The latest Atlantic includes Molly Ball’s recommendation that the Republican Party learn a lesson from Democrats’ efforts to remake their party from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s. While Ball’s observations generally prove interesting, if not convincing, one passage stuck out from the rest:
The bottom line of such defenses—that the party did not need fundamental change—echoes today’s future-of-the-GOP argument. The DLC took on such excuses in the time-honored medium of intellectual insurgencies: in 1989, following Michael Dukakis’s defeat by George H. W. Bush, it issued a manifesto. “The Politics of Evasion,” a 20-page paper by Galston (the former Mondale staffer) and Elaine Kamarck (a political scientist and longtime Democratic operative), demonstrated with devastating rigor the flaws in Democratic thinking. Countering the turnout argument, the report cited research showing that Dukakis would have lost even if blacks and the poor had voted at rates far exceeding everyone else. The party’s problem wasn’t electoral mechanics or voter apathy—it was the disdain of mainstream Americans. “Too many,” the authors wrote, “see the party as inattentive to their economic interests, indifferent if not hostile to their moral sentiments and ineffective in defense of their national security.”
Liberals didn’t take the DLC’s efforts lying down. Union members picketed a DLC convention; activists organized an anti-DLC conference in Washington under the slogan “Because one Republican Party is more than enough”; Jesse Jackson dubbed the group “Democrats for the Leisure Class.”
Why is this passage striking? A credible argument could be made that Democrats are no more attentive to average Americans’ economic interests, interested in their moral sentiments, or effective in defense of their national security than the party demonstrated 25 years ago. But President Obama and his acolytes do a better job creating messages that suggest they care about these issues. It’s another good example of Pearce’s Law.
