Democrats Lost the Power of Ideas by Elaine C. Kamarck November 8, 2002 Reprinted from Newsday -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- In the 2002 midterm elections, the Democrats forgot what they had learned in the 1990s. They win when they are the party of ideas, and they lose when they are the party of insiders whose idea of creativity is a focus group. Early on in this election season, we got a preview of the Democrats' weaknesses when it was reported that Democratic consultants were telling Democratic candidates to give the GOP a pass on national security issues and concentrate instead on domestic issues. Come again? The country suffers its worst attack since Pearl Harbor and Democrats aren't supposed to talk about it? Even at the time this sounded like a recipe for political irrelevance, not a recipe for political success, and events have proved it so. A year ago, Connecticut Sen. Joseph Lieberman introduced legislation calling for the creation of a Department of Homeland Security. Homeland security should have been the Democrats' big idea - it could have been their contribution to the national security debate. The Bush administration opposed the idea of a new department throughout the winter and spring, until they were finally forced to endorse the plan after embarrassing stories began to emerge about the ineptness of the federal government in anticipating the Sept. 11 attacks. But having had the idea and forced the Republicans to take it up, Democrats lost ownership of it. Instead of cutting the deals necessary to move it out of the Senate so that Democratic senators could go home and brag about it on the campaign trail, it became bogged down in ancillary issues. So, by the weekend before the election, the Department of Homeland Security had become President George W. Bush's idea and the Democratic Senate its enemy. At the beginning of the election season, President Bush's go-it-alone rhetoric on war in Iraq was making a lot of Americans nervous - in spite of his visit to the United Nations. Former Vice President Al Gore, free from "inside the Beltway think," gave a speech pointing out the national security dangers of the hard-line approach. Gore's speech and a cascade of hard news stories like the one about North Korean nuclear capability laid out some serious flaws in the Bush strategy. Shortly after that speech, The New York Times did a national poll that showed Americans' increasing ambivalence toward unilateral action in Iraq. But as the dangers of the original Bush approach seeped into the minds of voters, the Democrats failed to offer their own plan for dealing with Saddam Hussein. Instead, many of them voted for the Bush resolution, hoping once again to change the discussion. In the meantime, it was the Bush administration that changed its tune. By early October in Cincinnati, Bush had pulled his punches and was talking about coalitions, allies and getting the United Nations behind him. Once again, a Democratic idea got lost to the Republicans. Over the summer, Democrats had great hopes that the burgeoning corporate scandals, in conjunction with the poor economy, would create the possibility for a national boost for their party. In a burst of legislation, Congress created a new board to oversee the troubled accounting profession. But as everyone knows, the real test is in implementing the law, not passing it. The Bush administration was filled with corporate apologists who didn't really have their heart in corporate reform. And then, on the weekend before the election, the Democrats got a gift from heaven. The chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission had appointed William Webster, the former FBI director, to head this new board. He not only had no accounting experience but, it was revealed, he had been involved with a corporation that had the same kinds of problems he was appointed to fix! But where were the last-minute ads excoriating the Bush administration for putting the foxes in charge of the chicken coop when it came to corporate governance? Nowhere. The weekend before the election should have been a stark reminder of the jobs and pensions lost to corporate malfeasance. Harvey Pitt, the maladroit SEC chairman, resigned on Election Day but no other top Republicans lost their day jobs. As the Democrats deconstruct what went wrong on Tuesday, some will say the party should now turn right or left. But the real problem is not direction. It is that in the 2002 campaign, the Democrats stopped thinking. One by one they lost the big issues to the Republicans. In spite of its name, political opposition is not about doing the opposite of what the other party does. It is about creating real and better alternatives and seeing them through. The Democrats didn't do it, and they paid for it with control of the Senate. Elaine C. Kamarck is on the faculty at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. She was a member of the Clinton-Gore administration from 1993 to ’97.