I've been thinking about two key wedges the Democrats have to undo to move back into majority
- Being pro-growth
- Tiptoeing around "patronization by redistribution"
1) We must be legitimately sensitive to the needs of business. It is not enough upon adding some new layer of environmental or labor regulation to say "the CEO's will work it out, and besides they make enough as it is." Good regulation provides opportunities as well as burdens. We need to be diligent in balancing the burdens and opportunities, as well as going out and pitching the opportunities to the decision-makers who are going to have to make money with them. HIPAA and Sarbanes-Oxley were met not with howls of disagreement about government interference but with muted recognition of the need and the opportunities. And information security companies, for example, are
now in great shape thanks to these two bills - these are the people we need on our team when we propose new government activites. So if we're going to pass laws obligating people to build, drive, manufacture green, we must spell out the opportunities and build the business constituency.
To me this is about building networks and think-tanks of futurist, business-oriented Democrats. How do the needs of business and society overlap? When they are opposed, how do we resolve them equitably and fairly. The nascent "social mission business" movement is a step in the direction of answering these questions. We need to give it institutional and financial support.
2) One of the results of half a century of efforts to widen the middle class in this country was that people no longer see themselves entirely as "the common man" or "the little guy", and they have certainly never wanted anyone's pity. Dignity is worth more than any handout from anybody. The GOP has very effectively exploited this ambivalence - think of terms like "limousine liberal" - and combined it with the rural-urban culture clashes to imply that libertine citified do-gooder liberals look down on virtuous rural people who don't get into that weird stuff that goes on in cities. And frankly, this is always a danger for people who propose (re)distribution of material benefits: are you just helping "those poor downtrodden souls" just to look down on them? Are you picking your own pet winners? Means-testing Social Security is a great example of this - yes, it might help the system redistribute more money, but it could very well be perceived as yet another government-issue stamp of poverty.
Of the answers I've heard for #2, I think the best is the Land of Opportunity theme. We can aggressively promote the government as the defender of opportunity without always going back to redistribution or big government. Solving the healthcare crisis may involve the government paying something to provide health care to low-income people, but it also involves obligating people to a) do their duty by paying into the system when they're young, and b) living within their means by accepting that people - even loved ones - die, and saying that people who cannot buy heroic measures out of pocket cannot have them.
And we can apply principles of institutional governance learned from, yes, corporations, to make the government institutions we do need as lean and responsive as possible.
Onward, donkeys!