How the Democrats Can Win in 2008

By Crispin Sartwell

At the moment, Democrats bigwigs are pondering their loss and how they can avoid a repeat. And if I know my Democrats, what they're saying is this: Kerry was too principled, too committed to basic values like peace and freedom. There was too much contrast between the parties. Next time, we'll have to compromise.

And so as they gear up for 2008, they'll be thinking: where can we find a person with fewer convictions than Al Gore or John Kerry? Where?

They may actually find themselves resorting to inanimate objects: bowls of Jello, rubber stamps, and so on. The difficulty would be to find a bowl of Jello with a degree from an Ivy League university.

But here's a suggestion: instead of focusing on why Kerry lost, focus for a moment on why Bush won. His victory shows something interesting: that it is possible to have clear and controversial positions and win elections.

That is partly because of the way people think about leadership, particularly at a time when they feel endangered. But it is impossible at any time and any place to be a leader if you will compromise every principle. People don't respect you, and they don't have any idea where you and hence they are headed.

This is not a matter of simple-minded appeals to faith or fear, though the campaign was rife with those. There have been many great, smart, complex American politicians who have also had clear principles. Thomas Jefferson comes to mind. Or Barry Goldwater. Or Harry Truman. Or William Fullbright. Or John McCain.

I am personally of the opinion that this year the Democrats were under an serious moral obligation to present the choice of peace and freedom: against the Iraq war and the Patriot Act, in favor of gay rights. And they had that obligation even if it meant they would go down in flames.

They went down in flames anyway, and they went down having compromised or rather contradicted everything they ever claimed to stand for.

The current bromide that "the American public has never been so polarized" seems almost absurd in the face of a campaign in which John Kerry dedicated himself to nothing so much as obscuring all interesting differences.

The polarization can't have been about positions, I believe. Obviously it could not have been about the war in Iraq, for example. It has to do with things like "leadership style." But the Democrats need to hear this, now: believing something and saying it is not a political strategy or a style. It's a minimum condition for the very possibility of leadership.

One way the "moral values" issue cut was permissive eastern academic secularists against rigid evangelical Christians. But taking the thing at a slightly deeper level: you have no credibility on issues of moral values if you have no moral values. And you have no moral values if you will chuck anything you believe for a perceived political advantage.

Obviously the issue was not gay marriage, since as with most everything, Kerry made sure his position was not distinguishable from Bush's. But it was about whether the candidate had some kind of moral center, some basic contact with some values somewhere.

That is a reasonable thing to demand from a leader. And it might, just might, be relevant to winning the next election.

Crispin Sartwell Teaches political philosophy at Dickinson College in Carlisle, PA. He is the author of "Extreme Virtue: Leadership and Truth in Five Great American Lives."