Unlike Bush, many Democrats are sticking to the conventional wisdom. They grope for some kind of centre ground. But so far has the territory shifted, thanks to the Republicans' shameless stakeout on the hard right, that their quest continues to drain their party of most of its meaning and any of its capacity to inspire.
The rules are being observed, but we find that in some circumstances these rules are a fallacy. They draw a party so far into the orbit of its rival as to render itself meaningless as anything except a political machine of variable potency around the country. Yet the dominant mode of most presidential candidates is still to cling to the kind of centrism that defines them at best as Bush-lite, at worst as people who have nothing to say that could send the smallest shiver up the spine of afloating voter....
[M]any Democrats seem to have forgotten that they did win the election last time. For four years it has been idle to challenge the Florida vote and the bizarre workings of the electoral college, but now is the time to recall that in 2000 half a million more Americans voted for Al Gore's progressive version of the future than Bush's more conservative one. Bush was still posing as a bit centrist then, and Gore was scarcely a raving liberal. Gore mostly stuck to the Clinton third way doctrine that had taken the Democrats away from the narrowest version of their past. But there was a left-right choice, and more Americans voted left than right....
For any Democrat to take advantage of Bush's waning popularity and overcome his vast campaign finances, however, he must have something to say. There needs to be some clarity, on all fronts. The other day, the same edition of the New York Times carried stories saying that neither young African-Americans nor the Boston Irish could any longer be counted on as part of the core vote. Is this heresy surprising when nobody knows with any certainty what Democrats stand for? If a party can't fire up its core vote, it will be deader quicker than if it can't draw in people who've never voted for it before. Watching what Bush has done to both the economy and the constitution, it should be easy for a Democrat to come up with soundbites and articles of simple faith to inspire a few more than the millions of Americans who voted for Gore last time....
What their opponents need is a leader whose voice rings more eloquently than Bush's - surely not the hardest contest to win. That won't happen until they abandon their backing and filling, and their belief that being a Democrat no longer adds up to anything more than a milder version of their enemies.
"Extremism in the defence of liberty is no vice ... Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue." Barry Goldwater said that 40 years ago. It was the start of the recovery of the right. The words now belong rather exactly in the other side's mouth. If they came out of Senator Kerry's this autumn, they'd make him sound less like a calculating wimp.
