With the benefit of a the recent election victories in NJ, Virginia and California, I have been inspired to actually start dreaming about winning national elections again and regaining the White House and Congress. However, the bum rap on Democrats has been that we (specifically Kerry) haven't been offering real alternatives, and have just been running as "Bush is bad, we're not Bush." On that basis, I've tried to come up with a substantive platform that can win on a wide basis (and therefore not a fantasy wishlist)......
1) Free (or substantial financial assistance) with college tuition. IMO this is the biggest issue for families, each kid comes with a six-figure college tuition price tag, which keeps going up each year. This will also peel off red-state demographic voters- more married w/ children voted for Bush than Kerry. I think Rahm Emmanuel is putting something together along these lines.
2) Energy policy- meaningful increases in fuel efficiency, coupled with allowing ANWR drilling. I know the ANWR piece of this proposal will not be popular, but getting meaningful fuel efficiency increases will have the much bigger positive enviro impact than allowing limited ANWR drilling. The business lobby has successfully held the line against meaningful increases to fuel efficiency. Throwing ANWR into the mix IMO would fracture that coalition and allow for real opportunity to increase fuel efficiency- a much bigger win.
3) Reframe universal healthcare as something that must be done to keep American industry competitive with the rest of the world. Something like $2K of every GM car cost is attributable to worker health benefits. And you wonder why we're getting beat by Toyota, Honda, etc? They don't have to bake these costs into their auto prices- Japan/Germany/Sweden pay for the workers healthcare. Steve Miller, the guy who's managing Dephi through bankruptcy, recently cozied up to Hillary Clinton on this very point- Delphi (and other US international companies) can't stay competitive in the global market if they have to factor in employee health benefits that global competitors do not. I'd love to see the Wall Street Journal editorial responding to GM, Ford, Motorola, GE, etc demanding universal healthcare so they can still compete globally. Reframing the issue this way would be a huge win.
4) Abortion- whatever happened to Bill Clinton's "safe, legal and rare?" Dig that line back out of the closet and be clear that while abortion is a vital and unquestionable right, everyone is better off if fewer abortions are occurring. Point to the record of eight years of declining abortions under Clinton as evidence that the Democrats' approach- focusing on educational and prevention to at risk groups (teens, low income, etc)- is the best way to ensure a reduction in the number of women getting abortions.
5) Social Security- its not clear at this point that there is a meaningful SS shortfall, accuse any attempted Republican fixes (PSAs or otherwise) as overreaches based on subjective and uncertain projections many years into the future. It makes no sense to radically reconfigure the most successful social program in history when we don't know if the change would really solve an alleged problem, or if there is even a problem in the first place.
6) Tax policy- It would be a mistake to allow the entire Bush tax cut package to expire. A number of the tax cuts do (at least nominally) help the middle class- marriage penalty fix, raising the child credit. I wouldn't mess with the dividend/capital gains tax cuts either- too many people have stock market investments with 401ks, and any statements about raising these taxes back to previous levels leaves us exposed to the scare tactic that Dems will hike taxes and hurt the economy. I would focus on repealing the tax rate on the top bracket back to 39.5%. These people can afford it, and the people in that bracket whose votes we would "lose," probably wouldn't have voted for us anyway. As far as the estate tax, it will be easy to say that we want to "fix" it by leaving a cap of somewhere between $2MM-$5MM taxed at a rate of between 15%-30%. This would be lower than the pre-Bush tax level, but not so ridiculous as to abolish it all togher.
7) Iraq- the call for "exit timelines" opens us to Repub. charges of cut and run, and excessive focus on Gitmo/torture (as appalling as it has been) leaves us open to the Dick Durbin slam. I'd do two related things: 1) Slam the hell out of Bush for gross mismanagement of the reconstruction of Iraq- after 3 years, how is it still possible they have less electricity than pre-Saddam, how is it possible- the country is producing less oil, how is it possible that there is apparently only one battalion of Iraqi troops that has been trained to the point that they can operate on their own? After 3 friggin years? This brings me to 2) call for publicly stated and documented timelines for training the necessary number of troops to provide adequate security for Iraq, timelines for rebuilding the electrical infrastructure to the level necessary for them to have a functioning state, timelines for whatever else is necessary for us to accomplish so we can get the hell out of there. By framing it as timelines for accomplishing critical tasks, we get a "backdoor" commitment to an exit date (the length of time it takes to do these things) but we reframe the debate from "we want out by X date" which gets spun to "cut and run," to instead putting the onus back on the Repubs- how come no one is committing to doing what needs to be done to get us out of there and why has so little been accomplished thus far.
8) Winning the overall struggle against Islamic terrorists- this remains a huge issue for many voters who are otherwise appalled with Bush's performance. Our problem has been that we haven't had anything coherent to say about the bigger picture struggle beyond Iraq. The key to defusing the root cause of terrorism is to undermine the repressive societies that spawn them. The way to accomplish this is not just by spreading freedom, but specifically by promoting WOMEN'S freedom. If Women could gain greater freedom in Moslem countries, it would have the following effect: 1) Women have consistently voted for and favored policies that pursued peace and opposed war. Greater enfranchisement of women will yield governments that are less warlike and societies that are less hostile. 2) Greater reproductive freedom for women (primarily birth control) will reduce the overpopulation cycle that feeds the terror pipeline in many Moslem societies. Also, standards of living and GDP will rise if women are allowed to fully participate in the economy. 3) The men who become terrorists seem to have major sexual repression issues. Imagine living in a society where you only interact with women cloaked head-to-toe in a burlap sack, and you are barely allowed to talk to them. If the women could lose the burquas and introduce a little bit of sexual liberation into these societies, the men wouldn't run around so frustrated and pissed off all the time. On top of these reasons, we should promote women's rights in these countries because it's the right thing to do. The sub-human status that women have in these societies is sickening- ask yourself, would you rather be a black man in apartheid South Africa or a women in Saudi Arabia today. Second class citizens with little-to-no rights in either case, yet boycotting Saudi Arabia is unthinkable.
At any rate that's my take on how to run a successful national campaign and accomplish important and worthwhile goals. I know some of these may look like too much splitting the baby- touching ANWR, the roundabout way to push for Iraq exit- but on the assumption that there have to be some compromises and we need to have policies with a better spin than the Repubs, these proposals would win: responsible, not-hostile to business, financially beneficial to the middle class and solid on War/Terror issues.