For almost 50 years, between the first election of Franklin Roosevelt and the accession of Ronald Reagan, the Republican Party was the minority party. Sure, they won the occasional presidency, or even some seats in Congress, but the Republicans had very little in the way of practical alternatives to the New Deal and the Great Society. The Democratic Party was the party of ideas, the party of innovation.
Today, the debate in America has been completely transformed. Due in part to the lack of any novelty in the Democratic Party, but mostly because of the revolutionary new ideas generated within the Republican Party, the Democrats have become the minority party in America.
The Republicans are truly defining the national debate. One doesn't need to think very hard to think of big ideas that the Republicans have put forth: school vouchers, national missile defense, restructuring welfare and Social Security, tort reform, faith-based initiatives and trying to erase racial barriers by... erasing racial barriers (how revolutionary!). For over 20 years now, the national debate has centered around these and other Republican ideas and principles, even when Clinton was president.
The Democratic Party, on the other hand, has become very similar to the Republican Party of the Eisenhower-Ford era. They simply lack any new ideas. Try and name any Democratic idea that is not either an expansion of New Deal programs (communizing health care, the establishment of an international minimum wage) or knee-jerk anti-Republicanism (opposition to school vouchers and opposition to a national missile defense shield, among others).
Even the Democratic contenders have fallen into these categories. You have the old school New Deal liberals (Kerry and Gephardt), the one whose candidacy is almost entirely based on being anti-Bush (Dean) and the near Republicans (Lieberman, Clark and Edwards).
I have heard many people complain about the "lack of charisma" that plagues the Democratic contenders for president. The truth is that they don't necessarily lack charisma -- they lack ideas and coherent alternative policies.
The Democrats' lack of new ideas has left them with one alternative: oppose anything President Bush says, no matter how idiotic it makes them look. This has resulted in what can only be described as hilarious hypocrisies from the Democrats:
They harped on the fact that President Bush wasn't providing enough money or troops to rebuild Afghanistan (Al Gore said that Afghanistan was "falling back into chaos"). Now, they are falling over themselves demanding that the U.S. withdraw troops from and stop sending money to Iraq. This is despite the fact that Iraq is far more strategically important to U.S. interests than Afghanistan and has a far more promising future as a democracy.
They bemoan the federal deficit (heaven forbid America deficit spend to fight a war and a wavering economy), and yet they want to communize health care, something that will cost the American people billions of dollars each year.
They chalked up the impeachment of Bill Clinton to a "vast right-wing conspiracy" and "evil Republicans" trying to slander the then-president (I guess we weren't supposed to mention that he was a convicted felon). Now, without any evidence, they accuse President Bush of lying to the American people, war profiteering and election fraud. Furthermore, every time the president misspeaks, they call him an idiot.
They spent the entire Iraq War trying to convince the American people that North Korea was a greater threat. The end of the Iraq War and the silence about North Korea from the Democrats has revealed that they had neither the will nor the inclination to confront either Iraq or North Korea.
Democrats couldn't line up fast enough behind Bill Clinton when he decided to bomb in an effort to get weapons inspectors back in Iraq, in the interest of national security (Clinton stopped the bombing without achieving anything). Yet, when Bush decided to go to war, the Democrats flip-flopped, claiming that Iraq wasn't a threat to national security.
Even at a bastion of liberalism like Penn, the insolvency of the Democratic Party is evident. The Penn Democrats first recruiting poster featured the line, "President Bush doesn't want everyone to go to college." Besides being poorly thought out -- despite what elitist liberal intellectuals think, not everyone wants or needs to go to college -- the fact that the biggest selling line (and, as far as I can tell, the only selling line) of Penn Democrats on campus is anti-Bush rhetoric shows that they really have no new ideas of their own.
The Democrats may yet win the 2004 presidential election. But if they do, it won't be based upon the strength of their ideas or convictions. A Democrat in the White House will be good for only one thing: delaying the establishment and implementation of Republican policies. (Well, two things. It will also give terrorists a "Get Out of Jail Free" card.) If history serves as any guide, we can all look forward to a Republican majority for many years to come.
Dan Gomez is a junior History major from Wayne, Pa. and chairman of the Penn College Republicans.
