Party Naked

From IBD:

Posted 3/7/2006
Politics: Democrats can't take advantage of Republican missteps because they don't have an agenda of their own — or at least one that can win many votes this fall.

Why are congressional Democratic leaders continually delaying the unveiling of their legislative manifesto? Originally, the document's deadline was November. Then it was delayed to January. Since then it's been postponed twice. Now here it is March, and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi of California says it will have to wait at least a couple of more weeks.

When Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada appeared before the Democratic Governors Association last month making separate presentations, the half-dozen issues they had ostensibly agreed to focus on were embarrassingly different from one another. Oregon Democratic Gov. Ted Kulongoski told The Washington Post: "I don't think we have a message."

A big reason for the delay in releasing a manifesto is that New York Sen. Chuck Schumer, chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, and Illinois Rep. Rahm Emanuel, a former Bill Clinton aide who heads the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, have been urging Pelosi and Reid to hold off.

Schumer doesn't want it published until the summer.

It tells you something when the two people in charge of getting Democrats elected to Congress want candidates to avoid for as long as possible saying what they'll do after they take office. "We are going to do well if for no other reason than we are not them," Sen. Evan Bayh, D-Ind., told Bloomberg News this week.

But can going negative by itself secure victory? That's not the tack Republicans took in 1994, when they took over the Senate and gained 54 House seats, ending four straight decades of Democratic rule. Republicans that year successfully nationalized congressional elections with Newt Gingrich's Contract With America, a blueprint for what a GOP Congress would be like.

What happened in 1994 is clear. Hillary Clinton had just tried to socialize America's health care system — one-seventh of the national economy — via a secret task force. Gingrich coupled protection from the Clintons' plans to expand government economic power with a positive agenda that included a per-child tax credit, a capital gains tax cut, expanded IRAs, elimination of the tax code's marriage penalty and a balanced budget amendment.

But what would a Democrat "contract" amount to in 2006 beyond a giant "No!" followed by a fine-print agenda that includes higher taxes, gay marriage and an Iraq pullout?

With the Abramoff scandal, the Katrina calamity, the Scooter Libby indictment and unease about Iraq, Democrats might be seen as sure bets for winning big in November. But it doesn't say much for them that the only way they win is by hiding their true agenda from the American people.