Reclaim Democracy!

Democrats in Washington State Officially Oppose “Money = Speech” Precedent and Corporate Personhood

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Published June 9, 2004

Editors’ Note: Introducing positions into any local or state political party’s platform is one effective tool for broadening awareness of important issues among politically active citizens. We share below examples of statements passed by the Washington State Democratic Party on June 5, 2004, which occured after many citizens helped pass similar resolutions in their county platforms — a truly bottom-up process. Much of the language comes directly from our articles on campaign finance reform — we’re thrilled to see it put to such effective use!

Related platforms and resolutions have been passed in Oklahoma, New Hampshire and Maine. 

Resolution: Money Is Not Speech

Whereas, thirty-six years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the poll tax, which was a pay-to-vote scheme levied by several Southern states with the intention of disenfranchising Blacks. The Court struck down this scheme in Harper v. Virginia State Board of Elections by prohibiting deliberate economic exclusion of citizens from the electoral process, and;

Whereas, the bias of wealth still plagues our politics, largely due to the 1976 US Supreme Court decision in Buckley v. Valeo where the Court made a leap of logic to declare that spending money to influence elections was a form of “Free Speech,” protected by the First Amendment and largely beyond democratic control, and;

Whereas, as a result, we have two distinct classes of democratic participation. One class includes the majority of us who are entitled to turn out on Election Day to choose from a menu of candidates pre-selected because of their ability to raise (or possess) huge sums of money. The other class includes those wielding the real power – – the ability to finance candidates’ campaigns. This elite group determines the options for the rest of us and subsequently controls the political agenda, and therefore;

Be it resolved, that in order to provide all citizens, regardless of wealth, with more equal opportunities to influence elections, to influence public policy, and to run for office; and to further the principle of “one person, one vote” in a participatory and democratic republic; and to limit corruption and the appearance of corruption in our government, we, the people, declare the unlimited use of money to influence elections to be incompatible with the principle of Equal Protection established under the Fourteenth Amendment, and;

Be it further resolved, that we, the people, support all efforts:

  • To give Congress the power to set limits on contributions and expenditures made to influence the outcome of any federal election, including the power to ban such contributions and expenditures,
  • To ensure that each state shall have the power to set limits on contributions and expenditures made to influence the outcome of elections in that state for all offices, and

State Platform Plank on Corporate Power

Editor’s note: The language here was negotiated by the local activists who succeeded in passing the plank over vigorous objections. This is an example of their individual success, not model language.

  • We believe:
    • corporations are vital to our economy and standard of living;
    • business-friendly laws can be beneficial; and
    • corporations should not exert undue influence on our body politic or use our Constitution in the courts to thwart our democratically enacted laws.
  • We support:
    • revoking the charters of corporations that repeatedly violate our laws; and
    • a government created by, or, and for the people, not corporations.
  • We oppose:
    • the Supreme Court precedent that corporations are people, and further oppose corporate rights as persons under our Constitution and their associated constitutional rights, including the First Amendment right to make political contributions in the corporate capacity; and
    • tax breaks to corporations and other corporate welfare, unless a verifiable public interest is served.

More features on Political Reform

Democracy Run Amok? An Excess of Ballot Initiatives Plagues California

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By Los Angeles Times Editorial Board 
First published by the L.A. Times, April 4, 2004

Editor’s note: Ballot initiatives theoretically allow democracy to happen in its purest form. But what happens when anyone with a sufficient bank account — from self-serving corporations to publicly-minded activists — can spend their pet issue onto the state ballot? We don’t have a pat answer to the problems explored in this editorial. What do you think? If you’d like to learn more about ballot initiatives and referendums, visit ballotwatch.org. 

Direct democracy is running amok in California. Three propositions already are qualified for the Nov. 2 general election ballot, three initiatives have enough signatures and are awaiting official certification, and 40 others are still being circulated. Not all will make the ballot, probably including a proposal to require the state to establish a population-control program. Another would allow use of the Bible as a textbook in public schools. But an unusually large number of proposals have substantial backing from reputable groups like the state Chamber of Commerce, statewide organizations of California cities and counties, individual state legislators and activist organizations. They are paying millions to get the signatures needed to make the November ballot. Many will succeed.

