There was a great debate - Thursday - going on at numerous blogs, including the Mighty Kos and Eschaton and Hullabaloo. The debate began from a Tomasky essay in The American Prospect.

Michael Tomasky wrote:

The prevailing conventional wisdom in Washington — that the Democrats have no idea what they stand for — has recently been put to the test in persuasive ways. In an important piece in the May issue of The Washington Monthly, Amy Sullivan demonstrates that the Democrats have in fact become a disciplined and effective opposition party. From their Social Security victory to George W. Bush’s backing down on his post-Katrina changes to the Davis-Bacon law to the Dubai ports deal, the Democrats have dealt the administration a series of defeats — each of which took a reflexive media, still accustomed to hitting F9 to spit out the words “Democrats in disarray,” by complete surprise. More than that, the Democrats do have ideas; it’s just that no one bothers to cover them.

The party has discipline, a tactical strategy as the opposition, and a more than respectable roster of policy proposals waiting to be considered should Democrats become the majority again. It’s quite different from, say, three years ago. But let’s not get carried away. There remains a missing ingredient — the crucial ingredient of politics, the factor that helps unite a party (always a coalition of warring interests), create majorities, and force the sort of paradigm shifts that happened in 1932 and 1980. It’s the factor they need to think about if their goal is not merely to win elections but to govern decisively after winning them.

What the Democrats still don’t have is a philosophy, a big idea that unites their proposals and converts them from a hodgepodge of narrow and specific fixes into a vision for society. Indeed, the party and the constellation of interests around it don’t even think in philosophical terms and haven’t for quite some time. There’s a reason for this: They’ve all been trained to believe — by the media, by their pollsters — that their philosophy is an electoral loser.

He argues that Democrats should return to an old winning philosophy, “that citizens should be called upon to look beyond their own self-interest and work for a greater common interest. ”

Digby’s response began:

There is much to recommend Michael Tomasky’s essay today in The American Prospect. I agree with Atrios that it is important that the Democratic party give people something to believe in. Politics without heart is nothing more than crass deal making.

Tomasky prescribes a Democratic philosophy of the common good and posits that this is the basis of liberalism — sacrifice for larger universalist principles. What’s not to like? Certainly on a rhetorical level it’s a positive philosophical message that serves as an umbrella for Democratic policies. The rub, of course, is in determining what the common good is in the first place.

There’s always that nagging caveat: ‘I agree with Tomasky, but…’ And there’s plenty of ‘buts’ in this case. ‘New Left–driven atomization.’ ‘The old liberalism’s failures.’ And the nut of the problem per Tomasky?

The stance of radical oppositionism dissipated as the ’60s flamed out; but the belief system, which devalued the idea of the commons, held fast and became institutionalized within the Democratic Party. The impact on the party was that the liberal impulse that privileged social justice and expansion of rights was now, for the first time, separated entirely from the civic-republican impulse of the common good. By the 1970s, some social programs — busing being the most obvious example — were pursued not because they would be good for every American, but because they would expand the rights of some Americans. The old Johnsonian formulation was gone. Liberalism, and the Democratic Party, lost the language of advancing the notion that a citizen’s own interest, even if that citizen did not directly benefit from such-and-such a program, was bound up in the common interest. Democrats were now asking many people to sacrifice for a greater good of which they were not always a part.

Tomasky argues that Reagan applied a variant of the common good philosophy to pull the rug from under the Dems. I call this revisionist history, as Reagan’s ‘common good’ was not perceived as such by every common demographic in that 1980 vote. Black and Latino Americans didn’t buy it. Union households didn’t either. Nor did those beneath the middle class, the poor and unemployed, or people under 30. And while he made inroads in key Dem bases, he only won women and blue collar workers by 1%.

His appeal mentioned individualism, but its focus was more anti-federal than anything else. Big government was the problem he defined. States’ rights was his repeatedly stated prescription. Few code words are stronger than those in US history. They’re rooted in racial division, and that strategy remains the core of the Republican appeal even today.

It’s important to remember that Carter became president just as the cumulative bills of two decades in Vietnam and LBJ’s Great Society came due, so the economy was teetering and the added strain of OPEC oil embargoes pushed it off the cliff.

