Democrats need better message, messengers

I felt pretty lonely standing out on the National Mall Thursday. Though there were thousands… I felt pretty lonely standing out on the National Mall Thursday. Though there were thousands of other people on hand to watch President George W. Bush being sworn in, the majority of them were Republicans, many of whom were wearing Bush pins and cowboy hats. And here I was, a Democrat who had also forgotten my winter hat in the car and was suffering doubly as a result.

I shifted about in the tightly packed snow and piles of frozen mud, searching the crowd for others of my kind. I think there were more people in the crowd wearing Steelers gear than there were Democrats.

As the increasingly ancient-looking Chief Justice William Rehnquist came forward to administer the oath of office, I suddenly felt as though I was living the final scene of “Braveheart,” where William Wallace’s two friends sneak into London and watch from the crowd as he’s tortured and executed. And just like that scene, a grand spectacle was being made of something that was, in reality, horrifying.

Perhaps the more frightening thought at that moment, not only to me, but to Democrats the nation over, was that many of us have no idea in what direction our party is headed. As each election passes, the Democratic Party is coming to resemble Britain’s conservative party more and more, in that it’s so disorganized it can barely find its car keys, let alone challenge the Republicans’ majority government.

So where do the Democrats go from here?

“I don’t really think even they know,” said CNN’s Anderson Cooper, whom I met while standing on the Mall.

It’s sad, but it’s apparently true. The Democrats have spent so much time over the past several years courting the moderate vote that many feel they’ve begun to alienate their more liberal base.

“The Republicans are waging class warfare, and they’re winning,” said Duane Shank, a Democrat and policy adviser for Sojourners, a Christian social justice magazine. Shank, who watched the inauguration speech amid the stacks of newspapers in his office, said he wasn’t impressed.

“The reason Clinton was successful was that ordinary people identified with him. Someone like George Bush induces that kind of feeling,” Shank said. “He has a way of making folks feel like he’s one of them, and a lot of people in this country vote for any office based on who they’re comfortable with.”

And as the Republicans have proved, the popularity of the messenger can and will outweigh that of the message. This is a major reason the Democrats suffered such heavy losses in recent national elections. Since Clinton, there hasn’t been a Democrat with the personality, the inspiring flare or the folksiness that Bush has.

The Republicans have four or five figures of those figures on the national stage, not to mention more than a few governors who evoke similar feelings among voters. The Democrats have Barack Obama, whose tenure on Capitol Hill is so young that he likely hasn’t finished decorating his office yet.

“I like to think that the president and congressional Republicans will pursue what they see as their mandate and push strongly for policies that the vast majority of Americans oppose, policies like the privatization of Social Security and the imposition of dramatic cuts in Medicaid and Medicare in order to pay for more tax cuts,” said Matt Dinkel, press secretary for Rep. Mike Doyle, D-Pittsburgh. “If the Republicans take that course, they will lose important blocks of swing voters and re-energize the Democratic base.”

Many Democrats hope their party’s revival will be that easy. After all, it was overreaching on the part of Senate Republicans that allowed Clinton to win a second term by a landslide. But a party whose plan for success relies on the other guys messing up to energize its members has strayed too far from its ideological base.

The Democrats need to start showing their teeth, and they need to do so soon. If they don’t, four years from now, we might be mourning the loss of more than just an election — we might be mourning the loss of the United States’ left-wing party as well.

If you’d like to reenact a famous movie scene with Matt Wein, e-mail him at mattwein@hotmail.com.