Without Power, Democrats Lose Their Direction

Has anyone canvassed Dr. Phil? Or checked in with Dear Abby?

They may be the last two self-help gurus who haven't weighed in recently with guidance for the nation's oldest political party.

For Democrats, apparently, this is advice month.

Got an idea for reconnecting with the suburbs, cracking the "red" states, building a "new progressive infrastructure," rethinking political communication in the "post-broadcast era," redefining the Democratic "brand" or taking the fight to the Republicans in all corners of the country?

Get in line.

Last weekend, Democrats got an earful from the bloggers and Internet activists who gathered in Las Vegas for the first convention sponsored by the popular Daily Kos website.

The activists, journalists and elected officials who convened with Kos had barely caught a quick nap after the red-eye when the Campaign for America's Future summoned them to a Washington hotel for three days of noodling about how to promote "the common good" and "take back America."

More of the same, and then some, is due this week.

On Monday, three veteran Democratic thinkers -- pollster Stanley B. Greenberg, public opinion analyst Ruy Teixeira and Bill Galston, a political philosopher who sometimes masquerades as a policy wonk -- are launching a new online journal, the Democratic Strategist. On Tuesday, Andrei Cherny and Kenneth S. Baer, two brainy younger Democrats, are rolling out an old-fashioned, dead-tree quarterly, Democracy: A Journal of Ideas. It seems no one wanted to compete with reruns of "Lost" on Wednesday. But on Thursday, the Democrats gather again when the centrist group formerly known as the New Democrat Network -- which has reinvented itself as an eclectic, future-oriented bridge between the party's left and center known as NDN -- holds a two-day conference modestly titled: "What Comes Next: A New Politics for America."

Far be it for a newspaper columnist to discourage people from offering unsolicited instruction. But this ocean of advice for Democrats may be as much a symptom of the party's problems as a cure for them.

Many of the people involved in all of this -- and the Democratic therapy sessions unfolding daily in liberal magazines and on websites across the Internet -- are very smart. And much of the work they are producing is thoughtful and innovative.