What's the Matter with the Democrats? Two new books with different takes [View All]

[DeepModem Mom]

WP: What's the Matter With the Democrats?
Two very different takes on how the party can find its way back to power.
Reviewed by John Dickerson
Sunday, October 8, 2006; Page BW04


(Phil Foster)

BUILDING RED AMERICA
The New Conservative Coalition
By Thomas B. Edsall

WHISTLING PAST DIXIE
How Democrats Can Win Without the South
By Thomas F. Schaller

....Thomas B. Edsall and Thomas F. Schaller have both contributed well-documented and thoughtful arguments that might help direct Democrats out of their wilderness. Edsall's accessible Building Red America is not presented as a guidebook but as a tour of the political landscape. Republicans have learned how to manage that landscape and adapt more quickly to changes on it. Democrats, on the other hand, keep losing for a reason: Their party is no longer a populist coalition, but it keeps trying to run as one, and its leaders fail to understand the connection between middle-class voters' economic self-interest and their concerns about cultural values....

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If Edsall portrays Republicans as cynical and manipulative, he paints the Democratic Party as hapless and structurally flawed. The party has not come to terms with eroding public support for the liberal agenda, he argues; it is held captive by special interests such as unions and trial lawyers but hasn't found a way to manipulate its core constituency groups over long stretches of time the way the GOP has. The occasional bursts of populist sentiment from Democratic candidates -- Al Gore's "people against the powerful" theme, or Howard Dean's claim to represent the "Democratic wing of the Democratic Party" -- will continue to fail because the affluent college-educated voters who make up much of the party's base are more interested in socially liberal issues. "At the top, the ascendant wing of the party is not populist," Edsall writes. "It is elitist."

If that zinger doesn't get him an inbox full of angry letters, Edsall's view of the Democratic Party's cultural failings will. He disagrees with those on the left who argue that Republicans have won voters through trickery -- by emphasizing values issues like abortion or prayer in school and then doing nothing to help those voters economically. Instead, he argues that Democrats should forge a link with voters who feel that rapid cultural change undermines the sense of family and community that they believe are preconditions for economic success. "Traditional values of family, neighborhood, church, school, and the workplace are, to millions of voters, 'money in the bank' -- they are what holds people together, providing security against a rainy day."...

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If you can wade through the first part of Whistling Past Dixie , it does pick up steam as Schaller discusses the battleground states and the set of ideas that Democrats should embrace to build a new majority. The analysis of target states is well done, and if you read it before the midterms, you're likely to feel a rush of revelation as you realize how crucial battles in Ohio, Colorado and Nevada are. Schaller's suggestion that Democrats improve their national security credentials by focusing first on homeland security is tightly argued. (This whole set of issues is strangely lacking from the Edsall book.) Schaller also challenges liberal orthodoxy by proposing that Democrats embrace the language of Second Amendment rights to capture the votes of Midwestern and Western gun owners. At least one suggestion -- that Democrats realign their primary and caucus structure to spotlight winnable Western states -- is so prescient the party has done just that by moving Nevada's voting earlier in the process....

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/05/AR2006100501285.html