DLC MEMO
TO: Future Presidents of America
FROM: Al From and Bruce Reed
SUBJECT: The Vision Gap
George W. Bush, who was supposed to learn from his father’s mistakes, has been condemned instead to repeat them. Like his father, President Bush has remarkably little to show for his time in office – except a bigger deficit, a squandered international triumph, divisive politics, huge job losses, and a broken political system. For all his efforts to escape the curse of not grasping “the vision thing,” Bush the son goes into the next election without a working vision of how to solve the country’s nagging problems, win the war on terror abroad, or make the economy prosper at home.
That, in part, is why we’re increasingly optimistic that you will win in 2004. Bushism has failed, and Democrats have a proven formula to solve the country’s problems.
Nevertheless, for all Bush’s troubles, you must still overcome the Democrats’ burden: showing Americans that you will stand up for their values and economic interests and can be trusted to keep America safe in a dangerous world. The single most dangerous Democratic delusion today is pretending that voters’ doubts about us have gone away for good.
Most Americans don’t think Democrats have a vision for the country. In the last Gallup poll before the 2002 mid-term election, 60 percent of the electorate thought the Republicans had a vision, and only 30 percent thought Democrats had one. For a Democratic party whose mission is to solve problems, that’s a shocking indictment.
What both parties too often forget is that the only way to succeed in politics over the long haul is to embrace a modern, coherent political philosophy that works. Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson had Progressivism, Franklin Roosevelt the New Deal, Bill Clinton “Opportunity, Responsibility, and Community.” In the end, Americans will only think we have a vision if we actually offer them one.
Here are three things Democrats can do to close the Democrats’ vision gap.
1. Anger Management. So far, the primary race has been a shouting match to prove who can’t stand Bush the most. Democrats are telling themselves that the party should focus on turning out voters who already agree with them, not on persuading the fence sitters who still need convincing. Every election is, in part, a referendum on the incumbent. But although Americans may have growing doubts about the president’s performance, not enough are ready to join Democrats in blaming Bush for all the country’s problems.
2. Make Change Your Friend. Elections aren’t about the present; they’re about the future. Why should Americans think Democrats have a vision for the future when so many Democrats seem so afraid of it?
For example, we know that trade is a tough issue, especially in an economic downturn. A candidate needs to balance the clear economic need to find more markets with the clear economic hardships of people in sectors where the greater good is no current consolation. But there’s no excuse for you to hightail and run from the global economy by pretending that you can somehow reopen old trade agreements or get other nations to adopt our standards. You can’t say you’ll restore the economic optimism and growth of the 1990s when you’re walking away from one of the engines – expanded trade – that drove the 1990s expansion.
Likewise, we know you’re under pressure from some quarters to use Bush’s failure to fund the ‘No Child Left Behind’ legislation as an excuse to abandon education reform altogether. That would be a tragic mistake. Making standards and accountability a national priority is the right thing to do, and was championed by Democrats long before Bush’s political handlers stumbled on it as a winning campaign issue. Bush’s failure to put up the money shows where his heart really is, and is a reason to give up on this administration, not to give up on our moral crusade to make sure every American has a first-rate public education.
It’s not an accident that Americans almost always elect optimistic presidents. Keep that in mind as you make the rounds from one aggrieved interest group to another. The party regulars you meet on the campaign trail may not like change. But most Americans, and most rank-and-file Democrats, are born optimists. They believe America can do better, and they want a president who can give them more hope, not more fear.
3. May the Best Plan Win. So far, as primary contestants are wont to do, you’ve spent a lot of time trying to prove that, unlike your opponents, you’re a ‘real Democrat.’ That’s fine for the party faithful. But the rest of America wants you to answer a different question: What is a Democrat, anyway? And more important, what will America be like under a Democratic president?
Only you can answer that question. Make no mistake: A vision is not an attitude, a summary of grievances with the incumbent, or a collection of positions taken in response to the demands of interest groups. Nor is it where you stand on a particular issue – or the message you repeat 20 times a day to placate your campaign consultants. A vision is a road map of where you’ll take the country and the guiding principles by which you’ll run it.
We can’t speak for you, but here’s our vision for America: we believe the purpose of America is to give everyone the chance to get ahead, not to narrow the gates of privilege. We believe in expanding opportunity, not bureaucracy, and in economic growth, not redistribution. From education to healthcare to national service, we should offer every citizen a new bargain of more opportunity in return for more responsibility, not a return to the extremes of something for nothing, on the one hand, or every man for himself, on the other. We believe in a strong American role in the world that earns respect, not enmity. Above all, we believe in putting our economy in line with our values, so that the middle class and working poor have the chance to prosper, not sacrifice their dreams so that America can become the world’s largest tax shelter for the rich.
For example, on national security, some in our party believe that all we have to say on Iraq is ‘I told you so.’ To the contrary, Democrats must show their commitment to staying the course and winning in Iraq. We believe, as Tony Blair has said, that the gravest threat to our future is weapons of mass destruction in the hands of terrorists or rogue states. Whatever anyone thought before, this isn’t Bush’s war now, it’s America’s war, and the free world’s war on terror.
For two years, pundits told us that Bush couldn’t lose. Today it’s clear that he can. But Bush could still survive if we let him put us back in that old liberal stereotype and fail to offer a compelling new vision of our own. If we tell the American people exactly what we’ll do for the country, and what we’ll ask of them, the 2004 election is no longer Bush’s to lose. It’s Democrats’ to win.