This may be good for their causes, but it’s bad for California. It would be one thing if these were true grass-roots uprisings by the voters to right evils created in Sacramento. But that day is long past. The current crop of initiatives is an unhealthy flowering of special interests using their money to gain advantage in state government, including the earmarking of billions of dollars in tax funds for narrow uses. Ballot-box budgeting may help their individual causes – and many of them are worthy – but they diminish the ability of the governor and the Legislature to distribute state funds in a balanced way to meet as many needs as possible.

There’s only one course left to stem the ballot-clogging tide. Say no. Turn away from the clipboard-laden folding tables at supermarkets and on street corners. Decline to sign, no matter how alluringly the cause is described. Between now and April 16 – the deadline for gathering initiative signatures for the Nov. 2 ballot – it will be difficult to go to any public spot without stumbling over people collecting signatures of registered voters for up to $3.50 per name, more than triple the amount just a few years ago.

Another measure would simplistically cut back the workers’ compensation program, a complex issue that should be worked out in the Legislature, not at the ballot box.

One tax measure already on the ballot, co-sponsored by Assemblyman Darrell Steinberg (D-Sacramento), would levy a 1% income tax surcharge on millionaires to raise about $600 million a year earmarked for mental health services.

Another, still in circulation, would add a telephone bill surcharge of more than $500 million to pay for emergency medical care. A third, sponsored by actor Rob Reiner, would raise property taxes on businesses by an estimated $6 billion a year to pay for universal preschool for children, boost teacher salaries and buy textbooks.

Any reasonable person would want to put more money into those programs. But every dollar diverted to those interests is a dollar unavailable for child care or aid to the poor and disabled, or for solving the state’s transportation problems.

Ballot-box legislating – often swayed by false or misleading advertising – is no way to run a state of 36 million people and such diverse needs.

© 2004 Los Angeles Times

Related Feature: Corporations Taking the (Ballot) Initiative 

Executive Order 13303

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Protecting the Development Fund for Iraq and Certain Other Property in Which Iraq Has an Interest

From page 31931 of the Federal Register. Signed May 22, 2003

By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, including the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, as amended (50 U.S.C. 1701 et seq.) (IEEPA), the National Emergencies Act (50 U.S.C. 1601 et seq.), section 5 of the United Nations Participation Act, as amended (22 U.S.C. 287c) (UNPA), and section 301 of title 3, United States Code,

I, GEORGE W. BUSH, President of the United States of America, find that the threat of attachment or other judicial process against the Development Fund for Iraq, Iraqi petroleum and petroleum products, and interests therein, and proceeds, obligations, or any financial instruments of any nature whatsoever arising from or related to the sale or marketing thereof, and interests therein, obstructs the orderly reconstruction of Iraq, the restoration and maintenance of peace and security in the country, and the development of political, administrative, and economic institutions in Iraq. This situation constitutes an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States and I hereby declare a national emergency to deal with that threat.

I hereby order:

Section 1. Unless licensed or otherwise authorized pursuant to this order, any attachment, judgment, decree, lien, execution, garnishment, or other judicial process is prohibited, and shall be deemed null and void, with respect to the following:

(a) the Development Fund for Iraq, and (b) all Iraqi petroleum and petroleum products, and interests therein, and proceeds, obligations, or any financial instruments of any nature whatsoever arising from or related to the sale or marketing thereof, and interests therein, in which any foreign country or a national thereof has any interest, that are in the United States, that hereafter come within the United States, or that are or hereafter come within the possession or control of United States persons.

Sec. 2. (a) As of the effective date of this order, Executive Order 12722 of August 2, 1990, Executive Order 12724 of August 9, 1990, and Executive Order 13290 of March 20, 2003, shall not apply to the property and interests in property described in section 1 of this order.

(b) Nothing in this order is intended to affect the continued effectiveness of any rules, regulations, orders, licenses or other forms of administrative action issued, taken, or continued in effect heretofore or hereafter under Executive Orders 12722, 12724, or 13290, or under the authority of IEEPA or the UNPA, except as hereafter terminated, modified, or suspended by the issuing Federal agency and except as provided in section 2(a) of this order.

