If we wish to Nationalize these elections, than a general playbook of talking points can't hurt, but the book itself isn't going to do much.

To use a legal term: it's "necessary but not sufficient".

"Necessary" because you need to show to people that you've got a coherent and comprehensive set of ideas.  60% of voters might not have heard of the Contract in 1994, but 40% is still a large number.  Plus, you can bet that the Contract motivated those 40% to convince their friends, families, and colleagues to vote.

"Not sufficient" because ideas aren't all that you need.  You also need organization, good candidates, and some luck.

In short: produce a contract-like document, but don't assume that it alone will give you victory.

The way I see it is that Democrats should have a set of core beliefs that they campaign on, and then put into action through government. Whether this comes in the form of a Contract with America is less important to me.

I concede it's quite possible that the "Contract" had no measurable impact. But here are some obvious questions:

* Maybe only a third of the voters had heard of the "Contract". But who were these voters (die-in-the-wool rethugs vs. independents/moderates/swingers) and what influence did the "Contract" have on their decision?

* What was the secondary impact of the "Contract"? In other words, to what extent did it motivate talking heads and ordinary folks to spread a generally positive image of the GOP, which in turn may have influenced voters who hadn't heared of the "Contract" directly?

The second factor is especially hard to evaluate. One would have to study the media coverage the "Contract" got before the elections; that would be a starting point. As for 1980, I'm not quite sure of the thrust of that argument. Nobody has claimed that the "Contract" alone won the mid-terms. What is at issue is the public perception of the "Contract" as a response to the circumstances at the time, and those circumstances were of course different in 1980.

With a "Contract with America" type plan and we must deal with them.

First, comparisons to the Contract will begin immediately, with the media incessentally rationalizing the Democratic plan as purely political and just a "copy" of the Republican political idea from 1994.

Second, our plan will certaintly give Republicans something to rally around.  This is how the Republicans operate.  Their most consistent campaign theme is making themselves the lesser of two evils.  They rarely have issues to run on that will resonate with the American public, and thus must constantly attack the Democratic Party to demonstrate they are the "safer" choice.  See Bush in 2000 and 2004.  

As a result, any Democratic plan will be attacked fervently.  I believe having a message is important.  It's something we must develope in order to build our brand over the long-term.  However, we must recognize what the plan entails politically outside its written words.  Just as much thought must be placed into how we will rebut and attack Republican talking points when they being to criticize the plan as we will put into the plan itself.  

This is an important undertaking and I pray that our leadership is up to the task.  

To judge by the Real Security document (mostly bloviation), and the procedural shambles surrounding this mythical policy document (now emerging in instalments), I'd suggest they jacked in the whole idea.

(I can't even find the Honest Government document on Pelosi's site: has it gone the way of the Slaughter report, I wonder?)

The real need, it seems to me, is a snappy answer to the question, What do the Dems stand for?

Some equivalent to Less government, lower taxes that's the GOP equivalent. (Completely counterfactual, of course: but words that work, notwithstanding.)

It's not a new point, of course; every so often, the cry goes up from one Dem pundit or another for the snappy answer to the stand for question. But no one's found one to date, so far as I'm aware.

Longer answer - Yes but we better figure out what we believe first. As far as I can tell the definition of 'democrat' is 'one who is repulsed by republicans'... after that about anything goes.

As a result the bulk of independents - which we most convince to vote for us and currently are ambivalent to the partisanship  - hear messages from both parties...

From democrats they hear... "We aren't republicans!" Then a whole cacophony of issues & policies & specific wonkery all over the map.

From the GOP they hear "Democrats raise taxes and are soft on terra-ists." Then define themselves as the party of "Small gov't, low taxes & security"... and if faced with facts to the contrary just keep repeating.

Combine these two in the minds of independents and you have 'democrats aren't republicans and raise taxes and are soft on terrorists and also really confusing'.

No wonder we lose, we've been 'defined' not by ourselves but by our opponents.

First we need to define ourselves - what we stand for... then put it in a short cohesive & formal message folks can understand without getting a doctorate in political science. Think 'elevator speech'.

Remember "Its the economy, stupid!"

Simple to remember & salient. Something like that.

A 'contract' would do that but only if we could agree on the terms of that contract.

Can we?

