TO: The Democratic Party
FROM: Al From and Bruce Reed
SUBJECT: The New Democrat Majority
Ninety years ago this July, the Boston Braves began the greatest comeback in baseball history. The "Miracle Braves" came from 15 1/2 games behind in the summer to a World Series sweep in the fall. With their nomination in Boston, Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and John
Edwards (D-N.C.) can help their party complete the greatest comeback in political history. Sixteen years ago, following Michael Dukakis's sound defeat by George H. W. Bush -- the fifth Democratic loss in six elections -- the party was on the brink of electoral extinction. Now, while it may be too early to talk of a sweep, Democrats have a real chance to build a governing majority that could dominate the first half of the 21st century.
John Kerry has already shown that, like Bill Clinton, he is a Comeback
Kid. With the right campaign this fall, Kerry can make Democrats the
Comeback Party.
Make no mistake: Democrats aren't there yet. Republicans have wafer-thin control of government from top to bottom: one-vote margins in the Senate and the Supreme Court, a 12-seat swing in the House, a two-statehouse edge among governorships, and a swing of one-half of one percent in state legislatures.
But these days, Republicans are looking over their shoulders. Democrats have come a long way during the past two decades, and the successful formula that rescued the party from irrelevance in the 1980s is on track to bring Democrats a first-place finish in the popular vote for the fourth consecutive presidential election.
Worst to first. At the presidential level, by the end of the 1980s, the Democratic Party was in its weakest condition ever. In a quarter-century, it had lost five national elections, four by landslides. In the three presidential elections of the 1980s, Democrats lost at least 40 states each time, and averaged 42 percent of the popular vote and just 11 percent of the electoral vote -- the worst performance by a political party since the dawn of the two-party system under Andrew
Jackson. As Ron Brownstein of the Los Angeles Times recently observed, "When the Democratic Party in the Civil War era was the party of rebellion and disunion, they did better than when they were the party of Carter, Mondale, and Dukakis."
The Democratic Party's journey from worst to first began in 1992 with the transforming election of Bill Clinton. As Clinton writes in his memoir, My Life, he ran a campaign patterned after "the first New Democrat," Bobby Kennedy: "By embracing ideas and values that were both liberal and conservative, it made voters who had not supported Democratic presidential candidates in years listen to our message."
By offering new ideas that worked, Clinton and the New Democrats changed the Democratic Party and the country. Today, the stereotype Republicans ran against throughout the 1980s -- that Democrats are big-government, tax-and-spend liberals who are soft on defense, crime, and welfare -- is as outdated as the flannel knickers of the 1914 Braves.
Yet nostalgic Republicans have spent the past six months trying to pin that distorted label on John Kerry. Their efforts are in vain: Every time during the 1990s that the Democratic Party had to choose between the future and the past -- on balancing the budget, fighting crime, expanding trade, reforming welfare -- Kerry voted with the future. Democrats are on the cusp of becoming a majority party today because New Democrats like Bill Clinton and John Kerry rescued the party in the 1990s.
The resurgence of the Democratic Party is by no means complete. To borrow the slogan from British Prime Minister Tony Blair's last successful) campaign: "A lot done. A lot more to do."
With his smart selection of John Edwards, a Southern centrist, as his running mate, Kerry has once again shown his determination to run a positive, New Democrat campaign that will champion the interests, defend the values, and help solve the problems of the forgotten middle class.
The collapse of Bushism. Spin is a window on the soul of any White House. As Bush's popularity plunged this spring, his pollster Matthew Dowd spun the news: No one should be surprised at the president's falling numbers, he said, given all the bad news he has had to overcome. Never mind that much of the bad news was of the president's own making. From the beginning, the Bush White House has been so obsessed with the politics of its agenda that no one even bothers to ask whether it will work.
No White House has ever sold its soul in so many niche markets. When
President Bush, lifelong free trader, had to decide whether to impose steel tariffs in 2002, Karl Rove talked him into doing so to curry favor with steelworkers in West Virginia and Pennsylvania. One year later, after the policies backfired, Bush was forced to reverse himself.
Last fall, the White House threw over conservatives to get a prescription drug bill because elderly voters are crucial in Florida and Arizona. The result: The bill turned out to cost $130 billion more than the White House told Congress; angry right-wingers forced Bush to cut other popular programs; and even though the drug benefit doesn't take effect until 2006, polls show the bill is already unpopular among seniors.
