One question that can be asked, after reading former Senator Bill Bradley’s March 2005 NYT op-ed “A Party Inverted” in the previous JK blog post, is whether or not we have created a more favorable environment for our 2008 Democratic nominee than we had when the op-ed was written.

In “A Party Inverted”, Bill Bradley speaks of how the Republicans can still succeed even with a weak candidate, because the party provides him or her with a message and ideas to run on. Their chosen nominee has the support of a partisan media which communicates the ideas from permanent think tanks with constant funding by big donors and foundations that continually develop and test ideas and messages. All a given Republican Presidential candidate has to do is to personalize the existing message.

The equivalent Democratic candidate in a given election cycle does not start out with this sort of pre-existing infrastructure, making it difficult for him or her to communicate and sell new ideas or messages in the short time available. This leads to Democratic candidates running on charisma and catchy slogans, rather than on ideas and messages.

The Bradley article illustrates why it was much harder for a Democratic candidate to win under those circumstances. However, while little may have changed in terms of infrastructure since 2005, the Democrats running for President this time did not have to start entirely anew. They had the advantage of building upon the ideas and messages that John Kerry put forth during his 2004 campaign.

More than any Democratic candidate in decades, in 2004 Senator Kerry ran a campaign that was heavily based on ideas and messages. As Bradley notes, communicating ideas and messages in the environment of a modern Presidential campaign is harder than running on catchy slogans and shallow style. And in the 2004 election cycle, many voters never got to hear the ideas and messages from Kerry that they would have otherwise have responded to positively.

But the ideas and the messages he based his campaign on did gain acceptance from those who heard them. In a way, Kerry’s 2004 campaign became the functional equivalent of a think tank, giving the current crop of Democratic candidates many excellent proposals that had already been given some exposure and tested in 2004. The validity of those ideas and messages has been proven with every one of the many “Kerry- was-right” moments we are seeing today.

The similarities between the various Democratic plans in 2008 exist because so many of them are actually slightly tweaked versions of plans from Senator Kerry’s 2004 campaign. John Edwards’ 2008 campaign was stronger than his 2004 campaign for the Presidential nomination — in no small part because it was notably closer to Kerry’s own 2004 campaign, which greatly improved Edwards’ positions on many issues.

In 2004, Edwards called for health insurance for children only, saying that Kerry’s far more expansive program was unaffordable in one of the final debates between them. In 2008, his expanded health insurance proposals were much closer to what Kerry’s had been. Edwards also greatly expanded his environmental program in 2008, an approach that had been Kerry’s in 2004 as well.

On Iraq, every Democratic presidential candidate in 2008 echoed Kerry’s words from 2004 (as other Democrats had also done in 2006.) Every Democrat this year has spoken of the need for a regional diplomatic summit to solve the instability problems in the area. They have also spoken of how it will only be when the Iraqis believe that we will not stay there indefinitely that they will make the tough compromises needed to succeed. Kerry’s views on the need for a new foreign policy in dealing with our adversaries – a need that he has been consistently articulating even since his famous 1971 speech to the Congress – resonate even better today.

On the war on terrorism, even a person as conservative as George Will conceded that Kerry was right in 2004 when he spoke of how he would deal with non-state terrorism mostly through shared international intelligence and law enforcement, and occasional strategic military efforts only when necessary. Nearly every Democratic candidate has said something similar in 2008.

On the environment, Al Gore’s Nobel prize-winning work combined with Kerry’s positions on energy independence and the environment have become so much the dominant opinion that in 2008 even the Republican Presidential candidates “plagiarized” Kerry’s 2004 campaign platform points: that our country’s addiction to oil was financing both sides in the war on terror, and that we needed to develop alternative energy sources in order to be less dependent on an unstable Middle East.

All the Democratic candidates have taken this position as well, adding that investing in our developing alternative energy sources and more efficient technology would also lead to cleaner air, cleaner water, better health and the good jobs that would come from selling these new products and technology. Kerry made those points in all of his events and speeches on the environment during the 2004 campaign.

In fact, he and his wife Teresa made that the fundamental focus of their environmental book “This Moment on Earth,” and they both spoke extensively all across the county on those issues when their environmental book was released. It was also Kerry who represented the US Congress at the Bali conference last winter, when he again emphasized his longstanding positions on climate change and energy policy that the other Democrats are now espousing.

On healthcare, John Kerry argued in 2004 that it was our moral duty to ensure that people had access to health care. This is now the dominant position among Democrats in 2008. In addition, Senator Obama has made Kerry’s innovative concept of providing catastrophic re-insurance to protect those whose health is most at risk a key piece of his own healthcare policy in 2008.

If we Democrats succeed in 2008, it will be because the American people can see that our ideas are what this country needs, and that the ones carefully crafted by the Republican think tanks have led us to the brink of disaster. It will also be because the ideas and messages they hear this year will sound familiar, and therefore comfortable and easy to believe in, because John Kerry has been pushing them into the public sphere for the last 4 years and more.

But we need to avoid the mistake of the Clinton years, when no infrastructure was built, and work to build the long-term base of the pyramid that will give all of our Democratic candidates a level playing field from year to year.

If we don’t have the coordinated media platform that the conservatives have assembled over the years, and if we don’t put the energy, creativity and money into building permanent think tanks and teaching the next generation of progressive Democrats that the Republicans have over the last three decades, then the best we can hope for is to score another temporary success in 2008.

But if we do build a Democratic pyramid to counterbalance the one that Bill Bradley described in “A Party Inverted,” we will need to avoid the Republican flaw in their own carefully constructed pyramid plan: think tanks, by definition, become useless when they become rigid in their thinking.

Here, we have an advantage disguised as a challenge – no one has ever found a way to make all Democrats agree on issues of substance. While it may seem counterintuitive on the face of it, if we develop our own network of progressive think tanks, the Democratic tendency to keep revisiting the basics will be what stirs them to insure continued creativity over time.



Karen Corbman is an adamant Democrat, a longtime JK supporter, and we’re proud to welcome her to the johnkerry.com team as an additional blog contributor.