Democrats changes in 2006  Jeffrey Goldberg has written an excellent overview of the 2006 midterm elections in the New Yorker in their Letter from Washington: Central Casting: What is the Decomcrats' best way to win?. The basic contention is that Democrats need to appeal to more than just people like me, their liberal base. They need to demonstrate that they can empathize with the moderate majority and not let their differences hinder the propospects of defeating the Republicans this year.

“I’ll tell you this: if the election were held today, we would win,” Nancy Pelosi, the House Minority Leader, who represents San Francisco, told me earlier this month. Pelosi appeared excited by the prospect of one specific consequence of a Democratic victory: “We win in ’06, we get subpoena power.” Pelosi has said that the Democrats would reserve the right to investigate every aspect of the Bush Administration, including its rationale for the Iraq war.

Pelosi’s vision of a subpoena-filled 2007 appeals to her party’s most liberal supporters. But there is a worry that such a tack might alienate moderates, and that it would motivate otherwise dispirited Republicans to go to the polls. “You know, if you spend your whole day trying to catch the dog that bit you because all you want to do is kick him, you’re not going to win many friends,” Brian Schweitzer, the Democratic governor of Montana, told me.

This would be a surmountable problem for Democrats if liberals outnumbered conservatives. But the liberal base of the Democratic Party, even fully mustered for battle, is too small to carry a Democrat to the Presidency, or even to many of the Senate seats being contested in 2006. The math is unforgiving, according to Jonathan Cowan, the president of Third Way. “Exit polls consistently show that twenty-one per cent of Americans self-identify as liberal and about thirty-four per cent as conservative,” he said. “And a plurality, about forty-five per cent, self-identify as moderate. So this means that the Democrats have got to pull almost two-thirds of moderate voters to be the majority party.” A recent report by the political scientists Elaine Kamarck and Bill Galston argues that greater polarization in the electorate hurts Democrats, for a simple reason: one out of every three voters belongs to the base that in the past Karl Rove has so successfully mobilized; only one out of five belongs to Howard Dean’s.

“In 1976, Jimmy Carter eked out a victory with only 51 per cent of the moderate vote because he won nearly three in ten conservative voters,” Galston and Kamarck wrote. “In 2004, John Kerry won 54 per cent of the moderates and still lost by 3.5 points because he won a much smaller share of conservatives. With three conservatives for every two liberals, the sheer arithmetic truth is that in a polarized electorate effectively mobilized by both major parties, Democratic candidates must capture upwards of 60 per cent of the moderate vote—a target only Bill Clinton has reached in recent times—to win a national election.” Al Gore received the support of fifty-two per cent of self-identified moderates in his popular-vote victory over President Bush, in 2000, but eighty-one per cent of conservatives voted for Bush—“enough to carry Bush through in states Gore needed,” Third Way’s Matthew Bennett said.

Barack Obama is quoted extensively, and although he is much more moderate than I had thought, he seems to be the most intelligent, electable candidate for president in 2008.
posted by Bruce Wright at 9:57 AM #