The manned mission to Mars, which the White House hoped would lift Bush's appeal for a second term, crashed so badly that the president couldn't even find time to mention it in his last State of the Union address. Where Clinton had offered voters a laundry list of small, common-sense proposals with broad appeal because they would make a real difference in people's lives, Bush offered the opposite: a grab bag of small, cynical proposals that fell flat because even the target audiences didn't think they mattered.
Bush is failing for a simple reason. For all the talk in both parties about the urgent need to win one group or another, most Americans apply the same, simple political yardstick: They vote for what works. There aren't enough hacks, even in Washington, to sell a set of policies that don't.
The failure of negative thinking. When 2004 began, George Bush had a 20-point nationwide lead over Democratic frontrunner Howard Dean. By running a relentlessly negative campaign against Bush and his fellow Democrats, Dean had built a whopping lead over Kerry and Edwards in Iowa and New Hampshire. But Kerry and Edwards both embraced a different kind of politics that would ultimately put them in the driver's seat against both Dean and Bush: They took the high road. Campaigning across Iowa, they promised "answers, not anger." Iowa voters agreed, and the positive campaigns of Kerry and Edwards finished one-two, combining to win a stunning 70 percent of the vote.
Clearly, the Bush campaign wasn't paying attention. The night after the Iowa caucuses, Bush gave one of the least inspiring and most negative State of the Union addresses in memory. Instead of offering Americans a new agenda for a second term, Bush laid down the lines of attack for the campaign.
As a result, the past six months have been a perfect laboratory experiment in what kind of politics Americans want. The Bush campaign has spent $100 million to prove what Kerry, Edwards, and other New Democrats have been saying all along: Americans want answers, not attacks. After launching the most expensive barrage of attack ads in history, Bush is worse off than he was six months ago -- and no better off than he was at the end of the Democratic primaries.
Bush has already run the most negative campaign ever. According to a study by The Washington Post, 75 percent of Bush's advertising has been negative, compared to just 27 percent of Kerry's. This unprecedented smear campaign seems to have done Bush more harm than Kerry. When the primaries ended in March, Kerry's favorable-unfavorable rating in the Gallup poll was 53-36 percent positive. In late June, more than 50,000 Bush attack ads later, Kerry's rating was still 58-35 percent positive.
Ironically, the real victim of the president's attacks has been Bush himself. In January, his job approval rating -- the key predictor of electoral success -- stood at 60 percent. By June, it was down to the mid-40s.
The Bush campaign has forgotten the central lesson of the Clinton years: Results matter. For most Americans, everything else is just politics.
The Teflon Democrats. Bush's poor performance in office and his failure to offer a compelling agenda for a second term have spurred his decline. But there's another reason the Bush assault has fallen flat. The Democratic Party of 2004 is not susceptible to the same kind of negative attacks that it was before Clinton's presidency. The Bush White House needs to realize: We're not in 1988 anymore, Toto.
Under Kerry and Edwards, the Democratic Party stands for economic growth and opportunity, not redistribution; for expanding the middle class, not the middle-class tax burden; for national strength, not national weakness; for work, not welfare; for tackling big challenges with reforms; and for an ethic of duty and responsibility. In short, it stands for hope, duty, strength, and reform.
By choosing Kerry in the primaries, Democrats made an affirmative decision to continue that change and to build on the New Democrat foundation of Clintonism with another round of progress. The party rejected an effort by Howard Dean to reverse course. As a result, today's party is a far cry from the one that was in danger of ceasing to be a national party just 16 years ago.
Then, too many voters had come to see Democrats as inattentive to their economic interests, hostile to their values, and unwilling or unable to defend our country. Now they don't.
Reversing the drought in presidential politics was critical to saving the Democratic Party. In our system of government, a national party will quickly break into its constituent parts if it cannot win the big prize of the presidency.
In the 1990s, Clinton, Kerry, and the New Democrats changed the party in a fundamental way: They redefined the party on critical issues like fiscal discipline, welfare, crime, national service, and the size and role of government.
In doing so, they reconnected the party with its greatest traditions: Jackson's belief in equal opportunity for all, special privileges for none;
Roosevelt's thirst for innovation; Truman's tough-minded internationalism; Kennedy's civic ethic; Johnson's quest for social justice. By giving Americans a commonsense alternative to failed conservatism and ineffective if well-intentioned liberalism, this new Democratic Party saved progressive governance in America.