Sec. 3. For the purposes of this order:

(a) The term “person” means an individual or entity; (b) The term “entity” means a partnership, association, trust, joint venture, corporation, group, subgroup, or other organization; (c) The term “United States person” means any United States citizen, permanent resident alien, entity organized under the laws of the United

[Page 31932]

States or any jurisdiction within the United States (including foreign branches), or any person in the United States; (d) The term “Iraqi petroleum and petroleum products” means any petroleum, petroleum products, or natural gas originating in Iraq, including any Iraqi- origin oil inventories, wherever located; and (e) The term “Development Fund for Iraq” means the fund established on or about May 22, 2003, on the books of the Central Bank of Iraq, by the Administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority responsible for the temporary governance of Iraq and all accounts held for the fund or for the Central Bank of Iraq in the name of the fund.

Sec. 4. (a) The Secretary of the Treasury, in consultation with the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense, is hereby authorized to take such actions, including the promulgation of rules and regulations, and to employ all powers granted to the President by IEEPA and the UNPA as may be necessary to carry out the purposes of this order. The Secretary of the Treasury may redelegate any of these functions to other officers and agencies of the United States Government. All agencies of the United States Government are hereby directed to take all appropriate measures within their statutory authority to carry out the provisions of this order.

(b) Nothing contained in this order shall relieve a person from any requirement to obtain a license or other authorization in compliance with applicable laws and regulations.

Sec. 5. This order is not intended to, and does not, create any right, benefit, or privilege, substantive or procedural, enforceable at law or in equity by a party against the United States, its departments, agencies, entities, officers, employees, or agents, or any other person.

Sec. 6. This order shall be transmitted to the Congress and published in the Federal Register.

(George W Bush’s Signature)

THE WHITE HOUSE, May 22, 2003.

Read a Critical Analysis of Executive Order 13303

The Language of Power, Fear and Emptiness

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By Renana Brooks
First published in The Nation, July 2003

Editor’s note: This article obviously is written from the perspective of a Bush opponent, but it goes far beyond criticism, providing some fascinating insight for those who share our interest in the power of language and framing of issues.

George W. Bush is generally regarded as a mangler of the English language. What is overlooked is his mastery of emotional language–especially negatively charged emotional language–as a political tool. Take a closer look at his speeches and public utterances, and his political success turns out to be no surprise. It is the predictable result of the intentional use of language to dominate others.

President Bush, like many dominant personality types, uses dependency-creating language. He employs language of contempt and intimidation to shame others into submission and desperate admiration. While we tend to think of the dominator as using physical force, in fact most dominators use verbal abuse to control others. Abusive language has been a major theme of psychological researchers on marital problems, such as John Gottman, and of philosophers and theologians, such as Josef Pieper. But little has been said about the key role it has come to play in political discourse, and in such “hot media” as talk radio and television.

Bush uses several dominating linguistic techniques to induce surrender to his will. The first is empty language. This term refers to broad statements that are so abstract and mean so little that they are virtually impossible to oppose. Empty language is the emotional equivalent of empty calories. Just as we seldom question the content of potato chips while enjoying their pleasurable taste, recipients of empty language are usually distracted from examining the content of what they are hearing. Dominators use empty language to conceal faulty generalizations; to ridicule viable alternatives; to attribute negative motivations to others, thus making them appear contemptible; and to rename and “reframe” opposing viewpoints.

Bush’s 2003 State of the Union speech contained thirty-nine examples of empty language. He used it to reduce complex problems to images that left the listener relieved that George W. Bush was in charge. Rather than explaining the relationship between malpractice insurance and skyrocketing healthcare costs, Bush summed up: “No one has ever been healed by a frivolous lawsuit.” The multiple fiscal and monetary policy tools that can be used to stimulate an economy were downsized to: “The best and fairest way to make sure Americans have that money is not to tax it away in the first place.” The controversial plan to wage another war on Iraq was simplified to: “We will answer every danger and every enemy that threatens the American people.” In an earlier study, I found that in the 2000 presidential debates Bush used at least four times as many phrases containing empty language as Carter, Reagan, Clinton, Bush Senior or Gore had used in their debates.

Another of Bush’s dominant-language techniques is personalization. By personalization I mean localizing the attention of the listener on the speaker’s personality. Bush projects himself as the only person capable of producing results. In his post-9/11 speech to Congress he said, “I will not forget this wound to our country or those who inflicted it. I will not yield; I will not rest; I will not relent in waging this struggle for freedom and security for the American people.” He substitutes his determination for that of the nation’s. In the 2003 State of the Union speech he vowed, “I will defend the freedom and security of the American people.” Contrast Bush’s “I will not yield” etc. with John F. Kennedy’s “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.”