Simultaneously, the blowback from Cold War strategies had caused the overthrow of the government in Iran. The electorate’s anger about gasoline embargoes found a target when the Iranian revolutionaries held US embassy employees hostage throughout Carter’s final year. Those ‘other’ people were neither Caucasian nor Christian and Carter’s inability to free the US hostages from ‘those heathens’ resulted in his defeat.

(I think it was Mort Sahl who said “Reagan won because he ran against Carter. Had he run against himself, he would have lost.”)

Thus it was a convergence of xenophobia, racism and a rotten economy that made the Reagan revolution possible, not ‘the civic-republican impulse of the common good’. Yet even then, with the first GOP Senate in a quarter century, Reagan’s domestic agenda met stiff resistance till his post-assassination pluck provided a wave of sympathy and popular support for him. Personal appeal, not philosophy, passed his trickle-on sleight of hand into the annals of legend.

It’s important to consider that the overwhelming majority of the US population is white. So it wasn’t rocket science to see that any message designed to appeal to that majority would not only be effective, but would be the easiest path to victory. It doesn’t take vision or great philosophical skill to appeal to the ‘common’ good of the majority. Starting a touchdown drive from inside the 50 percent line always has good odds of producing a field goal, at least.

Taking the principled path of inclusiveness of and unity with minority groups has always been a harder sell. It’s a risky strategy, but to folks whose first instinct puts principle ahead of strategy, no other path was acceptable.

But is it true that white voters felt left out by equal rights victories that they didn’t directly share in? In the 1964 Democratic convention, Fannie Lou Hamer led the Mississippi Freedom Party delegates to challenge the exclusionary regular Mississippi delegation for the right to represent black Mississippians for the first time. Her description of her jailing and beating by police in Indianola for her voter registration efforts galvanized the attention of the country and drew a massive supportive outcry from white America. Except that part of white America embarrassed by the exposure of their racist constructs.

And with the subsequent passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts, the die was cast that has distorted national voting patterns since. Regionalism, not party loyalty, has withstood every thoughtful consideration and gimmick that’s been employed by Democrats since.

So is it the fault of ‘new’ liberals that stood up for real Black suffrage that white Southerners felt excluded from the common good? Or is it the fault of the white Southerners (and lily-white states from the Dakotas to Utah) that their racist practices and/or racial ignorance, excluded themselves from the cure while compelling people of conscience to act in the first place?

Granted, for a brief period, the Civil Rights protests, followed by the environmental movement, the Vietnam protests, the women’s liberation movement, the UFW boycotts and numerous offshoots (Black Power, Yippies, flower power, mainstream drug use, etc) provided the appearance that our society was being torn apart at the seams to a degree that frightened many Americans. In that regard, Tomasky’s point holds: the interests of subgroups pushed for remedies that the whole would not directly share in. But I think it’s important to note that many of these remedies still had majority support even then.

And the period of fearsome tumult largely occurred between 1966 - 1972, a short period that saw the assassination of national leaders like RFK and MFK, a similar attempt on George Wallace’s life, police-instigated riots at the 1968 Democratic convention and elsewhere, the Kent State and Jackson State shootings and the extermination of the Black Panthers, among other events. Like the murders of Civil Rights workers earlier in the Sixties, probably more than 95% of the violence originated from those opposed to the liberal ideals.

I don’t think Tomasky’s arguing that the violence arose from the commons feeling marginalized by liberal Democrats. Most of it arose from powerful interests who felt their power was slipping away. But is Tomasky suggesting the proper path at that point would be for Democrats to capitulate in their pursuit of equality for the marginalized majority? (Women alone were that). No, he considers that pursuit courageous.

Tomasky conveniently leaves out the fact that the reins of political and economic power in this country were largely held by white males. When Tomasky says ‘Democrats were now asking many people to sacrifice for a greater good of which they were not always a part,’ the ‘many people’ he’s referring to were society’s most powerful subgroup - upper middle class and wealthy white males - coupled with its most virulent, white racists.