Clintonism proved successful not only as a political formula, but more important, as a governing formula for the nation. The New Democrat ideas worked, producing the best economy in our lifetime, the longest period of sustained economic growth in American history; employment at an all-time high and unemployment at a three-decade low; inflation under control; incomes and wages up, child poverty down; the welfare rolls cut by 60 percent; the lowest violent crime rate in a quarter century;
and the smallest federal workforce since the Kennedy administration.
Just as clearly, Bushism hasn't worked. The economy has struggled. Middle-class burdens have increased, while incomes have stopped growing. After one of the greatest decades of upward mobility on record, Americans who aspire to join the economic mainstream have watched that progress grind to a halt. On issues like health care, college tuition, and energy, Washington has stopped trying to solve the real problems of real people. Fiscal responsibility, the signature New Democrat reform that makes social and economic progress possible, has given way to the reckless self-delusion that deficits are just another domestic problem that doesn't matter.
The rise of Kerryism. After Clinton's success, and Bush's failure, Americans have newfound confidence in Democrats' ability to govern. But Democrats can't rest on their laurels, because the Democratic comeback is not complete. If Democrats want to be the majority party in America, they need once again to summon the boldness, innovation, and determination to apply those New Democrat values and principles to a whole new set of challenges in the post-9/11 21st century.
John Kerry has spelled out a clear, principled vision of what we must do to make America stronger at home and respected in the world. Indeed, the story of the past six months is not just the collapse of Bushism, but the rise of Kerryism.
Kerryism is built on the best traditions of the Democratic Party and the pragmatic, centrist foundations of the 1990s. As he has said many times,
Kerry believes that we live in a dangerous world, and that America has a special mission to defend not only ourselves, but our values. He believes that to be strong in the world, we must be strong at home; that the measure of America's economy is a growing middle class, and to achieve that we must expand the reach of opportunity, not the size of government. He believes that citizenship brings responsibilities as well as rights, and that all Americans have a duty to give something back. And he believes that, in Andrew Jackson's words, the promise of America is "equal opportunity for all, special privileges for none."
Unlike compassionate conservatism, Kerryism is reform with results. Kerry has a long history of backing successful reforms. He crossed party lines to support the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings budget reform in 1985, when fiscal discipline was a dirty word in the Democratic Party. As a former prosecutor, he fought to pass Clinton's "100,000 cops" program, which changed the way America fights crime -- and helped cut violent crime by one-third, making our country the safest it has been in a generation. When his party was divided over welfare, he voted to pass a landmark welfare reform law with tough work requirements and time limits that has cut poverty in single-parent households by one-third, and made welfare a second chance, not a way of life.
The biggest difference between Kerryism and Bushism is that in the best New Democratic tradition, Kerry and Edwards have set out to make this election a campaign of ideas, not attacks. They have proposed a bold reform agenda to restore fiscal responsibility, end corporate welfare as we know it, and cut the deficit in half. They have a plan to increase economic growth and reward work, not wealth, by cutting middle-class taxes and putting the tax code back in line with our values. They want to finish the job of education reform by rewarding the best teachers for teaching in the schools and subjects where we need them most, and asking more of teachers in return. They have an innovative plan to reform the health care system to improve quality, expand access, and hold down costs. They have a plan to create jobs and increase security by making America the world's leader in new, energy-efficient technologies. They are determined to make America safer at home by reforming our broken intelligence agencies and supporting the firefighters, police officers, and emergency responders who form our front line of homeland defense. Above all, they have a strategy to win the war on terror by making sure America has the strongest military on earth and the strongest alliances with the friends we need around the world.
On domestic and economic issues, Kerryism will resume and accelerate the New Democratic progress that ended with the Bush presidency. On national security, as Will Marshall persuasively argues (see "Closing the National Security Gap"), Kerryism will show America's true resolve to triumph over terror by leading the world in a common mission.
In the 1990s, Bill Clinton showed Americans once and for all that Democrats could make the economy grow again, make government work again, and make America safe again. As a tough-minded internationalist and decorated war hero, Kerry has a chance to make his own mark, and complete the transformation of the Democratic Party as the one Americans can trust to make the nation stronger both at home and abroad.
When a Kerry-Edwards era makes that happen, Democrats will truly be the Comeback Party.