The word “you” rarely appears in Bush’s speeches. Instead, there are numerous statements referring to himself or his personal characteristics–folksiness, confidence, righteous anger or determination–as the answer to the problems of the country. Even when Bush uses “we,” as he did many times in the State of the Union speech, he does it in a way that focuses attention on himself. For example, he stated: “Once again, we are called to defend the safety of our people, and the hopes of all mankind. And we accept this responsibility.”

In an article in the January 16 New York Review of Books, Joan Didion highlighted Bush’s high degree of personalization and contempt for argumentation in presenting his case for going to war in Iraq. As Didion writes: “‘I made up my mind,’ he had said in April, ‘that Saddam needs to go.’ This was one of many curious, almost petulant statements offered in lieu of actually presenting a case. I’ve made up my mind, I’ve said in speech after speech, I’ve made myself clear. The repeated statements became their own reason.”

Poll after poll demonstrates that Bush’s political agenda is out of step with most Americans’ core beliefs. Yet the public, their electoral resistance broken down by empty language and persuaded by personalization, is susceptible to Bush’s most frequently used linguistic technique: negative framework. A negative framework is a pessimistic image of the world. Bush creates and maintains negative frameworks in his listeners’ minds with a number of linguistic techniques borrowed from advertising and hypnosis to instill the image of a dark and evil world around us. Catastrophic words and phrases are repeatedly drilled into the listener’s head until the opposition feels such a high level of anxiety that it appears pointless to do anything other than cower.

Psychologist Martin Seligman, in his extensive studies of “learned helplessness,” showed that people’s motivation to respond to outside threats and problems is undermined by a belief that they have no control over their environment. Learned helplessness is exacerbated by beliefs that problems caused by negative events are permanent; and when the underlying causes are perceived to apply to many other events, the condition becomes pervasive and paralyzing.

Bush is a master at inducing learned helplessness in the electorate. He uses pessimistic language that creates fear and disables people from feeling they can solve their problems. In his September 20, 2001, speech to Congress on the 9/11 attacks, he chose to increase people’s sense of vulnerability: “Americans should not expect one battle, but a lengthy campaign, unlike any other we have ever seen…. I ask you to live your lives, and hug your children. I know many citizens have fears tonight…. Be calm and resolute, even in the face of a continuing threat.” (Subsequent terror alerts by the FBI, CIA and Department of Homeland Security have maintained and expanded this fear of unknown, sinister enemies.)

Contrast this rhetoric with Franklin Roosevelt’s speech delivered the day after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. He said: “No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory…. There is no blinking at the fact that our people, our territory and our interests are in grave danger. With confidence in our armed forces–with the unbounding determination of our people–we will gain the inevitable triumph–so help us God.” Roosevelt focuses on an optimistic future rather than an ongoing threat to Americans’ personal survival.

All political leaders must define the present threats and problems faced by the country before describing their approach to a solution, but the ratio of negative to optimistic statements in Bush’s speeches and policy declarations is much higher, more pervasive and more long-lasting than that of any other President.

Let’s compare “crisis” speeches by Bush and Ronald Reagan, the President with whom he most identifies himself. In Reagan’s October 27, 1983, televised address to the nation on the bombing of the US Marine barracks in Beirut, he used nineteen images of crisis and twenty-one images of optimism, evenly balancing optimistic and negative depictions. He limited his evaluation of the problems to the past and present tense, saying only that “with patience and firmness we can bring peace to that strife-torn region–and make our own lives more secure.”

George W. Bush’s October 7, 2002, major policy speech on Iraq, on the other hand, began with forty-four consecutive statements referring to the crisis and citing a multitude of possible catastrophic repercussions. The vast majority of these statements (for example: “Some ask how urgent this danger is to America and the world. The danger is already significant, and it only grows worse with time”; “Iraq could decide on any given day to provide a biological or chemical weapon to a terrorist group or individual terrorists”) imply that the crisis will last into the indeterminate future.

