(Asking the inverse of Palo Verde’s question here, since I’m genuinely curious.)
So here is the challenge: come up with the best idea generally conceived and embraced by the Democratic party. This can’t be something that some minor official thought of, but rather an idea that many in the mainstream Democratic Party favored and was opposed by many in the mainstream Republican Party. But in hindsight, it was the right thing. Oh, and to prevent answers like “the Bourbon Democrats’ pro-business, libertarian-leaning policies” lets say it should be within the last 50 years.
Also, can you come up with something generally favored by the mainstream Republican Party within the last 50 years, that in hindsight was actually a really bad idea?
The Republican part is easy: supply side economics. We’ve done it twice and mainly just managed to bust the budget. The old Coolidge/Eisenhower style of fiscal conservatism is proven, the party should return to that. Politically it’s a winner as well. You cut spending, then you cut taxes. Coolidge cut spending and taxes nearly every year of his Presidency and was wildly popular as a result. Whenever spending wasn’t cut enough, he’d lament that maybe there would be no tax cut. That tended to spur Congress to find more savings. That creates a big constituency in favor of spending cuts: all the taxpayers. What supply side economics did was disconnect spending and taxation in the mind of the public. So now Republicans can’t produce a carrot to go along with the stick of spending cuts because they already gave away all the carrots unconditionally by cutting taxes first.
It’s a little harder for me to pick a good Democratic idea due to the diversity within the coalition, plus it would be cheating if I just picked a social issue since I tend to be pretty libertarian and already agree with them on most social issues. So I’ll list a few that may not apply to the whole Democratic coalition or that are small-bore ideas.
the free trade policies of neoliberals
The Democratic versions of deregulation, such as deregulation of the airlines, telecom, and the trucking industry. Democrats tend to be smarter about the process of deregulation than Republicans. Didn’t hurt that Ted Kennedy led a lot of these efforts.
Student loan reform of 2010. It never made sense to use banks as middlemen.
Entitlement reform. Those Democrats that want to cut Medicare want to use an unelected board. Sounds bad, until you realize that the GOP idea is to use the magic of markets. Problem is, their idea doesn’t actually create a market, it just creates an extra industry to lobby for higher Medicare spending(the insurance industry, on top of all the other industries and interest groups like AARP that want more Medicare spending).
Not really an idea, but a view of the world: Democrats understand the role of government vs. the role of the private sector better than Republicans. I wish the Democrats would regulate the public sector more and the private sector less, but they at least understand what a market is. Republicans just outsource government functions to private corporations and think they are harnessing the market somehow.
Dems - John Kerry’s solution to healthcare - a government guarantee of catastrophic coverage for medical expenses, leaving us to only having to pay for “gap insurance”. So, our much cheaper gap coverage would pay for the “oil changes” in our healthcare, and the 20% of us who use more than $25k of medical care in a year (or whatever number they landed on) would be picked up by the Feds.
Pubs - almost anything related to social freedoms - abortion, war on drugs, etc.
I’ve always been conservative/libertarian, my unwillingness to vote Republican had more to do with the candidates. Anyone in my age group(late 30s) has really only had Bushes to vote for until 2008. And Bob Dole. I did vote for Mccain, I will be voting for Romney, I generally vote Republican for Congress and I’m a big supporter of the Tea Party movement.
At the time it bugged the shit out of me, but I love Bill Clintons idea of signing Republican backed bills and claiming credit for them. Sure some egos got bruised and it was wrong for for him to get credit for them. But things that needed to become law got done so I guess the end justified the means.
Well, he could have vetoed them. What annoys me most isn’t that Clinton took credit, it’s that Democrats take credit for Clinton despite rejecting Clintonism. He’s the only successful Democratic President since FDR, yet Democrats act as if his term proves Democrats govern better than Republicans. If anything, Clinton proved that Republicans could govern better if they’d just drop some of the fat(like supply side economics) from their platform.