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Kerry: "Don't Go Changing to Try and Please the Voters"
Don't Go Changing to Try and Please the Voters
"Sen. John F. Kerry[*] told state legislators Friday the Democratic Party doesn't need to undergo an extreme makeover," the Associated Press reports from Seattle:
"We have to go out and fight for the real issues that make a difference in the lives of the American people and we don't need some great lurch to the right or lurch to the left or redefinition of the Democratic Party," the Massachusetts Democrat said. "The last thing America needs is a second Republican Party."
There's just one problem: The un-made-over Democrats have been losing elections for almost 40 years. In the 90th Congress, just after the 1966 election, the Democrats held 68 seats in the Senate and 246 in the House. Since then they have lost a net 23 Senate and 43 House seats (counting both bodies' current Vermont independents as Democrats), and they have lost seven out of 10 presidential elections.
Yet Kerry may be right that the alternatives are worse than standing pat. A Democratic shift to the right risks inflaming the party's Angry Left base, while a shift to the left would surely cost the party whatever support it has left from normal people. The least bad approach for the Democrats may indeed be to go into a defensive crouch in the hope of cutting the party's losses and riding out the current period of Republican dominance.
* The haughty, French-looking Massachusetts Democrat, who by the way served in Vietnam.
- Opinion Journal
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