Then or now, should political pragmatism supercede the pursuit of one-person-one-vote? Equal rights for the majority (women)? Some semblance of economic opportunity for those impoverished at the hand of the master bigot collective?

For the sake of party victory that excludes more than half of society, apparently Tomasky is saying ‘maybe.’

Tomasky points to the efforts of the DLC and Clinton to reconnect with those who felt marginalized by the efforts of the ghosts of liberal-Democrats past. Yet he quickly glosses over the elements of Clinton’s expansive inclusionism that don’t support his argument, without further explanation.

For example, he states: “With some programs, Clinton strove toward a kind of civic-republican liberalism: notably AmeriCorps, his program of national and community service that has been a noble attempt to create a sense of civic obligation among young people, even if it has never quite penetrated the national consciousness. ”

In simpler terms, the prescription he’s advancing now already has notable examples of failure in application, and he’d prefer not to analyze that inconsistency. For that matter, let’s not even analyze what he calls “the health-care fiasco” which had the support of 70+% of the electorate when Clinton was elected.

Allow me.

It certainly wasn’t a GOP appeal to ‘the civic-republican impulse of the common good’ that killed the Clinton national healthcare plan. What killed it was the folks that the Clintons went to great plans to include: that same power elite that the ‘New Left’ stands accused of marginalizing. He tried to keep the AMA, the medical pros and the insurance companies happy, produced a compromise bill and wham! It wasn’t the 70+% of Americans wanting national healthcare who shot it down. And in his effort to marginalize no one, he created a weaker plan that was killed in utero by his new presumptive allies. For a more recent analogy, consider the bipartisan efforts of Ted Kennedy working with Bush on the NCLB education plan.

Where does that fit in the Tomasky hypothetical? He posits that the Dems were lost in the woods by century’s end. Oh really? Then why did Will Rogers, half a century earlier, draw laughs saying “I belong to no organized political party. I’m a Democrat.” ?

Tomasky defines a schizophrenic split within the party that began in the mid-Sixties and continues today, that brings to mind the Pushme-Pullyou beast, with both sides reaching unpopular extremes. He worries that liberals are perceived as believing that ‘anything goes’, to the extent that non-liberals take nothing we say seriously.

His conclusion?

The Democrats need to become the party of the common good. They need a simple organizing principle that is distinct from Republicans and that isn’t a reaction to the Republicans. They need to remember what made liberalism so successful from 1933 to 1966, that reciprocal arrangement of trust between state and nation. And they need to take the best parts of the rights tradition of liberalism and the best parts of the more recent responsibilities tradition and fuse them into a new philosophy that is both civic-republican and liberal — that goes back to the kind of rhetoric Johnson used in 1964 and 1965, that attempts to enlist citizens in large projects to which everyone contributes and from which everyone benefits.

Arguing for it is the only way that Democrats can come to stand for something clear and authoritative again. It’s not enough in our age, after the modern conservative ascendancy, to stand for activist government, or necessary taxes and regulation, or gay marriage, or abortion rights, or evolution, or the primacy of science, or universal health care, or affirmative action, or paths to citizenship for illegal immigrants, or college education for all, or environmental protection, or more foreign aid, or a comprehensive plan to foster democracy in the Arab world, or any of the other particular and necessary things that Democrats do or should support; it isn’t enough to stand for any of those things per se. Some of them have been discredited to the broad public, while others are highly contentious and leave the Democrats open to the same old charges. And those that aren’t contentious or discredited suffer the far worse problem of being uninteresting: They’re just policies, and voters don’t, and should not be expected to, respond to policies. Voters respond to ideas, and Democrats can stand for an idea: the idea that we’re all in this — post-industrial America, the globalized world, and especially the post–9-11 world in which free peoples have to unite to fight new threats — together, and that we have to pull together, make some sacrifices, and, just sometimes, look beyond our own interests to solve our problems and create the future.

When I reached that point in his essay, I was struck by several thoughts. First, most of what he’s stating doesn’t seem particular innovative, it sounds like we’re already there. Second, the sole thing different than our current reality is the ‘pull together’ meme, as opposed to the country’s red/blue, neocon/liberal polarity.

