Doughnut Democrats: No Middle...

The editors at OpinionJournal.com spell out how the Democrat party has abandoned it's roots and - since the death of John Kennedy - has been so dominated by the Left that they have completely alienated the center-right members of the party that had at one time made it a majority.

• With the notable exception of Joe Lieberman, there are virtually no Scoop Jackson defense hawks remaining in a party that has made Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo its main policy touchstones for the war on terror.
• The party that voted en masse for income and capital gains tax cuts under JFK now has but one message on taxes: Raise them.
• On trade, the Democrats who delivered 102 House votes for Nafta and Bill Clinton in 1994 will, at last count, provide all of five House votes for the Central American Free Trade Agreement.
• The Clinton Democrats helped enact the most momentous social policy legislation of the past generation: welfare reform. Now Democrats conspire every day to gut work-for-welfare requirements and prevent the renewal of welfare reform by Congress.
• Above all, there's the know-nothing-ism on Social Security. The Democrats in unison proclaim that Mr. Bush is advancing a risky right-wing scheme to destroy Social Security by creating private investment accounts for workers.

If Democrats maintain this leftward lurch to the exclusion of its more moderate members, than the function of its current Chairman will be less to grow the party than to stop the bleeding.

Howard Dean observed recently that he hopes to "galvanize the Democrats into being the party of individual freedom and personal responsibility." That's a wonderful idea--just the kind that would put the Democrats back on the road to national viability. But that leaves unanswered the question of how a party that opposes voluntary personal accounts for Social Security, school choice for parents, tax and welfare reform, free trade and limited government broadly defined can sell itself as the freedom and responsibility party.

Posted by: Gary at 01:29 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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