There is also no specific plan of action. The absence of plans is typical of a negative framework, and leaves the listener without hope that the crisis will ever end. Contrast this with Reagan, who, a third of the way into his explanation of the crisis in Lebanon, asked the following: “Where do we go from here? What can we do now to help Lebanon gain greater stability so that our Marines can come home? Well, I believe we can take three steps now that will make a difference.”

To create a dependency dynamic between him and the electorate, Bush describes the nation as being in a perpetual state of crisis and then attempts to convince the electorate that it is powerless and that he is the only one with the strength to deal with it. He attempts to persuade people they must transfer power to him, thus crushing the power of the citizen, the Congress, the Democratic Party, even constitutional liberties, to concentrate all power in the imperial presidency and the Republican Party.

Bush’s political opponents are caught in a fantasy that they can win against him simply by proving the superiority of their ideas. However, people do not support Bush for the power of his ideas, but out of the despair and desperation in their hearts. Whenever people are in the grip of a desperate dependency, they won’t respond to rational criticisms of the people they are dependent on. They will respond to plausible and forceful statements and alternatives that put the American electorate back in touch with their core optimism.

Bush’s opponents must combat his dark imagery with hope and restore American vigor and optimism in the coming years. They should heed the example of Reagan, who used optimism against Carter and the “national malaise”; Franklin Roosevelt, who used it against Hoover and the pessimism induced by the Depression (“the only thing we have to fear is fear itself”); and Clinton (the “Man from Hope”), who used positive language against the senior Bush’s lack of vision. This is the linguistic prescription for those who wish to retire Bush in 2004.

The Commission on Presidential Debates and Exclusion of Vital Issues

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The Poverty of the Debates

Below are cumulative mentions of specific words or phrases by either George W. Bush or Al Gore during their three Commission on Presidential Debates events in 2000. Transcripts were obtained from CNN and analyzed by Reclaim Democracy! staff.
Middle Class
15
Working Class
0
Prosperity
16
Homeless(ness)
0
Poverty
1
Wealthiest
20
Poorest
1
Crime (street)
23
Crime (corporate or
white collar)
0
Prison (s)
0
WTO
0
NAFTA
0
Corporation(s)
0
Labor
1
“Free Trade”
0
Immigration
0
Population Growth
0
Transportation or Traffic
0
Slobodan Milosevic
17
Taxes
144
Social Security
67
Seniors
64
Teenagers
0
Medicare
58
Drug(s) (prescription)
60
Prevention (of illness / disease)
0
Drug War or
War on Drugs
0

The nationally televised presidential debates should address a broad range of national issues that most concern citizens–especially issues that the major party candidates typically ignore when left to their own devices. But under the control of the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD), many of the greatest concerns of the American public are excluded from discussion entirely.

The exclusion of deserving independent or “third party” candidates has generated the greatest criticism of the CPD, but the narrow range of discussion and lifeless formats also are critical problems.

The inclusion of the two third-party candidates with major national constituencies (Pat Buchanan and Ralph Nader) in 2000 likely would have changed the results of this survey dramatically, but we should insist on an entity and structure that ensures broad and substantive debates, regardless of who is participating.

The stiflingly narrow range of discussion is a direct result of the “debates” being controlled by the CPD–a private institution owned and operated exclusively by prominent Democratic and Republican party operatives. The major party candidates are granted near-total control over format, moderators, and who is invited to participate.

This control includes formats devoid of direct dialogue between the candidates themselves or between citizens and candidates. Even the promising “town hall” format has been turned into a spontaneity-free imitation of real discourse by preventing any citizen from actually speaking. The questions are screened and read from a card by moderators like Jim Lehrer, who consistently has declined to confront the candidates with uncomfortable questions.

Even former President George HW Bush decried the vapidity of the CPD’s events, “It’s too much show business and too much prompting, too much artificiality, and not really debate,” said Bush. “They’re rehearsed appearances.”

See our overview of the presidential debates and the need for reform.

Debacle: Without Vision, A Senate Majority Perishes

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By Harold Meyerson
First published by The American Prospect
November 6, 2002

They had no message. They were an opposition party that drew no lines of opposition. They had nothing to say. And on Tuesday, their base responded by staying home in droves.

The Democrats lost the Senate, lost seats in the House, and picked up significantly fewer statehouses than they had counted upon.

