How Democrats Should Talk

By Michael Tomasky

Washington liberals and Democrats have made many arguments about what they need to do as they try to recover from the low point of their support among the public during the Bush years in 2002 and 2003 and climb toward renewed dominance. Most of these arguments have centered on the big questions of ideology and vision— whether the times demand a calibrated centrism or a bolder liberalism of big plans and ideas. But other arguments, put forward in many a blog post, have ignored ideology and focused more on the question of tactics.

One can dismiss this as superficial if one wishes, but it's demonstrably the case that the gulf between the two parties is frequently greatest in tactical matters. Considerably fewer than 50 percent of Americans are as conservative as George W. Bush, Karl Rove, and Dick Cheney; yet somehow they got 52 percent of the voters to support the administration in 2004. That victory had many sources, but surely high on the list were the Bush campaign's effective verbal assaults on John Kerry's character—and not all of them, incidentally, calumnious; "flip-flopper," alas, wasn't really a false charge. Even so, the election was close enough that a smarter Kerry campaign would have won, whatever the Democrats' long-running internal ideological divisions. So tactics matter.