First of all, those are not the only two choices.  The Dems don't need a Contract with America.  What they do need is a simple set of concepts that make up a coherent narrative of what Dems stand for and what problems the Dems will attack if elected.  We have been over and over this since the last election.  Something like:

Expanding opportunities for the many not just the few;
-repairing the safety net including health care;
-fair taxation that equitably spreads the costs of government;
-responsible budgeting;
-protecting our security while repairing our international relations including ending the Iraqw debacle and
-above all, ethical and accountable government.

The Dems don't have to say HOW these problems would be addressed beyond the notions of fairness, expanded opportunity and fiscal responsibility.  "We are on the side of ordinary Americans, not just the top few."

This change in emphasis, coupled with a bright light on Bush incompetence and GOP corruption and favoritism for the elite will do the trick.

It's a puzzle:

There are dozens of good lefty writers around, who can produce decent, readable political prose.

Yet most of what I've read from official Dem sources has been atrociously written.

The standard seems to be a sort of Newspeak which is somewhere between prose for reading to oneself and that for reading aloud (the Kerry Our Plan for America book was full of it).

And so was Real Security.

If we are going to get a Dem CwA, for Heavens' sake let the alphabet soup hire some decent writers to produce it!

The LA Times also did a post-election poll that showed most people had never even heard of the Contract, or if they had, knew little or nothing about it.  Almost no-one could name more than 3 or 4 items from it. It was something for political junkies to write and talk about, and not much more.

That said, however, I have always said that the Democrats need to carve out a unifying message--but it's for entirely different reasons.  One of which is also well-supported by polls: people don't have a very clear idea of what Democrats stand for.  This fact helps explain why Dems are so vulnerble to late-breaking smear campaigns. (Another explanation is that they never learn to see them coming, and never organize an effective counter-response.  All these explanations are true.)  Lack of a clear message also makes it harder to motivate potential Dem supporters, who make up a much larger part of the non-voting population than do potential GOP supporters.

And, unlike the Beltway CW guys, I've always thought that impeaching Bush should be a key part of that agenda.  

#1, because, as MSOC said on Faux News yesterday, "The President broke the law."  If Democrats don't stand for the rule of law, then we pretty much don't stand for anything.

#2, because this is part of the larger message, that GOP is involved in a massive power grab.  It doesn't play by the rules in a wide range of different ways, it doesn't believe in open goverment, and it doesn't believe in democratic dialogue or power-sharing.  In Don't Think of An Elephant, Lakoff writes about the Dems failure to push the power grab frame in the California Special Election that deposed Gray Davis.  He was absolutely right about that failure, only it wasn't a single instance (not that Lakoff says it was, he just has a very specific focus).

Indeed, power grab is the basic GOP modus operandi, and unless we're willing to name and confront it head on, the GOP will continue to practice it, using different forms as the old ones lose their effectiveness.

#3, because it isn't a distraction from other issues. In fact, it helps illuminate them.  Power-grabbing politics--up to an including impeachable offenses--are intimately tied to special interest politics. Instead of protecting us from 9/11, for example, Bush and Cheney were preoccuppied with special interest concerns--tax cuts for the wealthy, and an energy policy for their cronies, with Enron at the top of the list. (Indeed, Bush stalled Congressional action on the Hart-Rudman Report, because Cheney was going to head up Bush's own anti-terrorist task force, but only after the much more important energy task force work was done.)  There are literally dozens, no hundreds of examples of how this works in the Bush Administration, and the GOP Congress has enabled and supported every one of them.

In short, the agenda should take the form of something like this:

(A) Government is for, of and by the people. Democrats will replace the secretive, unaccountable, illegal practices of the special-interest Republicans with open, accountable, government in the public interest.

(B) No one is above the law. Democrats will investigate GOP wrongdoing, up to an including impeachment of the President for breaking the law numerous times.

(C) Special interest deals should be voided, and replaced with legislation that promotes the common welfare.  Bush's reverse-Robin Hood tax cuts, and the massive "birth tax" they've imposed on future generations should be repealed, except for those that primarily benefit taxpayers making less than the average income. New Orleans should be rebuilt with no no-bid contracts, and preferential employment and contracting for the people and businesses of the New Orleans area. The corporate-friendly Bankruptcy Bill should be repealed. The the corporate-friendly Medicare-D program should be replaced with a program offering maximum consumer choice, the option of importing drugs from Canada, and vigorous price-reduction negotiations from the Medicare trust fund.

