Democrats
E.J. Dionne has a pretty sensible op-ed in today’s Post. He talks about the state of the party as an organization and looks at contrasting views on how to go forward with it. He compares the Democratic Party with the Republican. I don’t think he’s saying anything revolutionary, but it’s good to see this viewpoint in print at such a high visibility publication. I particularly liked this bit:
The odd result is that Republicans, who defend individualism in theory, act like communitarians where their party is concerned. Democrats claim to be more community-minded but act like radical individualists in their penchant for candidate-centered, one-cause-at-a-time politics.
I think he’s definitely onto something there. It seems to me that there are a lot more single issue voters in the Democratic Party. I think it’s fair to say that it’s also widely understood that the interest groups that make up the Democratic Party are a less cohesive group than those inside the party. Some of that, I believe, is the legacy of the Democrats’ former status as a true majority party in this country. As the GOP cleaved a group here and a group there off of the Democratic Party, it was natural that those splinters would have a strong similarity with the existing GOP interest groups. But I also think that a major part of it comes from the Democrats’ inability to craft a coherent system of rhetoric that speaks to the various interests and unites them into an easily recognizable framework. Other than a few things that are so generic as to be almost just plain American rather than the province of the party, there are few themes that you’d see repeated by non-candidate speakers at various interest group sponsored Democratic events. The message that you’ll see at an event sponsored by the Teachers or the Teamsters is going to be very specific. It’s not uncommon for that message to even conflict with what speakers might say when at some other interest group’s meeting/rally/etc. To ever really gain true majority status again, the Democratic Party needs to craft a message that speaks to most Americans in clear and compelling terms. But once it’s done that, it also needs to have invested in the grass roots and state level infrastructure that develops compelling messengers for that message. I applaud Howard Dean’s effort to do the latter.
