't wrong about everything. He understands the importance of values and an agenda. He calls the lack of ideas "hypocognition" -- which he says was first discovered in a Tahitian tribe where suicide was rampant because it lacked the concept of grief. One man's frame is another man's pine box.

But Lakoff is flat-out wrong to suggest that Democrats are losing just because Republicans know all the right words. His favorite example is that conservatives learned to call tax cuts "tax relief." He's right that Republicans make a fetish out of using the most misleading, Orwellian words they can find. But let's be honest: Bush didn't manage to pass his tax cuts because he called them tax relief. (Most of the time, he called them tax cuts.) Bush got the chance to pass his disastrous tax cuts because Democrats were too slow to offer real tax reform proposals of our own. The tax debate illustrates what Al From, who founded the Democratic Leadership Council, has astutely observed: In a country with three self-identified conservatives for every two self-identified liberals, when neither side's agenda is sufficiently compelling, Republicans usually win by default.

The real danger of Lakoff 's analysis is that it reinforces Democrats' favorite excuse -- that Republicans have succeeded by pulling the wool over Americans' eyes, and that we'll start winning as soon as we learn the same dark arts.

Some Democrats want to believe that we can stand in front of the mirror and practice the words to win America back. "Ever wonder how the radical right has been able to convince average Americans to repeatedly vote against their own interests?" Ariana Huffington says in plugging Lakoff 's book, "It's the framing, stupid!" One glowing reviewer declared, "While Democrats were campaigning as if policy mattered, Republicans were waging their campaign on a far more fundamental, and more powerful, psychological level."

Lakoff insists that when arguing against the other side, the main principle of framing is "Do not use their language. Their language picks out a frame -- and it won't be the frame you want." What he doesn't realize, however, is that the whole notion that words matter more than reason is the Republicans' frame, and it's the wrong one for the country's future.

If we believed in conspiracy theories, we'd think that only Karl Rove could dream up the idea of a linguistics professor from Berkeley urging Democrats to "practice reframing every day, on every issue." Lakoff even sounds like Rove when he says (approvingly!) that Republicans offer the "strict father" worldview and Democrats the "nurturant parent." He describes 9/11 in phallic terms: "Towers are symbols of phallic power, and their collapse reinforces the idea of loss of power. Another kind of phallic imagery was more central here: the planes penetrating the towers with a plume of heat, and the Pentagon, a vaginal image from the air, penetrated by the plane as missile." With frames like that, who needs enemies?

The Matter with Kansas. Highbrows like Lakoff and street fighters like Rove share the same Hack fallacy that we can game history to our advantage. In truth, we don't get to pick and choose between the great challenges the country faces. Even in calmer times, voters decided what was on their minds, not politicians. Today, we have no choice but to play the hand we're dealt: a long war against terrorism, a long struggle to compete economically, and a long way to go to build a culture of community here at home.

Republicans spent the past six years trying to stack the political deck in their favor by downplaying the country's long-term concerns and playing up the few remaining issues where they could claim any momentary public trust. In the 2002 campaign, Republicans ignored the economy, which was struggling, and cynically exploited the post9/11 concern about security. In the 2004 campaign, the White House couldn't be sure from week to week which of their policies -- economic or security -- would be the bigger failure, so they hedged their bets with constitutional amendments on same-sex marriage. In early 2006, with voters clamoring for change in Washington, Rove gave a speech explaining the Republican strategy of once again using the midterm elections to question Democratic credentials on security.

Democrats followed the Rove playbook in reverse. In 2002, we tried to change the subject from security to the economy, and let Bush beat us with a silly debate over the Department of Homeland Security -- which had originally been Democrats' idea, and a flawed one at that. In 2004, the Kerry campaign tried to avoid values issues like same-sex marriage, went back and forth between the economy and security, and ran hot and cold on Iraq. Republicans were in a stronger position to carry out their game plan, since they had the larger megaphone of the White House, but both sides had the same strategy: Ignore your own shortcomings and exploit the other side's.

No one should be surprised by the Republicans' tactical cynicism -- we can't say they didn't warn us. Their political model isn't built to run the country; it's just designed to outrun the opposing party. What's more surprising is Democrats' willingness to play along. If George Lakoff 's bestseller Don't Think of an Elephant! urges Democrats to change the frame of the political debate, Thomas Frank's bestseller What's the Matter with Kansas? implores Democrats to join Republicans in trying to change the subject. Frank's book, an entertaining hatchet job on his home state of Kansas, attempts to tell the story of why many working- and middle-class Americans left the Democratic Party over the past 30 years. Kansas turns out not to be a very useful example, because the state hasn't elected a Democrat to the Senate since 1932.

But Frank explores the state and his own upper-middle-class suburb in an effort to discover why so many voters put cultural issues ahead of economic ones. In a chapter called "What's the Matter with America?" he declares, "People getting their fundamental interests wrong is what American political life is all about. This species of derangement is the bedrock of our civic order."

In Frank's view, ordinary Americans have been duped into caring about the wrong issues, like guns, abortion, and security, when they ought to be voting their pocketbooks. He blames conservatives for fueling this cultural backlash -- and heaps special blame on Democrats for abandoning class warfare: "Democrats no longer speak to the people on the losing end of a free-market system that is becoming more brutal and more arrogant by the day. By dropping the class language that once distinguished them sharply from Republicans they have left themselves vulnerable to cultural wedge issues like guns and abortion and the rest whose hallucinatory appeal would ordinarily be far overshadowed by material concerns."

