The Democrats' Innovation Gap

In the 1980s, Democrats used to get accused of Blaming America First—siding with some socialist guerilla, U.N. potentate or foreign interest group against this country’s flawless Cold War policy of bloody right-wing coups, and freedom and democracy for all.

Today’s Democrats are guilty of Blaming Kerry First—leaking self-serving complaints to obscure publications like Newsweek and The New York Times to protect their posteriors if Senator Electable happens to lose.

Now, nobody sings the “I-told-you-Kerry-would-blow-it-against-Bush” chorus louder than I do. But despite Kerry’s myriad flaws, all magnified to fly-frying heat by the president’s political fuglemen—and despite the extraordinary disloyalty of a campaign staff that makes the team Al Gore ’69 had look like a mystic cult—the Democrats’ larger problem goes back farther than this campaign.

The problem, as Public Service Professor of Public Leadership David Gergen told me, is that “with a couple exceptions, Democrats have been outworked in every [presidential] election since about 1977.” And I would add: Democrats have been out-innovated too.

Those “couple exceptions” are obvious: the two Clinton elections, in which a tired and hapless George H.W. Bush, and a tired and hapless Bob Dole, could not help but succumb to the honeysuckle seek-and-destroy tactics, and coherent New Democrat vision, of a political master. But even setting the Lewinsky imbroglio aside, Clinton failed to translate his personal talent into any lasting gains for his party.

Almost as soon as Clinton, fingernails in the floor, got pried off-stage, his party returned to the same condition it endured before nominating The Man From Hope: intellectually flabby, arrogantly self-righteous and disconcertingly passive.

Susan Estrich, manager of Michael Dukakis’s presidential campaign, told me that “[Democrats] seem never to have any idea of what we’re in for. We tell everyone we’ve learned from 1988 or 2000 or whatever but…you have no idea how many times that just isn’t true.”

Just as Jimmy Carter’s campaign failed to learn from his 1976 near-loss and let Ronald Reagan define the terms of the 1980 debate … just as Walter Mondale’s campaign failed to learn from 1980’s vacillation and never projected consistency…just as Michael Dukakis’s campaign failed to learn from 1984’s interest group liberalism and ignored inoculating himself from appearing too far left…just as Al Gore’s campaign failed to learn from 1988 and neglected to respond fast enough, and early enough, to blunt easily-anticipated character attacks…the Kerry campaign, like all the others, ignores history and is, therefore, bound to repeat it.

And to win, the challenge is always greater than correcting what went wrong four years before. This month alone, Bush’s campaign found a new way to combine public and party funding to circumvent the law restricting its spending, forced Kerry (for the hundredth time) to step on his own message and defend a “pattern of flip-flops,” and produced the single most memorable advertisement of the year—footage of Kerry windsurfing off Nantucket, and sailing “whichever way the wind blows” on the issues.

If presidential campaign-obsessed terrorists put a gun to my head, and demanded that I name three electioneering innovations from Kerry-Edwards, let’s just say that you wouldn’t see any more columns from me.

The parties’ innovation gap is not a hunger gap: this year’s Democrats are more determined to win than at any time since 1992. But a partisan passion for the other side’s defeat—no matter how justified—cannot build a winning majority, nor can sharp-elbowed campaign tactics substitute for an understandable policy vision. Democrats must match their intensity against Bush with a passion for fresh and coherent ideas.

The Republicans found themselves in worse straits after the Watergate disaster. Midterm elections in 1974 left the party with 43 fewer House seats (down to a third of the chamber), 6 fewer governorships (down to only 12), and 21 percent fewer state legislators. Robert Teeter, a Detroit pollster hired then by the Republican National Committee to survey the wreckage, was candid in his report: “We are no longer a minority party. We have achieved the status of a minor party.”

The Republicans went to work. It was during this period that they invented direct mail fundraising, following such dramatic financial insolvency that the national headquarters of the president’s party was actually forced to close for a month. And after Jimmy Carter’s narrow victory in 1976 the Republicans—shut out of power in all three branches of national government—kept on rebuilding, and not just tactically.

A group of disillusioned former Democrats (many of them former Marxists), mostly from New York and northern California, spent these “wilderness” years in think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute. Together, they crafted what would become neo-conservatism—an attack on Jimmy’s Carter weakness, but mainly a new conservative agenda to end arms control, rebuild the military, aid anti-Communists and thus (they believed) defeat the Soviet Union. This was the coherent policy vision Ronald Reagan could consistently embrace; this was the program the voters of 1980 understood they would be getting.

At a time when, according to the last NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, only 36 percent of Americans understand what John Kerry would do as president, professional Democrats must regret having spent the last four years doing little more than hating George W. Bush. To win, the party of Franklin Roosevelt and Bill Clinton (and George McGovern and Walter Mondale) must do more than learn from its past, and more than emulate the Republicans’ sharp elbows. Democrats must finally build for the future.

Brian M. Goldsmith is a government concentrator in Lowell House. His column appears on alternate Thursdays.