I've been in that wilderness before

After the midterm elections in 2002, and again after the 2004 election, Democrats were doing a lot of soul searching. In fact, for a couple years it felt like that’s all we were doing. We had “lost” the White House in 2000, gotten our asses handed to us across the country in 2002, and failed to win back the White House against a president with an approval rating below 50 percent. Massachusetts, Maryland and Connecticut – notoriously blue states – elected Republican governors.

In November 2004, the AP wrote, “Soundly rejected in their attempt to win back control of Congress, Democrats face months of soul searching as they watch Republicans flex their increased power in the House and Senate and celebrate the defeat of one of the Democrats' most visible national leaders.” The Democratic Party seemingly had no message. And once again, as the adage goes, we formed a circular firing squad, trashing our own and refusing unity.

I can recall being at the Democratic Leadership Council’s National Conversation in Philadelphia in 2003, sitting in breakout sessions that were more like group therapy, with everyone leaving more frustrated than when the session started. We had brainstorming luncheons designed to define our core principles (a group shouldn’t be meeting to decide what it’s going to stand for). Mark Penn presented a PowerPoint explaining that the Democratic Party was on its deathbed, but of course presented no ideas on how to correct it.

We were completely lost. Who were our leaders? Who should we be listening to? Was it Michael Moore? Al Franken? Howard Dean?

After he won re-election in 2004, but watched as his party’s leader was defeated, Senator Chris Dodd (D-CT) said, “We have lost the ability to connect with people's value systems and we're going to have to work to get that back."

That sounds an awful lot like RNC Chairman Michael Steele. But imagine if, after 2004, we actually had let Michael Moore become the guiding force of the Democratic Party, do you think we’d have the White House, huge majorities in both houses of Congress, and control of a majority of state houses? I doubt it. While I feel for anyone who would ever have to be trapped in an elevator with those two, the difference between Michael Moore and Rush Limbaugh is that Moore actually had some ideas. Limbaugh just has hatred. The Republican Party can’t shout and scare their way out of this problem. But in following Rush Limbaugh, that’s exactly what they’re doing.

My point is, I know exactly where the Republicans are right now. I’ve been in that wilderness, and the path out admittedly isn’t very clear. We likely only found it because of two people: George W. Bush and Barack Obama. That, and we got very, very lucky – which, unfortunately, was mostly at the expense of others: the residents of New Orleans, soldiers in Iraq, the middle class, and at least a few Congressional pages. And if the economy does not improve by 2012, the GOP may find the same fate, but that’d be a short-term fix for their party, and if we’ve learned anything from the past decade, I would hope it is, in part, that short-term fixes have long-term consequences.

But, alas, the Republican Party doesn’t learn. They just continue to shout.