To gain that, he’s calling for a good faith effort on the part of liberals to unilaterally disarm in the face of the bad faith onslaught of the ideologically clinically cowardly neocons. That Clinton’s healthcare plan and Kennedy’s support of NCLB were sandbagged by GOP saboteurs and snake-oil spouters is completely overlooked in that call.

Tomasky also argues that Americans have tasted the gutter under Bush and are ready for something new and better.

More precisely, he’s saying interest groups under the Democratic umbrella have to think and act in less polarizing ways. And that Democratic unity must be absolute, instead of accomodating a few moderate Republicans. Yet once again, it’s my impression that we’re largely there, though I mildly disagree on the latter point. It was precisely the refusal to accept a liberal Republican that led us to the result of Joe Lieberman.

In general, I agree with his argument, for the sake of a Democratic legislative majority. But there’s risks in such absolutism that must be recognized. And the chief one is the false belief that a panacea can be had with a simple Democratic majority. Not just Lieberman but a Southern Democrat coalition put the lie to that under Reagan. I’ll buy two Olympia Snowes before I ever buy a Zell Miller.

Only near the end of his essay does Tomasky touch upon a solution I can embrace, the one we have no direct control over. He says:

Someone in the party has to decide to bust the mold. I dream of the Democratic presidential candidate who, in his — or her — announcement speech in August 2007 says something like the following: “To the single-issue groups arrayed around my party, I say this. I respect the work you do and support your causes. But I won’t seek and don’t want your endorsement. My staff and I won’t be filling out any questionnaires. You know my track record; decide from it whether I’ll be a good president. But I am running to communicate to Americans that I put the common interest over particular interests.” Okay, I said it was a dream. But there it is — in one bold stroke, a candidate occupies the highest moral ground available to politicians: to be unbought and unbossed.

I highlighted the dream part because that’s all we can do. We can dream that a perfect candidate will emerge. We are not a collective of Dr. Frankensteins, capable of assembling such a winning beast. He continues:

It’s hard for groups to change, and they must be given a reason to do so — a stake in a new paradigm and an assurance that their interests will not be tossed to the side. The answer is that, if Democrats are permitted to adopt a new philosophy and practice their politics differently — and, if Democratic leaders rise to the occasion — the prevailing situation in this country could change dramatically for the better, and that would benefit all their causes in the long run.

So, okay, he finally confirms that nobody willing to change the tactics of extreme confrontationism gets tossed overboard. But again, he yearns for leaders to rise who know precisely what to say. And his closing statement begins with a premise I simply do not buy:

The Democratic left wants it to be 1968 in perpetuity; the Democratic center wishes for 1992 to repeat itself over and over again. History, however, doesn’t oblige such wishes — it rewards those who recognize new moments as they arise. It might just be that the Bush years, these years of civic destruction and counterfeit morality, have provided the Democrats the opening to argue on behalf of civic reconstruction and genuine public morality.

This liberal never looked at 1968 as an ideal. Despite some giddy moments rooted more in youthful libertine pursuits than profound sociopolitical insight, I found 1968’s turmoil as unsettling as Nixon’s Moral Majority did, though I didn’t agree with its other preferences. The only thing 1968 had that’s not quite as visible today is the hope engendered by specific visionary leaders, like RFK and MLK.

Digby lands close to it when he says “The problem is that a political party cannot be all things to all people. And here’s where the politics of the common good becomes complicated.”

And, as he notes about the schizophrenic party split:

In any case, he sees the DLC’s failure as one of too much faith in markets and not enough in government, which I think is quite right. But from where I sit, the DLC’s failure also stems from its insistence that instead of working with the embarrassing coalition that forms the heart of the Democratic party, they needed to marginalize them. It didn’t work then, and I don’t think it’s going to work now.

Be sure to read the rest of Digby’s response. I share his skepticism completely.

A couple of commenters to Digby’s response raised excellent points. PBG not only defined how the Reagan model succeeded but he even defined a strategy so simplistic it sounds like a slogan:

America under the Democrats: Rich enough to help the poor; Strong enough to help the weak; Wise enough to withstand the foolish.

America Standing Tall.

