As 2006 looms around, scandals ranging from Abramoffgate to Coingate and now Plame/Rovegate have painted a big fat bullseye on the GOP. Yet simply crying foul isn't going to cut it in the upcoming elections. Democrats can prove that Tom Delay is a child molester, but until they can show that a Democrat-controlled House will actually be different, they're going to enjoy only limited success on this front.
More on the flip.
It wasn't so long ago after all that the GOP was demanding the resignation of Clinton on the basis of ethics charges. And before that, Newt Gingrich was campaigning against a Democratic House on the basis that it was filled with a bunch of crass, unethical, and out of touch liberals. He managed to take down Democratic House Speaker
Jim Wright because of unethical behavior. And in case anyone doubted his credentials, Newt even pressed for the expulsion of a Representative from his own party after a
sex scandal.
Given that line of events, I doubt the public's going to believe that a Democratic member of Congress is going to be different than a Republican one just because of a party change. Instead, what the Dems need to do is come up a with an actual agenda for reform. Just as the Progressives of old pushed for the direct election of senators, the referendum, and the recall, Dems today need to come up with their own ideas to convince the public that they're serious about reform.
The obvious one that's bandied about on Kos every once and a while is black box voting. That's been discussed plenty already, and if someone else wants to add on to that, I'm sure they're more of an expert on it than me.
Campaign finance reform is always an issue of course--although it'd be nice if the laws weren't being used to go over bloggers.
There are also a host of other ideas floating about. Former Oklahoma Congressman Brad Carson suggested that we should move Congress out of DC and have everyone vote via teleconferencing, if for no other reason than to bring our representatives closer to their constituents and to piss off lobbyists that now have to fly all over the country to buy votes. A national referendum might be an interesting idea. Some ideas on cutting pork. How about the relationship between the media and big corporations?
Obviously some of these ideas are a little more workable than others. As a Californian, I can tell you firsthand that initiatives and recalls can go a little haywire at times, but that's not to say that they can't be fixed. And if Dems really want to run on a GOP-gate campaign, we're going to have to prove that we really want a change.
