Whither the Democrats?

Unsurprisingly, SDB thinks that the Democrats are highly likely to suffer a defeat for the ages in 2004.

Equally unsurprisingly, I don't agree.

Not that I don't think that President Bush is likely to be a formidable opponent; and not that I don't think that there is possibility for a landslide if the economy finally starts to create some jobs and the foreign policy stuff starts to get better. It bugs me that to a great extent we've made Presidential elections into quadrennial referenda on the thickness of the American wallet, but that's where we are now. I doubt you'll find a single Democrat in the country that doesn't think that 2004 is likely to be a very stiff battle.

I don't want to respond to everything SDB says, but one thing that does strike me as odd is his apparent belief that the Republicans have moved toward the center while the Democrats have not. I think, in many ways, this is a question of decoration rather than a question of actual movement of the party. Last week Kevin Drum made a pretty convincing case that the Republicans have not moved toward the center at all. SDB is right that you don't see much of Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell and other former figures of renown on the Religious Right paraded about anymore as the public face of the Republican Party, but you do see their policy ideas maintaining a stranglehold on the Republicans. It's all window-dressing, really. It seems to me that the Republicans have done a mildly better job in the last couple of years of repackaging their wares, but it's really the same bunch of policies.

And I'm far from convinced that recent elections really spell the doom of Democrats as SDB thinks. 2002 was not a landslide; we went from a pretty closely divided Congress to a still pretty closely divided Congress, and we still have Republicans feeling nervous enough about it that they feel the need to gerrymander themselves into power in Texas and Colorado through mid-decade redistricting. Likewise, I'm not sure how the California recall, in itself, represents a significant rejection of Democratic ideas.

One thing I do think that the Democrats need to figure out is if they want to try recapturing the center, or if they want to try moving the center back toward the left. That's a pretty tough one, and I don't pretend to even know what I think on that score.