[Ed. Note: If you haven’t already, read the previous entry before this one.

In the last entry, I said that the Democrats need to figure out what our vision of the country and the future actually is. This is perhaps the biggest problem the Democratic Party has: what do we stand for, and what will we do if we’re elected? What are our core beliefs?

I must confess, I’m a loyal Dem, a self-identified liberal, and something of a political junkie, and even I don’t know what our core beliefs are. I could list a bunch of stuff I believe in and want to see happen, but if you asked another Democrat for the same thing, you’d probably get a different list. This phenomenon occurs because our party is far less monolithic than the other side. The Democratic Party consists of a lot of different sub-groups that all have their own priorities, and part of the liberal mind-set requires that all these ideas and priorities receive equal consideration. The problem is that you can’t sell all your ideas in a thirty-second commercial. You can’t even sell some of them. And what if those ideas contradict each other, or are wildly impractical? What if one candidate — say, Howard Dean — has one vision, but another candidate — John Kerry, say — has a different one? If you have a million different ideas of what your party is about, then what is your party actually about?

As hard as it has been for me to accept, I’ve come to the realization since November 3rd that ideas and priorities are not all equally valuable. It is because we’ve tried to sell them as equal that Dems come across to non-party members as unfocused and disorganized, and, again, it’s costing us votes. If Joe Schmo can’t latch on to a couple of clear, unequivocal, bullet-point ideas that describe your side, you won’t win elections.

In contrast, the Republicans present a unified front and a single message consisting of only three major ideas: lower taxes, smaller government, strong military. That’s it, really — everything else is details, and the message keeps getting repeated, over and over, until it becomes, in essence, common wisdom. (You can argue quite easily that George W. Bush’s administration has failed on points two and three, but they nevertheless stay on message and people believe that’s what they want to do, even if they don’t actually do it.) We need to emulate that approach. Not by adopting Republican-sounding ideas, as some have suggested, but rather by adopting Republican-style tactics. Pick three concepts, maybe four at the most, and make them our priorities. Make them what the party is all about. Make sure all your people stay on message, regardless of what their personal priorities might be. And then hammer that message over and over and over again until people start to listen. It won’t be any easy change for a party that’s always been about hearing everybody out, but I feel certain that this is the way the game has got to be played. Once we regain some Congressional seats and/or the White House, we can pay attention to the other things our various caucuses think are important. But until then, the core message is everything. Or at least it should be.

As for what exactly the message should be, well, I’m not sure what would be best for the party or for the country. This is where we get into arguments about whether we should skew more left or more toward the center. I tend to think that the more we can contrast ourselves with the Republicans, the better, but there are good arguments for going centrist, too. The one thing I do know is that we should pick our position based on what we think is right as opposed to what we think will get us votes. Voters will see through the latter easily.

Personally, I’d like to see the Democrats become what my parents always told me it was, the party of the little guy. The champion of the underdog, the average worker who gets paid by the hour, and is always in danger of exploitation from the more powerful.

Towards that end, I’d like to see the Democrats champion social fairness, specifically workplace fairness. They should begin fighting to protect the things the GOP is either deliberately or incidentally undermining, things like a 40-hour work week, and they ought to declare a policy of zero tolerance for corporate shenanigans. In fact, they ought to become the party of corporate reform. Run constant talking points on the need to do away with corporate subsidies. Make them pay their fair share. Punish companies that export jobs overseas in the name of ever-higher profits by taxing them for the privelege, and close the tax loopholes that allow those profits to go to the Caymans instead of staying here and contributing to the good of us all. And smack down the corrupt CEOs that enrich themselves while screwing over their employees. Instead of a slap on the wrist, guys like Enron’s “Kenny Boy” Lay need to do hard time, to show them what it’s like to work to survive.

Co-opt the crusade of a Republican hero, Teddy Roosevelt, and revive his anti-trust campaigns of the early 20th Century to reduce the stifling media homogeneity represented by companies like Clear Channel and TimeWarner. Insist on breaking those companies up, for the good of the country and all in the name of that favorite Republican buzzword, competition. (The Dems need to co-opt as many Republican notions as they can, just as the GOP has been twisting liberal tails for years.)

None of which will be easy, or even possible while we’re in the minority, of course, but by beginning to talk about these things and running principled bills even if they have no chance of actually being approved, the Dems can begin to build a brand for themselves. That’s what opposition parties are supposed to do: not merely block the other side’s proposals, which earns us the tag of obstructionist and ultimately does little to advance liberal causes, but to show a clear (and hopefully better) alternative to the way things are currently being run. For every piece of legislation George Bush and his people try to run, the Dems should be prepared to offer an alternative proposal — a genuine alternative, not just one with a few cosmetic differences that won’t mean a thing to the average Joe pushing his cart around WalMart.

The point has been made that Democrats lost as much because of inferior marketing as a lack of ideas, and I believe that’s true. But in order to improve the marketing, you need to have a good product to sell, and that’s only going to happen if my party does something like I’ve suggested.

There are a lot of other things Dems can and should do if we’re ever to return to prominence. I think we need to find ourselves a liberal version of Karl Rove, the diabolical but very successful Republican campaign manager. I think we need to work on reclaiming the ideas of patriotism and responsibility from the other side. We need to somehow counter the pervasive attitude that the word “liberal” is a bad thing, although I have no idea of how to do it. We need to find an effective counter to conservative media personalities like Limbaugh and Hannity. And we need to be willing to let go of certain causes that obviously do not appeal to the bulk of Americans — gun control, for instance, something I myself am indifferent to and on which we can’t seem to make any serious headway anyhow. It’s become a liability for the party, and I think we’d be better off abandoning it.

Finally, we need to do a better job of selecting candidates for president; campaigns are won or lost as much on personality as anything, and, with the exception of Clinton, we have a bad habit of nominating stiffs. But none of these suggestions will amount to a hill of beans if we don’t figure out what the hell the party is really about and start communicating that to the public. Bush-hate united us and took us a helluva long way, but not far enough. I’m convinced that genuine ideas could take us farther.

Postscript: the DNC has been meeting in Florida this weekend, deciding the future direction of the Democratic Party even as I typed these last two entries. We’ll see if what they come up with is going to make any difference or if it’s just more of the same…