See?  Attacking GOP corruption--and Presdential law-breaking is the epitome of such corruption--clarifies the common thread of defining issues that the Dems can win, and win big on.

My strong recollection of those days dovetails with the exit poll results. Most Americans had not heard of it, those who had probably did not read it, and my remembrance is that when polled specifically on the positions in it they were less than enthused.  There was a desire tapped into that year to run the incumbents out and a deep seated unpopularity of Clinton at the time.  At best the contract with America was brandished symbolically by the Gingrich crowd, and I am of the opinion that had the internet been more developed at that point (I believe I first used mosaic in 1995) we would probably have seen a negative impact from the Contract.  

That is not to say that a democratic Contract-like document with the genuine popular and populist positions from our side might not be useful.  Hell, in this day and age it might even get read.

Indeed, a majority of '94 voters might not have heard of the Contract, but they probably heard it. Whether voters are aware or not of some formal document that outlines policy proposals and states positions on issues is immaterial. What matters is that these voters can hear that the particular candidates for whom they are voting have a coherent message on issues that are important to them (the voters) and that the party of which these candidates are a member has an apparatus in place to frame the issues at a national level. The value of a Contract-like document is not that voters can carry around a little pamphlet in their pocket, but that it enunciates that one party/candidate thinks, believes and will do things that a voter wants and that an other party/candidate does not think, does not believe and will not do those things.

I'm glad you're coming around on this.  I've been amazed at how many Dem pundits insist on lining up all the Dem pols behind a single target for the GOPers to attack.  It is puzzling to me why, just when we finally got the Republicans drowning in their own bathtub, so many Dems want to throw them a rope.  It is almost as if Rove has infiltrated moles into the Dem consultant class.

There is only one theme the Dems need to invoke on the national level in 2006: running against GOP incompetence and corruption.  Everything else should be left to the local level.

However, if you long for central control from DC, and wish to multiply the fiasco in IL-06 by 435 come Nov, then keep pushing for a Dem Contract.

The Constitution of the United States of America.

I'm serious.  Let's run on it.

A Contract will never work for the Democratic party. If one is made it will only contain generalities and no specifics. This will only reinforce the theme that Democrats have no ideas because nothing we say can be translated into law. It would also be pointless to write a bill and explain it to the American people because it will never fit into a 30 second soundbite. If there is to be any kind of contract it should simply say to the public that we refuse to play these campaigning games and stunts. We want to govern. We  will not shape policy so that it will make Wolf Blitzer's show more interesting but we will craft true policy that may not be entertaining but it will do the job of governing. The only thing we need to do in this election is to figure out how to get out of this catch-22 we are in. We need to be able to convey our ideas while still keeping the public attention.

We need to show the American people that if they want a party that is in campaign mode 24/7 then they already have it in the Republican Party. We need to change the way people think about politics. Once they realize that effective campaigning does not equal smart governing they will have developed the patience to listen to what Democrats think.

There is also another huge problem with developing a Contract that is shaped around Democratic views and Values. The Democratic Party is not monolithic it is a coalition. We cannot write in the contract that we are pro-choice because there are a great deal of Democrats (mainly here in the South) who are socially conservative. We cannot promise tax cuts or tax hikes because there is no consensus in the party as to the extent of either. We cannot present a unified front on Iraq because there will always be that senator or representative who will stand by his/her yes vote. The Contract will not work because there will always be some dissention in the Party that will undermine the whole thing. We are not like the Republican party. We are not liberals and ultra-liberals but we are a coalition of progressives, populists, moderates, centrists, liberals, conservatives, and other smaller factions.

The party leadership should not be out on news hows trying to convey our policies. They will just confuse the average viewer because it is not always easy to understand how a law is written or how to understand a budget. Our leaders should be out encouraging the public to tune in to C-Span. The American people need to see the Thirty Something Dems in action. They need to see the passion of Senator Feingold and the fiscal sanity of the yellowdog democrats. Once the American people are able see Democrats in action and not trying to sound like Republicans (or using their Campaign tactics) they will give Congress back to the Democrats because it is obvious that we are the party of reasonable and effective governance.

There is plenty that Democrats of any stripe can agree on, and that should be set out in a platform. However, as Lois Murphy told me at our fundraiser, it's important for the platform to be released in a few months, much closer to the election. In that way, the impact of such a compact can be maximized. The difference is, unlike the CoA, we'll follow through on it, and it will make the average American's life better.