The Slow Death of the Democratic Party

Great Debates
1

I chose this forum instead of Great Debates because the following is my own and analysis.

I think the Democrats are dying and liberalism is killing it. That’s why the level of desperation and devisiveness is so high for this Presidential Election. Many people view the success of the Republican Party as a recent phenomenon, but I think the roots of the problems the Democrats are having go a little deeper into history. The emergence of left-wing over moderate thinking in national Democratic politics goes back to where some of their problems of today are coming from…Vietnam.

The vocal anti-war sentiment was much more a part of the Democratic mosaic than it was for the Republicans. After Johnson chose not to seek relection in 1968, Hubert Humphrey emerged. Even with George Wallace taking five southern states and nearly ten million votes, Richard Nixon won an easy electoral victory. Had Wallace not been in the race, I believe that most of his votes would have gone to Nixon. I think that the social conservatives in the south, denied a segragationist candidate, would have been mostly supportive of the Vietnam war and therefore Nixon.

In 1972, George McGovern had his head handed to him by Nixon. Vietnam was still a central issue, but the beginnings of the ideological divide that separates the left and right of today were beginning to emerge.

In 1976, Jimmy Carter benefitted from the desire to punish Nixon and the Republicans for Watergate. Even with this dynamic in play, the election was tight. Carter then went on to pursue noble goals or to screw things up, depending on your ideology. Regardless of your chosen spin, the Carter Presidency was not one of America’s best moments…primarily because idealism was allowed to compete with pragmatism for center stage.

In 1980, Reagan drubbed Carter and the Republicans regain control of the Senate for the first time in a generation. The precursor of the modern political climate continues to gel.

In 1984, Walter Mondale becomes the standard bearer of modern liberalsim and manages to take his home state of Minnesota and Washington D.C. in one of the worst defeats in electoral history.

In 1988, Michael Dukakis emerges. Another liberal standard bearer from the North or East. George H.W. Bush sends him packing with a punishing win.

  1. The Democrats find the formula for electing a President. A charming southern moderate. (This was a lesson forgotten 12 years later when they chose Kerry over Edwards). Bill Clinton ran away from liberalism during the campaign…but he couldn’t resist trying to push some of its agenda through during his first two years. His first effort out of the box was gays in the military…and then came the national healthcare experiment. The result? In 1994, the Senate and the House both return with Republican majorities that remain today. After that, Clinton ran from liberalism like it was the plague. He declared “the era of big government is over” in a State of the Union speech…and did many more things to establish his moderate presidential appearance.

  2. Clinton defeats Bob Dole as the economy is humming along and he uses his superior campaining skills.

  3. Gore and Bush square off. Gore tries to appear moderate and benefit from the Clinton economy while avoiding the Clinton stink. Much drama ensues and Ralph Nadar costs Gore the White House. Bush is elected in a very close race.

Now here we are in 2004. The liberal side of the Democratic Party is first entranced with Howard Dean. He is saying what they want to hear…but they don’t realize that they simply do not have the numbers at the polls to win a national election on an unapologetic liberal platform. Dean self-destructs and Kerry is selected over Edwards. This will be something that is regretted by Democrats for years to come. Edwards is of the Clinton mold…but they chose John Kerry instead. Impeccable liberal credentials. But sometime between the primaries and the convention, buyers remorse about those liberal credentials must have set in. Why else would nearly the entire Democratic convention and a large part of Kerry’s presidential campaign be about four months in Vietnam 35 years ago and little else? Voters are asked to accept Kerry as a “warrior” and as part of a “band of brothers” instead of examining his very leftward voting record in the Senate. As I write this, Kerry is in the midst of destructing slowly. Bush will win the election.

What does the future hold for the Democrats? I see Hillary Clinton and John Edwards as the Democratic frontrunners in 2008, competing against John McCain and Rudy Guiliani. Any guesses on how that will turn out?

2

Every election you speak about, the winner was, by far, the better campainer.

Nixon lost to Kennedy after a televised debate, and the key factor was that Nixon looked bad on TV. He learned that lesson and his fellow Republicans have learned it well.

I dont’ recall '68 clearly but Nixon ran a much stronger campain than McGovern.

Jimmy Carter ran a better campain than Ford.

Reagan was a masterful candidate. He, and his staff knew how to controll the image of the candidate.

George HW Bush ran a much better campain than Dukakis.

Bill Clinton is second only to Regan in campaining.

Gore was not a very good campainger. He seemed to think people would look at the candidates record and not what the candidates present.

In general I would say the the Republicans are better at defining the Democratic candidate than the Democratic Candidate themselves. They label the opponet and because of their masterful campaining, the lables stick. Wether the lables are true are not true does not matter. If you let your opponet difine you, you will not win.

