The dominant theme of
the midterm elections
was that a majority of
voters rejected ideology
as the central organizing
principle of government. They particularly
disdained the preference for ideological
certainty at all costs that the
Republican Party has come to represent.
And that's why, for Democrats,
the coming two years represent a
chance for both short-term success
and fundamental reform.
The ideological rigidity of the
Republicans who have been running
the Congress and the White House
has yielded a fidelity to outsized tax
cuts at the expense of fiscal discipline;
a massive transfer of entitlements to
already healthy corporations; an ugly
redistribution of resources at the
expense of college students and
Medicaid recipients; and, not least of
all, the advance of a slash-and-burn
politics that aggressively distinguishes
one kind of American from another.
The architects of these policies do not
know doubt: If you don't share their
agenda for the country's well-being,
their political approach is to brand
you as uninformed -- or in possession
of a flawed or eccentric character.
You could watch the turning away
from this ideological certainty in race
after race. Whether it was John Tester's
campaign in Montana, Jim Webb's
effort in Virginia, Claire McCaskill's
race in Missouri, or even Harold Ford's
near-win in Tennessee -- all these red-state
Senate candidates undercut traditional
Republican advantages by running
as problem-solvers offering pragmatic
solutions to the challenges facing
our economy and country. Even an
unabashed liberal like Sherrod Brown of
Ohio rolled up impressive totals in sections
of southern Ohio that don't agree
with his votes on gay marriage or gun
rights, and he did so by offering a deadly
critique of the ways Republican policies
have cost Ohio jobs and capital.
To be sure, Democratic wins in red
states and red districts were helped by
Republican hypocrisies. But the
foundation of our victory was a
recognition of a point that former
President Clinton often makes: Evidence
matters in politics, and results
matter most of all. We didn't have to
guess the impact of the Clinton policies
in the 1990s: 20 million new
jobs; crime and social pathologies
going down; poverty decreasing; a
projected $5 trillion budget surplus.
We also don't have to guess the
effects of the Bush administration and
its congressional enablers: greater economic
inequality; poverty rising; deteriorating
schools; exploding deficits.
We know that the economic gap
between urban and rural areas -- and
even more fundamentally, between
suburban and rural America -- continues
to widen. The policies of the
1990s worked; those of the Bush
administration have not.
Concrete solutions. So what voters
did in November was to create the
opportunity for a vital new center in
American politics. But if this prospect
is to be a durable one that could
realign our voting patterns, and if the
hope of 2006 is to lead to a
Democratic presidency that respects
our nation's possibilities, our party
must understand the nature of what
has fatigued voters about politics.
We have not always understood
that to many Americans, our politics
has degenerated into an argument
over who got the better of the recent
past. Our political factions have
argued over who "won" the 1960s
and 1970s, and whose policies are
responsible for our substantial collection
of unfinished business. Voters,
most of whom don't revere history
and don't have long memories, are
tired of it. They yearn for an honest
debate over today's uncertainties.
Another major element of voter
disaffection is the sense that Congress
and the White House have been wedded
to a very narrow special-interest
agenda. We have seen the crafting of
energy legislation by covert task
forces and the dismantling of any
walls between K Street lobbyists and
the shaping of public policy. In the
rare instances when the last Congress
actually legislated, the public has seen
little relevance to the pressing
concerns in their everyday
lives. They haven't felt that
their elected government was
motivated by a larger sense of
the public good or by an
understanding of the values
that we have in common as a
nation.
I believe that the party that
comes up with concrete solutions
for our immediate and
future problems -- and makes
us see that our substantial similarities
trump our differences
-- will dominate American
politics for the next 10 to
15 years. The opening is
there -- especially for Democrats
-- but the outcome is by
no means predetermined.
It's time to escape the old
ideological battles and to fashion
policies that speak for the
country as a whole, not just for
our various constituencies and
special-interest groups. We have to
articulate a national set of values that
span our ideological predispositions. We
need a coherent approach that balances
our progressive and our conservative
instincts, that emphasizes accountability,
responsibility, and connection.