If working-class Americans feel like victims of an elitist conspiracy, Frank seems to say, it's Democrats' fault for not making them feel like victims of a capitalist one. Frank is right to question Republican motives, but wrong to question Americans'. Voting on cultural issues instead of economic ones doesn't make people deranged dupes. If it's all right for affluent suburbanites to choose candidates based on abortion rights or the environment, it's insulting to suggest that blue-collar workers are wrong to make faith or conscience, not money, their bottom line. Democrats won't win back those voters by changing the subject or raising the volume. The best way to trump the Republicans' gambit is to stop trying to play their game. Instead of looking for ways to turn every issue to partisan advantage, we should start tackling big problems to the country's advantage. As the Bush administration's collapse demonstrated, it's not possible to change the subject for long. Democrats can't ignore security; Republicans can't ignore the economy; and both sides will have to learn to solve class and cultural concerns, not just stoke them.

Giving an answer. The final myth that Democrats must leave behind is the idea that "oppose, oppose, oppose" is a successful formula for an opposition party to escape being in the opposition. A successful opposition must oppose and propose, and do both well. Democrats in Congress have an obligation to stand firm against the Republicans whenever they're wrong, which is all too often. At the same time, however, we have an obligation to ourselves and to the future to suggest a clear alternative path for the country to follow. As Mark Penn found in a survey for BLUEPRINT, three out of four Americans -- and five out of six rank-and-file Democrats -- are more interested in hearing Democrats' agenda than what's wrong with the Republicans' agenda (see Moment of Opportunity, by Al From, BLUEPRINT, Vol. 2006, No. 1).

In the end, the purpose of politics isn't to say the right words or strike the right notes, it's to find the right answer. That takes courage, not calculation. Ten years ago, Bill Clinton faced perhaps the most difficult decision of his presidency -- whether to sign a sweeping welfare reform bill into law. Even those of us who had worked with him for years didn't know what he would decide. The bill posed an excruciating dilemma. On the one hand, it made good on his signature promise to "end welfare as we know it": requiring recipients to work, providing child care and health care so they could work, cracking down on absent parents who owed child support, and helping people find jobs and independence so they wouldn't need the welfare system anymore. By vetoing two earlier bills, Clinton had preserved the guarantee of health care and nutrition for poor children, and had forced the Republican Congress to provide more money to put people to work. He knew from history that if he vetoed this bill, the chance to reform a broken system might never come his way again. On the other hand, Republicans had insisted on mean-spirited cuts in benefits for legal immigrants, which made Clinton's blood boil. Moreover, many Democrats had never shared his desire to fundamentally reform welfare in the first place. Democrats in Congress were evenly divided, for and against the bill. Within the administration, those of us who supported it were badly outnumbered.

The outside world saw the whole debate as a political decision -- but for Clinton, politics was the least of the concerns. He was well on his way to reelection, and had done more than enough through executive action to satisfy the electorate -- issuing executive orders to increase child support collections, impose time limits and work requirements, and require teenaged welfare mothers to live at home and stay in school as a condition of public assistance. He had approved welfare reform experiments for 43 states, more than all previous administrations combined. If Clinton had wanted to decide the issue on the politics, he could simply have vetoed the bill to keep his party happy or could have signed it to neutralize the issue. But as a governor, Clinton had spent more time in welfare offices than any politician in Washington. He wanted to do right by people like Lillie Harden, who had told him that the best thing about leaving welfare was that when her son was asked what his mother did for a living, he could give an answer.

As we watched Clinton walk past the Rose Garden to join us in the Cabinet Room, none of us knew what he would do. He began by asking us to put politics aside and tell him our hopes, fears, and expectations for the bill. The ensuing debate around that table was the most extraordinary we've ever experienced. Everyone sensed the historic significance of the decision the president had to make, and respected the honest differences he had to reconcile. "It was a very moving thing," Clinton himself said afterward. "There was significant disagreement among my advisers about whether this bill should be signed or vetoed, but 100 percent of them recognize the power of the arguments on the other side."

As so often happened, Clinton came up with his own synthesis: Sign the bill, and make Congress restore the immigrant cuts later. It worked. The welfare reform law went on to become the most successful social policy experiment in a generation. Millions left welfare for work, cutting welfare caseloads in half, and people still on welfare were five times more likely to be working. According to the Census Bureau, from 1993 to 2001, poverty among single mothers fell by a stunning one-third, to the lowest rate on record. In the end, Clinton kept both his promises: to restore the immigrant cuts and to make welfare a second chance, not a way of life.

Clinton's decision to sign the welfare bill -- like his decision a year earlier to overrule many of his advisers and pursue a balanced budget -- was a leap of faith. But he understood what progressives must never forget: We have to reform government in order to save it. After watching welfare, crime, and budget deficits soar in the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s, Americans had lost faith in the nation's ability to solve big problems. As Clinton used to say, most people thought the federal government couldn't run a two-car funeral. After he signed welfare reform and the Balanced Budget Act, and brought the country its lowest welfare rolls, sharpest drop in poverty, and first budget surpluses since the 1960s, public confidence in government soared. Clinton knew that you can't be a successful progressive unless people have confidence in government, and people will only have confidence in government if you do the right thing and make sure it works.

The secret to victory isn't simply better tactics: stronger turnout, a better ground game, or, so help us, even sharper attack ads. Americans are looking for answers. Everything else is just politics.

Rahm Emanuel, a Democratic congressman from Illinois's 5th District, is chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Bruce Reed, president of the Democratic Leadership Council, writes "The Has-Been" blog for Slate.