The Democrats' biggest problem is that they don't have a viable means to spotlight or forge a party consensus behind these ideas. Unless they can recruit Republican defectors, Democrats can't force the serious legislative debate on their initiatives that would attract news coverage and public attention.
Democrats simply have failed to woo enough Republicans to create such opportunities. That's meant congressional Democrats have been able to express their beliefs almost solely by blocking Bush proposals. As a party, they have had few opportunities to explain what they are for, only what they are against.
That pattern exposes Democrats to substantive and political risks. The substantive danger is that Republicans will push through policies that undermine core Democratic beliefs (like preserving Social Security as a universal safety net) or weaken Democratic constituencies (like trial lawyers squeezed by GOP changes to tort law), or both.
The most immediate political danger is that Republicans can portray Democrats as obstructionists, a dangerous label in the "red" Bush states. The larger problem is that the Democrats' inability to sustain attention on their ideas encourages a public sense that they have none. In the latest poll from Democracy Corps, a project of leading Democratic consultants, Republicans held a crushing 30-percentage-point advantage when voters were asked which party knows what it stands for.
That's one measure of the Republican advantage in defining the debate. Yet that advantage creates its own risks. Politicians are usually most successful when they can contrast themselves with an opponent. President Clinton made himself look more centrist by effectively portraying congressional Republicans as extreme. Bush appeared stronger by defining Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) as indecisive in last year's White House race.
The danger for the GOP is that the political dialogue is being structured less as a choice between Republican and Democratic ideas than as a referendum on Republican ideas alone. And some of those aren't faring so well.
An overwhelming majority of Americans opposed congressional and White House intervention in the Schiavo case; Bush's Social Security plan is lagging in the polls too. And it's difficult to imagine that many Americans outside the GOP's conservative base applauded House Majority Leader Tom DeLay's (R-Texas) fevered rant against the courts last week following Schiavo's death.
Republican strategists like Stephen Moore, president of the Free Enterprise Fund, believe that even with these near-term reversals, the central focus on Republican ideas will benefit the party over time. "In the long term, this is the way you win in politics," he says. "You plant the seeds of your ideas, and you effectively blockade the other side from advancing any of its ideas."
Conversely, Democratic thinkers like veteran pollster Stanley B. Greenberg believe Republicans are planting the seeds for a voter backlash by overreaching. "Democrats have an opportunity in pushing off this agenda, which may seem extreme to many," he says.
Only future elections will settle that debate. But both analyses point to the same conclusion: The fate of both parties hangs mostly on the public's verdict about Republican ideas.
