What do Iraq and the Democratic Party have in common?

When a policy is perceived as not working out, there are two explanations usually given:

This debate is certainly raging over the U.S. administration of Iraq, and looks like it will not end anytime soon (though click here for an upbeat story about the revival of the Marsh Arabs). However, as Matt Bai points out in today’s New York Times Magazine, the Democratic Party is undergoing a similar debate about it’s own future. The story discusses former White House chief of staff John Podesta’s efforts to create a liberal think tank to rival the right-wing triumvirate of the Heritage Foundation, Cato Institute, and American Enterprise Institute. The key grafs:

”The question I’m asked most often is, When are we getting our eight words?” Podesta said. Conservatives, he went on, ”have their eight words in a bumper sticker: ‘Less government. Lower taxes. Less welfare. And so on.’ Where’s our eight-word bumper sticker? Well, it’s harder for us, because we believe in a lot more things.” The Center for American Progress, Podesta said, was concerned with articulating these principles carefully, over time, rather than rushing out an agenda to help win an election in 2004. ”We’re trying to build an idea base for the longer term,” he said, to bring about ”an enduring progressive majority.” There was genuine excitement in the room. ”This is the first thing I’ve heard that gives me hope in a very long time,” one woman said. The audience, however, had varying notions of what a think tank should do. Most of the questioners seemed to assume as a matter of faith that the liberal message would naturally triumph in America if not for Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and a president who, they insist, has lied. One guest urged Podesta to concentrate on briefing liberal TV guests before they appeared on talk shows; another thought Democrats were losing because they used the wrong language. Podesta gently reminded his audience that a think tank was for developing new policy solutions, not simply repackaging old ones. ”We’ve got to fill the intellectual pail a little,” he cautioned, before worrying too much about how those ideas should be conveyed. This is precisely the challenge facing Podesta. Just about every leading Democrat in Washington agrees that the party could use a new Big Idea, something to compete with the current conservative agenda of slashing programs and toppling rogue regimes. But what kind of idea? Is it as simple as an image makeover? Is it a left-leaning TV network to fight back against a right-tilted media? Or does the party need a new and bolder policy agenda, even if it means years wandering in the wilderness to find it?

So, is the Democratic Party’s problem that it needs to fix media misperceptions or that it needs to generate new policies? Bai seems to answers his own question at the end of the piece:

It may be that Podesta is willing to confront the party establishment, but there is nothing in his past — or in the resumes of any of his main hires at the center, all of whom are veterans of the Hill or the White House — that suggests he and his team want to divorce themselves from the party’s political aims. They are the Democratic establishment, and that means there will always be the temptation to forgo the longer, harder conversation that the party probably needs to have in favor of a short-term strategy. It is worth remembering, too, that activists like Weyrich and Feulner didn’t start with either the message or the specific policies. They started, instead, with a core philosophy that deftly articulated the way a lot of frustrated Americans felt. They knew what they believed and how to put it into words, and they were passionate about living in a country that closely resembled their vision. What Podesta dismisses as a bumper sticker — ”less government, lower taxes and so on” — is, in fact, the starting point from which a generation of powerful ideas took flight. Podesta has undertaken this process in reverse; he is building up a machine for finding new ideas and marketing them in hopes that all this effort will somehow coalesce into a new and compelling governing philosophy for Democrats. Even before its official debut this month, American Progress began assembling focus groups in nine cities and among a number of ”elite” Democrats to get a sense of what the progressive vision ought to be. This is what consultants do when they want to win elections, but it is a less promising way to locate a bold new concept of American government.

As a member of the opposition who nevertheless truly wants to see this project succeed in part (click here for why), I’d suggest that Podesta may be aiming too high. Part of the reason the right-wing think tanks have thrived is not just their willingness to take on the Republican establishment, but to take on each other. Cato and Heritage hardly see eye-to-eye on all matters, and I’m sure that there are different strands of the Democratic party that feel the same. The key is not just to fund the construction of new ideas — it’s to encourage competition among new sets of ideas. My advice to Podesta — one think tank can’t house every strand of the Democratic party — aim for ideological coherence first, and then try to wipe the floor with other think tanks that lean Democratic.