“Advice” for the Democrats

In Saturday’s New York Times Nicholas Kristof offers his “advice” for the Democratic party in the wake of the re-election of George W. Bush. His suggestion appears to be that the Democrats should become carbon-copies of the Republicans, and then they’ll do better.

His column begins by saying that the Democrats should follow the model of the British Labour party.

Then Tony Blair and another M.P., Gordon Brown, dragged the party away from socialism, unions, nuclear disarmament and anti-Americanism. Together they created "New Labor," which aimed for the center and aggressively courted Middle Britain instead of trying to scare it.

Not that I think the Democrats are particularly in favour of those issues (they’re anything but socialist), however the implication that “unions” and “nuclear disarmament” are outright negative things is troubling to me, at least. I’d argue many Democrats likely share my thoughts, even if they don’t gravitate towards the left quite like I do.

But the risk is that the party will blame others for its failures - or, worse, blame the American people for their stupidity (as London's Daily Mirror screamed in a Page 1 headline this week: "How can 59,054,087 people be so DUMB?").

Well, perhaps the Democrats do need to reconsider their election strategy. I don’t have enough details, and this could warrant its own article, but the way they conducted their campaign and their policy emphasis should be analysed, if not changed. I’d argue they also weren’t aggressive enough in attacking Bush for many of his blunders. For the most part they played nice and emphasised how allies had not been brought into Iraq, as opposed to talking about the intelligent failures and the incompetence in handling the rebuilding of Iraq. They also could have formulated a cogent policy on how their rebuilding plan would differ from Bush’s, but I’m not sure that many voters who voted for Bush would have been swayed by that.

However, Kristof’s dismissal of the fact that the Dems can blame others for the lost campaign is wrong. The generally right-wing media, especially Fox News, had a lot to do with portraying Kerry as an elitist, flip-flopping, phoney Massachusetts liberal; even while mentioning Bush’s failures in Iraq. Apparently for only the third time in history, more newspapers endorsed the Democratic candidate over the Republican; however the industry’s simultaneous under-cutting of his positions and the right-wing element on TV and radio did a great deal of harm to Kerry’s campaign. So did the Swift Boat Veterans. Nobody can really say what amount of the vote they cost Kerry, but their lies certainly cost him something. There were many other factors that contributed to the Democrats defeat and its legitimate to direct part of the “blame” can certainly go towards them. The Democrats should be aware that the same sort of thing will likely be present next election, as well.

Later Kristof writes:

"The first thing we have to do is shake the image of us as the obstructionist party," notes Senator Ben Nelson of Nebraska, who manages to thrive as a Democrat in the red sea. He says Democrats must show a willingness to compromise, to get things done, to defer to local sensibilities. "We have to show the American people," he says, "that Democrats aren't going to take away your guns, aren't going to take away your flags."

That’s interesting advice from Mr. Nelson, who “thrives as a Democrat in the red sea.” However, do you want to know why he thrives in the red sea? Because, for all intents and purposes, he’s a Republican. This site has scientifically ranked the 108^th Senate session to measure voting patterns. Now, I don’t know enough about math or statistics to verify that the procedure is mathematically accurate, but the description certainly seems to verify the claim that it is a pure statistical calculation and is not ideologically driven.

The results of this ranking show give Ben Nelson a score of 48, making him the most conservative Democratic Senator, aside from Zell Miller. The rankings show basically a clean split between the two parties, with Zell Miller being the only exception as he’s about 1/4^th of the way into the Republican list. However, Nelson is the most Republican Democrat, and is quite distant from moderate Democrats like Joe Lieberman (D-CT) or Chuck Schumer (D-NY).

I sincerely doubt that most Democrats view Nelson’s policies as particularly Democratic, or agree with them personally. If the Democrats want to turn into the Republican party-lite (or further into the Republican-party lite for the most part), that’s their choice. If that happened I think you would see independents like Ralph Nader turn into even more of a force than he was in the 2000 election, and a lot of Democrats would abandon the party if they started following the “Nelson Doctrine.”

If the “liberal” New York Times, Nicolas Kristof and Ben Nelson are going to offer advice like this, the Democrats shouldn’t listen. It brings to mind the old saying, “With friends like these, who needs enemies?”

(Note: I have included the quotation marks around the word liberal in front of the New York Times because that’s how the newspaper has been portrayed in the media and to me by a friend when we were discussing the political spectrum of various media outlets. I have not read it enough to say one way or another, but this op/ed piece is certainly not very liberal. All in all, I’ve not formed a definitive position one way or the other yet.)