Courage, Unions And Democrats’ Identity Problem - Salon

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How to trounce Scott Walker: Courage, unions and Democrats’ identity problem
Party leaders trying to understand how they got trounced this year should take a look at Wisconsin. Here's why
Elias Isquith - Salon
Thursday, Nov 20, 2014 05:30 AM PST

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I don’t know if the seven stages a partisan goes through after her side gets walloped in an election are quite the same as the ones associated with grief, but after progressing from despair over their party’s failures in the midterms to rage over the GOP’s success, it seems to me that many Democrats now just want to know what comes next.

Hillary Clinton’s pending candidacy — which will reportedly have its big unveiling in January — has an anticlimactic, even perfunctory feel to it. Granted, Clinton is popular with the Democratic rank-and-file. But unless she has changed dramatically during her time out of public office, there isn’t much reason to think a Clinton presidential campaign in 2016 will be any bolder or more visionary than it was in 2008. Early signs, in fact, suggest the opposite.

That said, I don’t think Clinton is much to blame for the tepid enthusiasm her crypto-campaign has inspired among the Democratic intelligentsia. She’s an easy target, with her corporate leanings, her temperamental conservatism and her lengthy history, but the reasons Clinton 2016 feels so uninspiring transcend the former secretary of state and in truth apply to the entire Democratic Party. Yeah, it may be hard to say what the next Clinton run will be about — but is there a single viable candidate out there that’d make a difference?

With apologies to Tommy Carcetti, I’d say no. Not because the Dems’ roster is especially thin currently (though it is) but because the party right now doesn’t really stand for anything. Put differently, it has no real identity. One moment it’s the party that takes on Wall Street; the next moment, it isn’t. One moment it’s the party that’ll save the world from climate change; the next moment, not so much. Sometimes it’s the party that promises to fight economic inequality head-on; most of the time, it’s content to leave the basic setup of our economy intact. It’s hard to say what the Democratic Party stands for, really — except being in opposition to Republicans.

To be fair, the “Not-Republican” strategy worked all right in ’06 and ’08, when being seen as the opposite of George W. Bush was often enough. But as a recent report from the Huffington Post’s Sam Stein finds, the Democratic Party’s leadership is starting to worry whether that’s still true, especially now that Barack Obama’s electoral career is over. After repeatedly pointing to demographics and the six-year itch to explain their recent thwacking, Stein says Democrats are now realizing that “the party lacks other critical elements” of success, like “a message that addresses the top concerns of voters and effective messengers to share it.” In other words, an identity.

Yet for all the hand-wringing, most of the sources in Stein’s piece seem more interested in blaming the president for the midterm failure than engaging in any actual introspection. There’s a lot of insider-y whining about the DNC, and the typically D.C. myopia of thinking stories about process matter to voters. (If I never again hear another pundit or anonymous Dem authority vaguely criticize the White House’s response to Ebola, which was completely appropriate, it will be too soon.) At no point do any of these professional Democrats mention flatlining wages, the delay of immigration-related executive orders or worries over being sucked back into the Iraq quagmire. Policy might as well not exist.

What may be the most frustrating thing about this desperate flailing for a more fine-tuned message, though, is the fact that it’s so very unnecessary. The Democrats may not have much of an identity right now, but that’s not because this or that wing of the party’s political infrastructure dropped the ball, or because President Obama is so fond of golf, or any other Beltway nonsense. On the contrary, the Democratic Party’s increasing opacity is the result of their having an identity but deciding not to use it. Students of the last 50 or so years of American political history can probably guess where I’m going with this. It’s one single, simple word: unions.

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More: http://www.salon.com/2014/11/20/how_to_trounce_scott_walker_courage_unions_and_democrats_identity_problem/