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Mark Shields is a nationally known columnist and commentator. |
Reform or perish
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- A story told about Haile Selassie, for 44 years until his toppling in a 1974 coup the emperor of Ethiopia, reminds me of the current state of the Democratic Party.
After his overthrow, Selassie spent his days in the Grand Palace, where servants still addressed him as "Your Imperial Majesty" and where reportedly after daily "briefings," he could still issue "orders" to his ministers and generals.
Sound at all familiar? After consecutive losses in three congressional and two presidential campaigns, more than a few Democrats still take comfort from the fact that a switch of just 60,000 Ohio votes could have put John Kerry in the White House.
According to the latest Pew Research Center poll, voters who have heard "a lot " about President Bush's proposal to overhaul Social Security through private investment accounts continue to hemorrhage support for the president's plan. But as the GOP drops, Democrats are not the beneficiaries.
James Carville and Stanley Greenberg, two architects of Bill Clinton's 1992 White House win, conclude from their own national surveys that Democrats "appear to lack direction, conviction, values, advocacy or a larger public purpose." Happy days are not here -- or even near -- again.
The Haile Selassie Syndrome infects many Democratic officeholders who wrongly think of themselves as the insiders, the natural governing party. They are not. They are a depleted minority.
But defeat can be wonderfully liberating. To compete, Democrats must see themselves for what they are and must become the Party of Reform, the relentless enemy of the status quo, of the Washington Republican establishment.
No better place to begin than heeding the reform words and deeds of the one Democrat who strikes genuine fear into the dark hearts of corporate malefactors, New York state Attorney General Eliot Spitzer.
While the Bush administration dragged its Gucci loafers, Spitzer and his lawyers got mutual funds that had ripped off customers to pay more than $2.3 billion in fines and major Wall Street investment houses to pay $1.4 billion for swindling their customers, and broke up an illegal insurance cartel.
"It is the Democratic Party historically that created the middle class," says Spitzer, "that protected middle-class investments. Democrats made it possible to invest with integrity and transparency." Democrats believe and have proved that "Government has to enforce the rule of transparency."
In addition to economic reform, Democrats must embrace political reform. Congressional redistricting has regularly produced in the thoughtful judgment of political thinker Tom Mann "the pathologies associated with legislative redistricting -- incumbent protection, noncompetitive elections, partisan bias and polarization ..." He is right.
Democrats must champion the real reform of independent redistricting commissions working under total transparency and committed to competitive electoral races.
Private money and Republican Washington are slimy and synonymous. Are Democrats strong enough to advocate a law that follows the practice in some state capitals and outlaws all fund raising while Congress is in session?
Can they stop the revolving-door of influence-peddling between high office and Big Money by banning for 10 years public officials, including former members of Congress, from lobbying the Congress or the executive?
In George Bush's America, what people earn by the work of their hands, their heads or their hearts will be taxed, while all unearned income from stocks, interest, bonds and property will be untaxed. It is that simple. If Democrats lack the wit or the will to take on that moral outrage, then it is time for them to shuffle off quietly into the dustbin of history.
This list is descriptive rather than definitive. Missing is any Big Idea to provide an overarching mission for the party or a 10-point legislative program. The former is beyond my pay grade, and the latter would be an exercise in futility.
The immediate question is whether Democrats are now able to see themselves for what they are -- an out-of-power, out-of-office minority, for whom honesty and reform are the only realistic policy and the only hope.
