DLC issues a manifesto: What We Stand For [View All]

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Don't know if this has been posted here yet. But the full article talks about how Democrats will never win if all we try to do is turn out the base. Etc. Etc.

http://www.ndol.org/ndol_ci.cfm?kaid=127&subid=171&contentid=253206


Closing the national security gap. The most important challenge for Democrats, and the country, is security. It cost Democrats the Senate in 2002. It cost us the White House in 2004. In the next decade, it will determine whether we can recapture the glory days of FDR, JFK, and Clinton, or whether we will go the way of the Whigs and the Know-Nothings. Fair or not, too many voters doubted our party's toughness and resolve in the face of new dangers. Until we recapture the muscular, progressive internationalism of Roosevelt, Truman, and Kennedy -- and convince voters that national security is our first priority, not just something we talk about until we can change the subject to more comfortable domestic issues -- we'll have a hard time convincing them to return us to national power.

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Building an Opportunity Society. At our strongest, Democrats have been the party of the middle class and those who aspire to join its ranks. Opportunity is the value that unites our party like no other. Moreover, we are the party of opportunity in a decade that is likely to produce the greatest concentration of wealth since the 1920s and the greatest erosion of middle-class opportunity since the 1970s.

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Standing up for responsibility. We can't let the Republicans set the moral and cultural debate in election after election. If we do, they'll keep using wedge issues to help them, hurt us, and divide the country. It doesn't have to be that way, and we don't need to compromise our values to change it. We can win the cultural debate, but only if we offer a values and cultural agenda of our own.

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Reforming a broken system to bring democracy back. In order to restore these great values, Democrats need to remember our calling as the true party of reform. Last time we looked, the Republicans controlled the White House, both houses of Congress, a majority of governorships, and a plurality of state legislatures. Yet the Republicans are the party of fiscal profligacy, special interests, and K Street corruption. Congressional leaders rewrite their rules faster than the old Soviet Union. In a country built on a free press, the administration has admitted putting columnists on the take.