An area ripe for Democratic
leadership is the
education crisis in our
country. Although the
federal government's penetration
into public education
is unprecedented,
public schools are continuing to deteriorate.
The gap between high-performing
and nonperforming schools is
wider than ever, and the college attrition
rate for minorities and low-income
students is growing at an
alarming pace.
Too often, our Democratic mantra
is no more ambitious than the full
funding of the No Child Left Behind
legislation. The Republican answer,
conversely, has too often been that all
we need is an infusion of values and
better parenting. Yet in Alabama, a
majority of students in some nonaffluent
districts are missing one parent,
and in some communities, one out of
five high school sophomores lives primarily
with an individual who is neither
his or her mother nor father.
We have to talk about genuine
reform. Yes, we need more accountability
in public education. But we
also need a more intelligent allocation
of resources to identify and combat
the social pathologies challenging at-risk
kids. Psychological services and
individualized counseling need to be
reintroduced as educational tools.
We should develop incentives for
local school districts and states to
build systems that address the individual
needs of at-risk students and start
closing the cognitive gaps. To encourage
creative strategies for closing the
gap between performing and nonperforming
students, we should emulate
the model of the Hope VI program for
the revitalization of the public housing
projects. Hope VI allots federal
matching money to cities that convert
their public housing units into mixed-income
dwellings. The program offers
grants to generate both private investment
and local funding to improve
the public housing stock. The goal is
the creation of neighborhoods desirable
to people up and down the
income scale.
That's a shrewd and successful use
of the federal purse. We should do the
same thing with public schools.
Targeted grants should be tied to a system's
demonstrated ability to close the
gap between winners and losers and to
a sustained and measured ability to
move kids toward better outcomes.
Another agenda item for the new
Democratic Congress should be remedying
the inequities in our delivery of
health care. The costs are rising; the
quality is not as consistent or as available
it should be, given our advanced
technology; and the scandalous number
of uninsured Americans
continues to rise. While not
abandoning market principles,
we need solutions that bring
more accountability and discipline
to the market.
I am embarrassed that a Republican
governor of Massachusetts,
Mitt Romney, has a
claim on this issue because he
has helped deliver near-universal
health insurance in his state
by offering a combination of
subsidies and mandates. In our
party, Sen. Barack Obama (DIll.)
is on to something when
he proposes that the struggling
automobile industry be offered
subsidies for employees' health
care in exchange for tougher
fuel-efficiency standards. There
is merit in an array of other
ideas. One is automatic Medicaid
enrollment of the parents
of children who receive coverage
under the SCHIP program.
Another is a greater
reliance on portable, individualized
coverage for employees, rather
than the purely group-based model.
Still another is more efficient inventory
of medical records for rural and
low-income patients.
A national ethic. Mainstream values
that reflect our best conservative and
progressive instincts are what voters
chose in the last election. They sensed
that a politics based on a rigid
liberal/conservative divide is just not
adequate to today's challenges. Neither
the liberal nor the conservative
vision has provided remedies for the
gap between skilled and unskilled
workers, between performing and
nonperforming schools. Neither of
our two dominant philosophies has
offered adequate solutions to the disruptive
effects of globalization, which
include the shrinking of whole industries
and the displacement of too
many workers into a low-wage basement.
Neither conservatism nor liberalism
has even found the right vocabulary
to deal with these issues, so we
often find ourselves confronted with
the familiar false choices of values vs.
more resources; of advantages for the
consumer vs. advantages for business;
of market regulation vs. market-based
innovation; of trade vs. protectionism.
I want my party to stand for a
national ethic that asserts that we are
strengthened by our ties to one another.
To get there, we need articulate
answers to the following questions:
Exactly what connections do we have
to one another as Americans? What
are our collective and individual
responsibilities? What is the nature of
our obligations to the people who lose
and become displaced in a sharply
changing economy?
The most profound moments in
politics usually happen unexpectedly.
This year's collapse of government by
ideologues and by uninformed conviction
may be a pivotal transition in
our politics. But to make that possibility
real, Democrats, now that we
have our chance, must offer governance
that works.