To an activist, it sounds corny, but it’s exactly the sort of well-framed message the electorate can find uplift in. And for those concerned there are too many interests under the Democratic umbrella, Chris Anderson’s response is the best I’ve heard, as it shares the Will Rogers view:

What if, instead of looking for a way out of the problem, we simply embrace it as part of the load we have to bear for working for a better world?

There is no magic formula that will allow all the disparate interests that make up the Democratic coalition to work together in peace and harmony. There will always be conflicts. What we need to do is understand that the existance of those conflicts does not require that the coalition shatter.

Stop looking for a way out. Start looking for a way up.

Chris Anderson can rock our boat anytime, and I’ll kneecap anyone who tries to throw him overboard.

Yet everyone I’ve read has missed a couple of bottom line realities. The first is at their starting point, that the party’s philosophy can be defined prior to and independent of the candidates who will be its standard bearers. Ever since McGovern pulled the party’s decisionmaking processes outside of the smoke-filled backrooms of party bosses, so the numerous previously public interests of progressive subgroups became overexposed in the sunlight, there’s been far too much emphasis on sorting out a process by which every goal of every subgroup can be given sufficient nurture. And while accomodations can be made - and have been - there remains too many still willing to throw someone overboard, supposedly for the common good.

Nonsense. The Democratic umbrella is capable of addressing more, not less. The only thing that needs a tossing in the drink is the idea that there are limits to what we can achieve.

But let’s begin with a recognition of what a political party is. The entire purpose of a political party is to get candidates elected. That means, if instinctive leaders are not available to unite most of the party behind a common vision, the party’s work is multiplied. Electing weaker leaders can be done, but it’s akin to making a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. Selling an inferior product takes good PR, good sales technique, and good coordination of available resources for voter registration and GOTV efforts. Yet even when a party’s firing on all those cylinders, its standard bearers - the candidates - can create backfires that no party effort can overcome.

Analyses like those provided by Tomasky are critical to the discussion of how a party can improve and retool its machinery to maximum positive effect. But a well-tooled machine is ultimately only a tool whose effectiveness depends on the person wielding it. Excuse the mixed metaphors but no matter how great the innovators of new tools are, how precise the machinists build it, how well its mechanics maintain and oil it, if the person who sits astride your perfect Harley steers it into a mudhole, all the king’s horses and all the king’s men aren’t going to outpoll J. Danforth Wussypie in a creampuff cookoff.

When I think of the two GOP standard bearers - Reagan and Dubya- capable of rallying loyalists to any cause, no matter how demented or illegal, the thing I’ve heard respected Democrats say the two have shared in common is their personable natures in face to face meetings. Both apparently came across to much of the electorate that way: friendly, approachable, guys you’d enjoy having a beer with. Both also offered something directly to most Americans that was hard to refuse: tax cuts.

That says to me that personality and self-interest outweighed every other factor influencing a majority of voters. Only the sunny optimism of ‘morning in America’ and the fear-based message of ‘vote for us or America loses to the terrorists’ carried any sort of ‘common good’ message at all.

Yet Tomasky is correct to say the ‘common good’ meme can be a motivator. But it must come from candidates with the personality and speaking prowess to sell the message and their vision must be easily conveyed without clumsy analogies, scientific white papers or the erudite windiness of policy wonks.

Wonks make good party chairs. We have one in place now, in Howard Dean. He’ll soon demonstrate how sharp the tools are he’s put in the hands of state party operatives coast to coast. Where candidates emerge with real leadership skills, those tools will come in handy in getting them past ‘Go.’

Another Digby commenter, Desert Dawg, noted, among other salient points:

Digby has raised an essential point, that the special interests are not the bogeyman,and that singling them out only aids the Republican strategy of divide and conquer. The problem of “special interest” groups began with the signing of the Voting Rights Act in 1964, when Lyndon Johnson, realizing that what he was doing was ethically right but politically suicidal, said that he was signing over the South to the Republicans for a generation. Like the founders making a deal with the devil over slavery, FDR had made a deal with the devil Dixiecrats: econonomic progress would come at the price of social progress for some.

