Political parties, candidates and issues

The prevailing view in the Democratic Party these days seems to be that the only function of the party is to elect candidates. Elected officials--former candidates--define the issues the party stands for. This seems to me wrong-headed, back handed and why the right wing prevails.

For the last decade or two the right wing movement in the U.S. has organized around individualism and national chauvinism--that everybody should be able to take care of themselves and that America should be and should remain supreme in the world. Organizing around individualism--working together to promote individual effort-seems a contradiction in terms but it has worked and worked well. Chauvinism in a global world is dangerous. We end up going it alone, as in Iraq, and losing friends.

That's because the Democratic Party, instead of promoting new ideas to solve the problems facing individuals in an increasingly global world, has shifted to electing candidates. But for what? To defend past ideas? No wonder one hears that the Democratic Party is intellectually dead, has no new ideas. It has become the centrist party, the defensive party, whose goal is only to elect candidates.

The role of a political party is to define a philosophy--read that in today's terms as "message"-- and find the best candidates it can for public office to carry out that philosophy. Just as the right wing is always to the right of its candidates, the Democratic Party ought to be to the left of its candidates. It ought to defend them, offer them protection by providing a left base. Let the candidates move to the center.

We who are liberals ought to be smart enough to learn from the right wing movement. We ought to be talking about the issues first, about what we believe in. If we believe in government as a good, as that which we do collectively then we have to make our political party talk education, health care, how to solve traffic congestion, save the environment and survive in a global economy. Then we ought to go out and find candidates who will campaign on our issues, not just wait around for the next person who wants to hold public office and figure out ways to elect him. Maybe we should even figure out why too often it's him, not her.

Arvonne Fraser

Comments

[Don Ostrom]

I agree. A party organization becomes stultifying if the meetings focus only on fund-raising, literature distribution, and other campaign needs. We need more talk about ideas. And yes, our ideas will be to the left of our candidates, who need to appeal to a broader group.

But the party activists also have to help win elections. I was active in the Nicollet County DFL for years and years before I ran for election. One of my goals for the organization was to be more effective in winning elections than any other local group--the Farm Bureau and Minnesota Citizens Concerned for Life on the Republican side, AFSCME and the MEA (now Education Minnesota) on the Democratic side. If the party people are not significantly involved in the elections, there is little incentive for potential candidates and incumbents to pay attention to them.

So we need both issues and election activism. Can we do it?