For the past 12 years, the DLC's basic prescription for what Democrats need to do to find the road back to power has been the same: According to the DLC, Democrats need to do what Bill Clinton did in 1992 by standing up to the party's base and running as a "New Democrats." But what worked in 1992 is not what will work in 2006 or 2008. It's not 1992 anymore and the DLC strategy has long been rendered obsolete.
Bill Clinton had a very difficult challenge in 1992. Without having the luxury of simply promising to reform Washington and throw all of the rascals out (since most of the rascals in Congress were Democrats), Clinton had to differentiate himself from Congressional Democrats and convince voters that he could reform the Presidency in a way that Republicans could not.
It was a very difficult trick, and Clinton (and the DLC) figured out the solution by running as a "New Democrat," which was simply a code for "I'm not like the stale Democratic Congress and I'm not like the stale Republican President either." It worked in 1992, but success lasted only two short years. The 1994 Congressional takeover was the inevitable endgame of Clinton's successful argument that the establishment as a whole had become stale and that people needed something new.
In the years since 1994, divided government has caused Democrats and Republicans to face a dilemma similar to Clinton's. Clinton in 1996, Bush and Gore in 2000 and even Bush and Kerry this year, all confronted a situation where no candidate could really claim to be from the clear majority party, and thus each faced complexities when calling for unadulterated "change."
But today, the playing field for Democrats has shifted dramatically. The Republicans now unambiguously control every single lever of power in Washington. They are the party of the Washington D.C. establishment. They are the party of the lobbyists and speical interests. The Democratic candidates in 2006 and the Presidential candidates in 2008 will have a freedom that Bill Clinton (and Al Gore, George Bush and John Kerry for that matter) never truly had: They can run as the unadulterated "change" candidates, demanding reform in Washington and demanding a new way of doing business.
In adopting this path, Democrats can focus their fire solely on Republicans in a way that was impossible before. The Democratic message is now free to be: "The Republican establishment in Washington is the captive of the special interests, and is running a government of, for and by the special interests. The only policy they stand for -- both here and abroad -- is enriching their fat-cat corporate friends at the expense of everyday people. We need to clean up Washington with real corporate reform, election reform, energy reform, open government reform, etc."
That is precisely what Democrats can and must do. The Republicans did not seize power by turning their guns on themselves. Suggestions like that, in fact, seem laughable when you look at how Republicans play politics. Many DLC'ers have suggested that the Democrats need to reign in the Michael Moore/Hollywood wing of the party because of their sometimes boisterous tactics. But look at what the Republicans did this year with the Swift Boat Liars, who ran an ugly concentrated smear campaign of slander and lies against a bona fide war hero.
Did George Bush move swiftly to distinguish himself from these pathetic crackpots? No way. Did Republicans seem frightened that such a campaign would isolate them from the mainsteam America? No way. Republicans have seized power by sticking together, and through a constant strategy of portraying the Democrats as the corrupt insider party, beholden to special interests, and themselves as the party of reform. That's how insurgent parties always win.
But 2004 ended the Republican insurgency. They're the insiders now; we're the outsiders. Democrats need to repeatedly label Republicans as stale, corrupt establishment party, and contrast Democrats, ALL DEMOCRATS, as the only real reformers. The DLC strategy was nice when things were more muddled, and Democrats could not completely adopt the banner of reform because we controlled too much of the government and were far too intertwined with the establishment. But things are different now. The DLC needs to get with the program. It's not 1992 anymore.