On what should have been the Democrats’ defining issues, they endeavored to be indistinct. They could never bring themselves to oppose Bush’s tax cut, his trillion-dollar handout to the rich, though that made it impossible for them to advocate any significant programs of their own. Nor could they bring themselves to oppose the White House’s headlong charge into Iraq, though polling showed over two-thirds of the American people oppose a unilateral war. So Missouri’s Jean Carnahan, Colorado’s Tom Strickland, New Hampshire’s Jeanne Shaheen and Georgia’s Max Cleland — Democratic Senate candidates in close races — backed the president. All of them lost.

The candidates were merely following their leaders. Senate Majority (now Minority) leader Tom Daschle condemned the tax cut but did not call for its repeal. House Democratic leader Dick Gephardt supported the president’s Iraqi adventurism and pushed it through the House at the earliest possible moment, so the Democrats could refocus the nation’s attention on their domestic message. Which, unfortunately, did not exist.

This past Sunday, The New York Times published a poll in which voters were asked whether the two parties had a clear plan for the country if they gained control of Congress. By a 42 percent to 39 percent margin, voters said the Republicans did. By a 49 percent to 31 percent margin, voters said the Democrats did not.

On election night, the AFL-CIO conducted a poll of 1020 union members, 68 percent of whom said they had voted for a Democratic House candidate. The members were asked whether they thought the Democrats had clear plans for strengthening the economy and creating jobs. Forty percent of this heavily Democratic working-class group said yes. Forty-seven percent said no.

They were right: In a nation where economic anxiety is high and rising, the Democrats had no economic plan. On corporate reform, they did nothing more than pass a bipartisan bill instituting some accounting reforms, but they squelched stronger legislation that would really have cracked down on corporate abuse — and which Republicans would have opposed. That was Daschle’s doing; he was afraid of alienating the Silicon Valley CEOs who wanted to preserve their stock options. Now, with wall-to-wall Republican control, the CEOs will preserve their stock options. The Democrats also promoted bankruptcy legislation that would have ruined working-class creditors. That was Daschle’s doing, too; he was afraid of alienating big banks. Now, with Republican control, the big banks will be able to run amok.

So Tuesday was a great day for the business interests with whom the Democrats sought to curry favor. Actual existing Democratic voters, on the other hand, couldn’t figure out what their party stood for. The Republicans knew very well what their party stood for; the president spent the final two weeks dashing from state to state promoting a message — get tough on Saddam, get tough on liberals — that roused the GOP base. The Democratic base remained unroused. An election eve Gallup Poll found 64 percent of Republicans saying they were especially motivated to vote; just 51 percent of Democrats said the same.

The base stayed home. In Georgia, where Zell Miller, the Democrats’ most rightwing, Bushophilic Senator, counseled his fellow Georgia Democrats to run to the right lest the good-ol’-boy vote turn, the good-ol’-boy vote turned anyway, while African-American Atlanta didn’t come to the polls, dooming not only Cleland but heavily favored Democratic Governor Roy Barnes. In Maryland, working-class Baltimore voted light, and longtime favorite Democratic gubernatorial candidate Kathleen Kennedy Townsend went down to defeat. In state after state, the Democrats waged a futile campaign to win over their periphery, while failing to mobilize their core. And midterm elections, as they bewilderingly forgot, are all about mobilizing your core.

If the Democrats had a paradigmatic candidate in this debacle year, it was the guy they recruited to go up against Jeb Bush, super-attorney Bill McBride. Early on, it had looked like the Democratic candidate was going to be Janet Reno, Bill Clinton’s controversial attorney general, who seemed to have no chance whatever to win. The state’s teachers unions then recruited McBride into the race. A fabulously successful lawyer with an affable demeanor, McBride had neither held nor run for office previously; he had taken no positions that could damage him with voters. Nor did he take any in the course of the campaign. After narrowly defeating Reno in the primary, he went up against the governor by criticizing Jeb’s record on education. He offered no detailed education plan of his own, however, and declined to take positions on anything else. He needed to mobilize the state’s African-American, Haitian and non-Cuban Latino constituencies, yet he had nothing to say on economic-security or other issues that concerned them. McBride was simply the anti-Jeb, and on Tuesday, that wasn’t enough of an identity to pull much of the Democratic base. He lost to Bush by 13 points.

