The Dems Of Doom

From EJ Dionne, Jr. in today's WaPo - The Democrats' Real Problem.

The stories about the Democrats are by no means flatly false -- Democrats don't yet have a fully worked-out alternative program -- but they are based on a false premise, and they underestimate what I'll call the positive power of negative thinking.

With all due respect to Mr. Dionne, what utter tripe. Clearly his perspective is a negative one and what Dionne and the Democrats simply can't understand is that their basic world view remains so consistently entrenched in negativity, not only do people not want to hear it - they don't buy it, no matter the lofty rhetoric they might hope to spin.

Dionne displays that negativity over and over, again in his editorial.

For example, moderates and liberals alike are mystified by budget policies saddling our kids with debt tomorrow to pay for tax cuts for the wealthy today. Moderating this radical fiscal approach is something the voters clearly could accomplish with their ballots this fall.

But Democrats have no good answer to Iraq. True. And neither does Bush, who started the war and should be held accountable for where we are now.

The philosophical man who owns our neighborhood Chinese restaurant recently shared with me a brilliant aphorism to describe how to build a good business. "You have to do the right thing," he said, "and you have to do the thing right."

Tax cuts for the wealthy ... the national debt ... on and on it goes. But the Democrats are forgetting that the baby boomers, still the largest voting block, lived through the Reagan era when the Dems embraced precisely the same rhetoric. Yet what followed was not doom and gloom, but the most significant economic boom in decades, a great deal of it fostered by the same Reagan tax cutting policy the Dems can't resist attacking. And all the debt we heard about back then was paid off through growth, not higher taxes.

In their view, the bigger the tax revenue, the larger the government. And large government is central to today's Democrat Party view.

The war is lost ... the war was bungled ... and what about that hurricane? That's all the Democrats can possibly have to say because there is absolutely no way to convince a majority of this country that the Democrats, or the Libertarians, communists, or whatever else have you, could do that much of a better job.

And that's because your average guy or gal on the street has a thing or two the lofty minded, elitist strategists for the Democrat Party don't possess - a world of practical experience, and at least a modicum of common sense.

It's fine for Dionne to assert that Democrats need to turn their negative judgments into positive approaches read spin. But it will never resonate with the American people to the extent it needs to for them to win.

At its heart, current Democrat thinking is so unnecessarily negative, they can dress it up any way they wish, in the final analysis, they'll still come up some number of votes short of a fun night out on the town when they take it out. Only Bill Clinton had the ability and style to overcome that. And even he needed Ross Perot to do it.

Comments

[Jim]

Excellent observations! Dan

[sigmund, carl and alfred]

I'd go one step further. The dems insist on having a alternative (read: response) to GOP ideas.

There is no original thinking (remember Kennedy's moon challenge or lBJ's War on Poverty?) whatsoever. While Americans certainly respond to challenge and new ideas, they are also aware of having to deal with reality. As long as kids can't read and and social security are issues that are ignored or avoided, the dems remain on the defensive.