3

Another theory on the Democrats’ current malaise is that the party is too full of intellectuals and individualists who know there are no easy answers and view problems as complex issues. Plus they each want to put their stamp on solutions. The Republican drones march in lockstep, hence the party is more efficient and their “ideals” easier for an uninformed public to digest.
Now do you think that if Gore’d won the White House he would’ve stopped 9/11? I’ve heard it said that if 9/11 had happened on Gore’s watch, that would have been the absolute end of the Democrats. Given what out-of-the-box thinking the attacks represented, I’m not positive any President could have prevented them.

4

Despite the OP’s assertion that this is not a GD issue, it very much is and I will respond in kind.

The OP is a classic “Big Lie” that ultra-rightwingers keep trying to assert despite every piece of evidence to the contrary. I repeat: it’s a Big Lie.

It gets a lot of display in the media because the media is overwhelmingly controlled by ultra-conservatives. (Not liberals, another Big Lie.)

Look at the last 3 presidential elections: the Democratic candidate won the popular vote in all 3. It is absolutely inconceivable that anyone who knows this little fact would think the Democratic party is dying. Dying parties don’t win national elections on such a regular basis.

Ditto notice how close the balance of power in the House and Senate has been over the recent years. These are widely known facts. How do the ultra-conservatives handle facts? They lie. The state the opposite of what is obviously true.

Note that another Big Lie is that the Democrats=liberals and Conservatives=conservatives. This is a recent Big Lie created to polarize the country. Most years there is very little difference between the candidates on the issues that matter. (Forget wedge issues, again that is merely to create polarization.) Ergo, the media has to label Kerry a liberal, just like they did Clinton, in order to further their ultra-rightwing political agenda. The media is scared to death that the American voter is going to catch on that these guys are centrists, and the center is where the vote is folks.

5

The Democrats have won more votes than the Republicans in the last three Presidential elections. Yep, the party is dead.

6

I think the Democrats need to be less middle of the road and go back to supporting populist ideals and consumerism and ecological do-gooder-ism (for lack of a less pejorative term).

As was noted this week in an LA Times editorial, this is called “sewer populism”, another unattractive name, whereby the cities, which are the Democratic base, are supported by infrastructure projects that help the whole area, things like sewers and roads and hospitals and schools. Instead, the Dems in city governments seem to be relying on things like producing “cafe zones” and swank apartment towers to bring improve the life of the city. These are actually more gentrification schemes to bring suburbanites back but not help the people already living in the cities.

7

Moving this from IMHO to Great Debates.

8

“The emergence of left-wing over moderate thinking in national Democratic politics goes back to where some of their problems of today are coming from…Vietnam”

How many important issues can you name where the party mainstream hangs to left-wing thinking rather than moderate thinking.

-Gay marriage. Most party insiders going for civil unions rather than marriages for gays. Not that one.

-Medicare. Ted Kennedy’s effort to block the 2003 prescription drug bill on the grounds that it contained to much movement towards privatization failed due to lack of support from the party center. Not that one.

-Iraq. Ah, not that one, I think.

So how do you defend that statement?

9

Maybe that’s why he started this thread in IMHO! :wink:

Actually, I would also try to see him argue that the Republican Party hasn’t moved quite far to the right. Just compare the sort of leaders in the 70s to those today…Howard Baker and Gerald Ford vs. Tom DeLay and Trent Lott. Hell, Nixon started the EPA and signed landmark environmental legislation into law. (Clean Air Act among them I believe.)

In fact, a counterargument that might be easier to defend is that the Republicans are doing better than the Democrats because they have staked their ideological ground more strongly while the Dems have been too wishy-washy.

10

Defending that one might be a bit tricky too, however. Consider the issue of education. In 1993 Bill Clinton proposed a series of new education iniaitives centered around creating a federal testing system that would be used to judge schools nationwide, and of course, the Limbaugh crowd trashed it as big government waste and senseless bureaucracy. In 2001, 90 percent of Clinton’s ideas got passed into law as the No Child Left Behind Act, supported by most Pubs and opposed by most Dems. Just one example of how surreal politics has become these days.

11

The possible decline in the Democratric party can be summed up in two words:civil rights. What once were overwhelming majorities in the Southern States for the Democratics are now in the Republicans favor. Voters simply chanced labeled not their attitudes along the political spectrum.

And the Democratic party now is about it’s average position outside the South since Andrew Jackson. Since that time the country has elected a dozen different Democratics as president but only 2 got more than 51% of the national vote, while the Republicans had 8 individuals(Eisenhower twice) with over 55%.

12

I’ve never been one for fancy reasons when there’s a simple one layin nearby.
I suspect that the reasons for its malaise are more mundane and mechanical rather than ethereal as you suppose.