When that ended in ‘64, the challenge for the Democratic Party was to maintain its focus on workers and the middle class while, to paraphrase Firebug, carrying the “baggage” of blacks and women. But the baggage was not optional: you’re either the party of the people or not. The Republicans simply harnessed the anger against these groups getting a bigger piece of the pie into a backlash: w/ blacks, welfare and affirmative action; w/ women, abortion rights.

That the Democrats failed is not surprising: witness the inability of Republicans to keep their conservative fiscal underpinnings while running herd on their “special interest” fundamentalists. There, too, the tail has begun to wag the dog.

All this talk of the common good may be wonderful for writing in-depth articles and debating philosophy, but it has nothing to do with the reality of the situation. People do not vote the common good. People vote their self-interest, either economic, or (as What’s the Matter with Kansas states) “values” driven.

Over the decades I’ve watched the Democrat party in operation, I’ve always seen some bright spots shine, even when its standard bearers - the presidential candidates - have displayed all the magnetism of a blood clot. William Proxmire’s Golden Fleece awards. Morris Udall’s environmental appeals, that reached environmentalists and ranchers alike. Alan Cranston’s anti-nuclear speeches. Lawton Chiles’ folksy wisdom. Jesse Jackson’s exhortations to ‘Keep Hope alive!’

Jerry Brown’s libertarian populism and visionary alternate energy pursuits. The principled Henry Gonzalez and his dogged persistence in uncovering scandals from the crooked S&L’s to the weapons sales to Saddam Hussein. The soaring oratory of Mario Cuomo and his fight against capital punishment. And of course, Paul Wellstone.

Even without presidential victories, there were always visible reminders of what Democrats stood for in lesser officeholders throughout my life.

But those examples have been fewer and further between in the past dozen or so years. As Governor of Arkansas, Clinton felt it necessary to avoid pardoning an obviously retarded killer, to prove he was tough on crime. Numerous Democrats who’d soon be battling for the 2004 presidential nomination voted to support Bush’s War On Iraq precisely because they feared being cast as ’soft on terrorism’. The Kerry campaign, to prove he’d be tougher on tyrants and terrorists than Bush was, used the word ‘kill’ more often than anyone since Arlo Guthrie’s lyrics in Alice’s Restaurant.

All of these were reactions to GOP charges. Instead of the positive actions of leaders, they displayed the reactive rebuttals of defense attorneys. And who, among the lesser officeholders stands out in the memory as the shining lights of the Democratic party in the past dozen years? Paul Wellstone, on the rare occasion the press covered him. A rarer speech or statement from Byrd, Boxer or Kennedy. John Edwards in behalf of the working poor. Howard Dean. Dennis Kucinich. Feinstein.

But most of these have occured in the past three years, much of it as part of a presidential race. And if you get beyond the activist blog community, I’ll bet most of America would cite very few examples from the past 15 or 20 years.

Certainly the party machinery was in disarray through some of that, but the real deficiency was in the elected officials, not the grassroots Dems voluntarily working their butts off. Or, at least, that’s how it seemed.

The full truth is found digging deeper still. The power of television on political events became starkly apparent in the Kennedy-Nixon debates, in the Civil Rights movement and in Vietnam. Though contentiousness between politicians and the press had a long history before the advent of television, the GOP began an effort to corral the press through consolidated ownership, changes in FCC rules and other manipulations that have distorted news coverage, such as the false story of Kuwaiti babies dumped from incubators that built public support for the first Gulf War, the Murdoch-Ailes monstrousity of Faux News and the outright purchase of commentators like Armstrong Williams.

Against these PR machinations that limited the visibility of Democratic lights and distorted the rays of those that shone through (i.e., Dean’s rally cry) what counter did the old-guard Democratic consultancy provide? Too little too late, for the most part. It took liberal activists via blogs, followed by Think Progress, Media Matters and CAP, to start factchecking the mainstream media’s asses and embarrassing them into greater pursuit of the truth.

Too much introspection can lead to paralysis.

I don’t mean to be dismissive of Tomasky’s analysis, or of others whose clear perceptions and earnest expressions add insight that can benefit the country. I just think there’s too much emphasis placed on the goals of specific subgroups within the party’s base.

