According to this Washington Post story, Democratic intellectuals William Galston and Elaine Kamarck have issued a report warning their party that moving to the left would be a disastrous electoral strategy.
The groups that were supposed to constitute the new Democratic majority in 2004 simply failed to materialize in sufficient number to overcome the right-center coalition of the Republican Party.
They note that GOP support is rising among hispanics, a group whom liberals had been counting on. Moreover, they claim that issues like health care and education, traditionally key cards for Democrats to play, have lost their power to win large numbers of votes. Finally:
On defense and social issues, "liberals espouse views diverging not only from those of other Democrats, but from Americans as a whole. To the extent that liberals now constitute both the largest bloc within the Democratic coalition and the public face of the party, Democratic candidates for national office will be running uphill."
Leftists are full of grievance. That defines the modern leftist--grievance. There’s no there, there. Just grievance wrapped within grievance, recursively, to the rotten core.
Can they win? Of course they can! They tap into the sense of grievance inside everyone. Voting out of emotion is commonplace. Democracy as practiced in this country seems to encourage the practice. So don’t get cocky.
The Democrats "official" response to Bush’s powerful 9/11 commemoration speech yesterday points to the Democrats’ continuing problems in the national-security area.
First, they let Sen. Dick "Guantanamo" Durbin--the notorious likener of U.S. soldiers to Nazis--give the main rejoinder. I had to pinch myself: Could the Democrats really be this clueless, I wondered?
Second, Durbin and his colleage Jack Reed (D-R.I.) continually scored Bush for lacking a strategy in Iraq. Yet of course they had no strategy of their own to put forward. When asked by the first media questioner at the event what strategy the Democrats would suggest to replace the President’s alleged non-strategy, Durbin said something about "measured accountability," by which he seemed to mean benchmark indicators that could be measured to show we’re succeeding. Metrics are all fine and well, fair enough, but since when is a set of metrics a strategy? Who do the Dems think they’re fooling with this? Both Durbin and Reed kept bringing up electricity and Iraq’s power grid, as if that’s hyperimportant somehow. It was a strange performance indeed. Clearly, the Democratic Party has its work cut out for it when it comes to regaining public trust on the issue of national security--a trust that the Dems essentially lost in 1968 and have never really regained.
Here’s the report itself(71 page pdf).