Our success has more to do with what we do right than with what the Dems do wrong. We didn’t come to dominate merely because the Dem defaulted.

Just like today- esp re Iraq. When Kissinger says an invasion is a bad idea, it should give one pause for reflection.

And Bush and the oxymoronic ‘big-government conservatives’ have brought it back.

Ah the campaigning skills. I suspect that these are more along the lines of the kinds of things I’m talking about when I cite mundane and mechanical reasons.

McCain won’t run. I’d like to vote for him. I’d also like to vote for Sen Lugar.

13

Tough luck, Simon, 'cause those who pay attention to these things see the RNC choosing Frist in 2008. How he’ll fare against Kerry’s reelection bid is anybody’s guess. But the Republican Party leadership squashed McCain’s bid in 2000 because he’s against almost everything that they’re for, so why on Earth wouldn’t they do so again if he ran in 2008? And from their perspective, Guiliani is even worse.

Heck, if that ticket ran I might vote for it just because it would cause so many heart attacks among corporate conservatives.

14

A strong case could be made that the success of the Democratic Party in the last three presidential elections is due to the triumph of moderate thinking over liberalism within the party. The entire political spectrum in this country has moved to the right. I suspect the pendulum will swing back to the left again just as I’m too senile to chortle about it.

15

Dana Rohrbacher has just introduced a prosed amendment to the constitution that allows foreign born citizens to run for President as long as they have been citizens for 20 years or more.

Look out for President Arnold.

'Course, I have no idea if such an amendment might pass. The Democrats also have a foreign-born superstar, Jennifer Granholm. So it could be Schwartzenegger vs Granholm in 2008 or 2012.

But Granholm is a moderate as far as I know. That’s what makes her electable. If the Democrats do as some of you suggest and turns to the left, it will be destroyed as a national party and it’ll take a generation to recover. And that’s not a good thing.

16

This weeks This American Life radio show entitled Big Tent was about how the Republicans had become the dominant party by being inclusive of many different types of voters while the democrats had become increasingly exclusive. This fits my preception going to political events run by both parties, the Democrats are about issues (environment, womens rights, social safety net, civil rights, etc) while the Republicans seem to incorporate a less tangable message along with their platform. They try to be the party of intangibles, faith, freedom, loving america, things no one could possibly disagree with. That, plus basing a large part of their campaigns on character assasination of the other guy means they can put less stress on “being about” the issues, allowing those who disagree with some of their platform to still feel comfortable in their party, while the democrats focus on their platform, and the damage the Repubs will do to it.

While the Repubs certainly have a conservative platform and issues around it, by not making being a republican soley about these issues, they’ve expandend their party while Democrats have shruken theirs by making their party about believing in liberal issues.

It is perhaps an effort to mimic the Repubs successful strategy that has led to Kerry’s “issueless” campaign strategy.

17

  1. The Democrats are thinking of politics as a social duty, a task you undergo for the good of society. This requires compromise, diplomacy, and trust with your political peers across the aisle.

  2. The Republicans think of politics as war, and are out to (metaphorically) destroy anyone who is not a Republican. The only thing that matters is the acquisition of power, and the ends do justify the means.
    Until (1) realizes that (2) is in effect, they’ll be bringing good intentions to knife-fights – and getting killed in the process.

18

This strikes me as being a little utopian. Self-interest drives most of what we do, whether as individuals, or as groupings/alliances. That doesn’t rule out compromise; in fact, toleration of the other side is very important in politics, as in everyday life. Pluralism and diversity are to be cherished.

But elevating people’s self interest to talk of duty and summum bonum requires the skill of the alchemist. We should strive to reduce suffering, but attempts to bring about a heven on earth usually have the opposite effect.

19

Yes. Clinton twice and Gore once. If the electoral college was not in place and if Ralph Nadar had stayed out of things, Gore would be in the White House today. Gore ran on the moderate policies of the 1994-2000 Clinton years instead of trumpting classic liberalism. Even so, he was too far left for his home state of Tennessee. As for Nadar, he siphoned off enough far left votes to give the White House to Bush. (Yes, I know…many of you think the Supreme Court did that.) My point is that the Republicans do not have a Nadar on the far right taking support away. And the further left that activists try to pull the Democrats, the worse they fare.

Most people are not sophisticated enough politically to realize that their local vote for Senator or House member has national implications. That’s why the balance of power has been close. Some members of Congress come from such homogenous districts of one flavor of political thought or another that there hasn’t been a party shift in that district in decades. How many Republicans do you think are going to be elected in San Francisco…or Democrats in Utah?

Given the advantages of incumbency and the demographic shift of the population South and West to more Republican dominated states, the future does not look bright for the Democratic Party in congress.

20

Any movement left loses votes from the middle. And there are far more moderates than there are people at either end of the political spectrum.