Most people think the three most important issues in the 2006
election will be Iraq, Iraq and Iraq
– which roughly corresponds to the number of Democratic stances
on the war.
There is the pull-out-now crowd, a small and, as ever, loud
faction within the party. This is same minority that over the years
has never succeeded at anything except electing Republicans,
because in the end they cannot be counted on to vote for anyone not
named Nader.
The second is the set-a-timetable crowd, headed by Congressman
John Murtha and Senator John Kerry. Mainstream Democrats avoid this
position like poison oak at a picnic, but they seem to be the only
ones with a real plan, however controversial.
Most people think the three most important issues in the 2006 election will be Iraq, Iraq and Iraq – which roughly corresponds to the number of Democratic stances on the war.
There is the pull-out-now crowd, a small and, as ever, loud faction within the party. This is same minority that over the years has never succeeded at anything except electing Republicans, because in the end they cannot be counted on to vote for anyone not named Nader.
The second is the set-a-timetable crowd, headed by Congressman John Murtha and Senator John Kerry. Mainstream Democrats avoid this position like poison oak at a picnic, but they seem to be the only ones with a real plan, however controversial.
The third is that of the leadership, Rep. Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Harry Reid, whose plan is … I’m sorry, what was their plan again?
So while Iraq may be the 800-pound gorilla in the voting booth, it is unlikely the Democrats will figure out how to tame the issue this year, if ever.
No one really knows what to do about Iraq. Getting al-Zarwawi was a lucky break for which the Jordanians, not President Bush, get the lion’s share of the credit. His death revealed little about our ability to achieve long-term political stability in Iraq.
In the end, the war remains a debit on Bush’s side of the ledger that does not show up as a credit on the Democratic side.
It may not matter. Many people who have already factored Democratic dithering on Iraq into their political preferences will vote left just to punish the party in power. It wouldn’t be the first time American voters held their collective noses as they pulled the lever.
If failure to offer an alternative on Iraq isn’t the Democratic party’s biggest challenge in November, what is? I believe it’s an old affliction that the party shows little sign of curing. Web idol and netroots glammeister Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, otherwise known as Kos, offers a clue.
Kos is a big fan of Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer, a dark horse favorite of many Democrats to run for president in 2008. He’s got that Reaganesque, tall-in-the-saddle swagger that lefties have long envied, mixed with a compelling, can-do populism. Winning in blood-red states like Montana takes a candidate with a hat and cattle who knows how to solve problem by using government, not demonizing it. Many liberals, hungry for a win, have become enamored of this new breed of outdoorsy Dem.
But when it comes to grasping the finger-nail dirt nature of rural politics, they stumble.
Last week, after Schweitzer protege Jon Tester won the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate race against incumbent Republican Conrad Burns, Berkeley-based Kos rhapsodized over Tester, a rancher from Big Sandy, happily noting that Tester came from “the middle of nowhere.”
A few days later Newsweek’s Howard Fineman, in a Web commentary titled “Outside the Beltway,” picked up on Kos’s riff, arguing that the Democratic Party may need to find leadership outside its traditional power centers of Washington, New York and California if it wants to win the White House in 2008.
Like Kos, Fineman cannot resist the idea of this new kind of Democrat. “So that’s the place to start from in this new political era,” he writes, “not Washington, but the middle of nowhere.”
Kos and Fineman have a funny way of paying a compliment – which brings me to the Democrat’s long-standing Achilles heal.
The Democrats’ Eastern liberal establishment as well as its West Coast websurgents may have taken notice of Schweitzer, and how Democrats in conservative states have learned to win through a change in style as much as in substance. But they have not yet shed their elitist attitudes about interior America.
As long as the party remains largely bi-coastal, as long as it fails to grasp that there is no “nowhere,” it will fail to understand how Democrats win in places like the Rocky Mountain West.
And if they don’t get that clue soon, Democrats won’t take control of either house of Congress in 2006, or the White House in 2008. And that, I predict, could spell the end of the party, along the lines of the Whig collapse of the 1850s.
As I argued in a previous column, Democrats need more Will Rogers and less Michael Moore.