The pursuit of a better-balanced corporate media - especially its television component - may be the first best place liberal activists must advance their efforts, to gain more positive electoral outcomes.

A second pursuit not previously mentioned that is just as vital is the elimination of potentially fraudulent ballot-counting methods.

Staying involved to get courageous and innovative Dems like Dean elected and appointed to run and refine and oil the party machinery, to keep that tool at its maximum effectiveness, is the third pursuit liberals should agree on, no matter which subgroup within the party they align with.

It’s only in concert with those three principal pursuits that the discussions of potentially winning philosophies can be taken seriously. For no philosophy can be a proven winner if the media acts like a Republican parrot, if the votecount can be corrupted, or if the party machinery is left to a desultory consultancy class with a record of bunting on an 0-2 count.

If the best example of a shining light in the party is Russ Feingold’s censure call, which he defined as a poll-supported strategy, then we still may lose to J. Danforth Wussypie. Contrary to those who think Americans are too stupid to vote their best interests, my conversations with many ‘ordinary’ Americans yields an entirely different impression. Struggling to get by, to raise and educate their children, their time is the thing in the shortest supply. They lack the time to observe the intricacies of many political debates and media machinations, which makes it doubly hard for many to sort and sift out the truth.

Given that, the best way the next shining lights of the party can reach them is not to diminish their actions by making them sound like strategies to help the party win. They should make it clear their actions will help America win.

Yes, Tomasky’s right, America’s tasted the asphalt and is hungry for something far more nutritious. Consider these examples:

Americans can defeat the most threatening terror organizations without resorting to the unprincipled methods of gangsters and psychopaths. Americans can pursue greater regulation and oversight of the out-of-control excesses of essential industries like the energy barons at Enron and Exxon-Mobil. Americans must be secure in the knowledge that they will reach their retirement years with Social Security untouched by partisan politicians eager to control those funds. Americans cannot surrender the First or Second or any rights under any amendment. The Bill of Rights held fast against far superior opponents like Soviet Communists. Surrendering those rights would not have prevented the 9-11 attacks and surrendering them now means a few ungodly terrorists have already defeated some of our freedoms.

Americans can defend our shores and ports and land without being the police for the entire world. We can defend our own and we can defend our allies when called upon by any ally demonstrating similar commitments to democratic principles of freedom and justice and fair representation.

Americans can support its workers in pursuit of family wage jobs with family health benefits. The economic and personal health of all Americans must be maintained if we’re to continue to compete in the global marketplace. And if other free countries can achieve that without sacrificing parents to sixty hour workweeks, then so can we.

The power and innovation of the American economy was built on the strength of citizens who advanced their ideas and goals through the quality of the education they gained in our public schools. Americans can pursue new innovations that might improve our opportunities without abandoning the needs of the schools who continue to educate the majority of our students. We cannot build a better bridge to a brighter future by weakening that bridge’s foundations.

Americans can build a greater society with all its citizens sharing all its freedoms and economic opportunities. It can do so best if we each take up the responsibility to respect each other, to respect the law and to respect the ethical codes of morality the great religions of the world share in common.

We cannot do so by pretending that sexual matters require our constant attention and punitive restrictions and invasions of personal privacy. Nor can we pretend that other moral corruptions such as theft, graft, bribery, dishonesty, and the endangerment of lives require less attention and less correction than we’re providing now. We must increase our efforts to prevent these far more dangerous crimes and ethical breaches. And the surest way any responsible adult can limit the ethical lapses caused by the desire for love or passion is to model those ethical self-disciplines in their own lives, to the benefit of their families and communities.

Messages like these are inclusive and provide a motivational ‘can do’ message. But even if we echo these or similar sentiments, there’s no guarantee Americans will believe this is what Democrats stand for, unless they hear it from leaders with the personalities and speaking styles that make them sound convincing and principled and ready to make these things happen.

And not because our party is better than any other party. But because, at this moment, the person telling them they believe these worthy goals are reachable and desirable for all Americans, says they’ll be honored to lead the way to this better America if they’ll join in the work to make this Velveteen rabbit real.