Or perhaps the Democrats’ paradigmatic candidate was Texas’ great Latino hope, gubernatorial candidate Tony Sanchez, an oil and banking gazillionaire who dropped about $60 million of his own money into his campaign, and who also failed to craft a message of his own. Like McBride, Sanchez assailed his opponent, Republican Governor Rick Perry, for the state of the schools, and also for being beholden to the state’s imploding insurance industry. He had nothing to say, however, to the hundreds of thousands of dirt-poor Latinos, who would have gained greatly from a living-wage law that the legislature had passed but that Perry had vetoed; the issue was not on Sanchez’s radar screen. Nor was he on Texas’; Latino turnout fell understandably short of the Democrats’ projections and the Republicans won both the gubernatorial and senatorial contests in Texas going away.

Or maybe the paradigmatic Democratic candidate was California’s own Gray Davis, who eked out a scant five-point victory over Republican Bill Simon, a candidate of industrial-strength ineptitude. Davis took office in 1998 with a stunning 20-point victory, but he spent the first three-and-a-half years of his term estranging the Democratic base by vetoing countless pieces of progressive legislation, and estranging almost the entire state by his relentless focus on fundraising. In the past couple of months, he was compelled to shore up his base by signing some groundbreaking liberal bills, but it was barely enough to pull him through. For the most part, though, Davis spent his $60 million campaign boodle on relentless attack ads against Simon, driving a disproportionate number of late-deciding voters to the Green Party’s candidate.

California is so Democratic that not even Davis could lose it. The Democrats ended up sweeping all eight statewide offices, though the turnout of the base was so depressed that some of statewide contests that should have been won handily were turned into squeakers. (Of the four incumbent Democrats running statewide, Davis had the smallest margin of victory.)

From one end of the country to the other, the Democrats had nothing to say. And the nation will suffer for their silence.

It will suffer in all the rightwing judicial appointments that will be ratified, for the Supreme Court on down, now that the Republicans control the Senate. It will suffer in the lack of scrutiny that the administration will receive now that the Democrats control no committees. Only the filibuster now stands between the nation and the unchecked rule of the most rightwing, xenophobic and belligerent administration in the nation’s history.

The first order of business for Democrats is clear: They must dump the utterly discredited masterminds of their disaster. Dick Gephardt, Tom Daschle, and Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe, a let’s-make-a-deal businessman and fundraiser of no discernible strategic savvy, went up against a popular president by crafting an indistinct message for undefined candidates. Labor leaders from AFL-CIO President John Sweeney on down should throw their considerable weight behind the efforts to drive these money changers from the party’s inner sanctum.

Were there extenuating circumstances that account for the Dems’ defeat? There are always extenuating circumstances. Corporate money poured in at the end to pay for commercials that vilified the Democrats; the drug companies alone spent enough money to cure cancer had the thought occurred to them. But the Democrats had a record level of money, too. Their problem was less the quantitative imbalance of the commercials than the qualitative one: The Republicans had a coherent theme (backing the president); the Dems didn’t.

The second order of business for the Democrats, then, is message. In a nation where economic insecurity is routine; where anxiety over jobs, retirement and health coverage is widespread; the failure of the Democrats to connect on any of these causes is astonishing. Unions can help Democrats to make those connections: Among union members, according to the AFL-CIO poll, awareness of the two parties’ differences on economic issues is such that 62 percent of white men and 65 percent of gun owners voted Democratic on Tuesday. But only 13 percent of the U.S. work force is unionized; for the rest of America, the party must look to itself to draw distinctions. It must now craft plausible policies that will restore some security to the economic lives of Americans — and that cannot be done without challenging the all-wealth-to-the-wealthy economics of the administration. The party must also move to restore some security to the social lives of Americans; in particular, to defend abortion rights now that administration may soon be able to nominate potential justices who’d create an anti-choice majority on the Supreme Court.

The Democratic Leadership Council and other center-right Democrats will doubtlessly argue that this election proves that Democrats dare not deviate from fiscal conservatism at home and hawkishness abroad. But the dwindling of the Democratic base this Tuesday argues precisely the opposite: that when Democratic candidates cease to be Democrats, Democratic voters cease to be voters. Republicans may have worked to depress Democratic turnout in this week’s election, but the real scandal is, so did the Democrats.

Harold Meyerson is editor-at-large of the Prospect.
©The American Prospect