I volunteered for Bill Bradley in 2000. I thought it was absolutely critical that he deny Al Gore the nomination. I believe history has vindicated that appraisal. I know Gore has legions of fans these days, but he still lost to Bush (or won…whatever). In Bill Bradley’s new book, The New America Story, he has a chapter called Why Democrats Don’t. The following excerpts are on the trauma of Reagan’s presidency and the rise of the DLC in response. It shows that Bradley understands the roots of our current problems.
After Reagan won in 1980 and nine Democratic senators were defeated, giving control of the Senate to the Republicans, Democrats lost not just their confidence but some of their convictions as well. Indeed, their pro-government stance of the previous forty-eight years was said to be the cause of the party’s defeat. Ronald Reagan had tapped into the anxiety that many taxpayers felt about the nature of the federal bureaucracy, portraying it as too big, too intrusive, and too wasteful. A kind of Democratic panic ensued. It was as if ‘government’ had become a bad word. Republicans had successfully defined the political moment, and we Democrats increasingly sought to be Republican lite. At the time, few of us seemed to understand the depth of our party’s problem. “In politics,” the late political scientists David Green wrote in The Language of Politics in America: Shaping Political Consciousness from McKinley to Reagan, “real intellectual victory is achieved not by transmitting one’s language to supporters but by transmitting it to critics.” When you adopt your opponents’ definition of the situation, including their premises and even some of the substantive analysis, effective opposition becomes difficult. By 1984, when former vice president Walter Mondale ran, Democrats were no longer in control of the dialogue.