If you’re able to pick up the Economist this week (June 9), there’s a great short article, “Looking for a Plan,” summarizing how the Democrat’s anti-everything policies are leaving them bereft of ideas going forward.

You can sum up the Democrats’ current economic strategy in three words: “Just say no.” Whether it is George Bush’s ideas for Social Security (pensions) reform, the free-trade agreement with Central America (CAFTA) or efforts to control the rise in spending on Medicaid, the Democrats in Congress are offering nothing but blanket opposition. No alternatives, no negotiation. Just say no.

… the strategy is also moving the Democrats further to the left. On Social Security reform, for instance, Mr Bush recently floated a plan to help plug the system’s financial hole with “progressive indexation” of benefits: cut the growth in future benefits for richer Americans by tying them to consumer-price inflation while keeping benefits for poorer people tied to wage growth, as they are now. Many congressional Democrats decried the idea as a cut in benefits for the middle class, implying that benefit cuts were off the table as part of pension reform. As Will Marshall of the centrist Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) points out, that is a clear shift. “Back in the late 1990s,” he argues, there was consensus that “any balanced and progressive reform would have included benefit cuts.”

Similarly, many congressional Democrats now attack the 2001 No Child Left Behind education reform, even though many of them supported it. Some opposition is based on Mr Bush’s subsequent failure to fund the law fully but, as Robert Gordon of the Centre for American Progress (CAP) points out, many Democrats are now sceptical about the reforms themselves, such as the focus on educational testing. On trade, too, there has been a shift. Most Democrats have long been trade sceptics, but on CAFTA even the centrist free-traders have come out against. Democrats, it seems, are now universally opposed to trade deals.

But at some point Democrats, particularly potential presidential candidates, will need to lay out what they are for, not just what they are against. That leads to important questions. Are these tactical shifts on economic policy symptomatic of a broader shift to the left? What economic policies do Democrats actually stand for?

The answers are unclear. …

It looks at what’s going on in Democratic think tanks, but the progressive - centrist divide is a wide one, and the party is unlikely to develop a unified plan prior to the next election.

To us that means it’ll be up to the next presidential candidate to develop one. And that’s a long time to go with the “no, no, no” strategy. If the economy is in a cyclical downturn in 2008, that may not matter. But if it’s stable or on an upswing, the Democrats’ lack of achievement will cost them at the polls.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, June 11th, 2005 at 5:00 am by A Senior Administration Official and is filed under Election 2008 Live Team Coverage!. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.