Why Democrats Don't Need a Plan

A common refrain we hear from Republicans -- and even from the pundits and commentators -- in response to Democratic criticisms is that Democrats, in order to be taken seriously as critics or as election-day alternatives, need to offer specific plans of their own first. They don't. And they can win without them. Here's why.

For one thing, I would be mightily surprised to hear of a single president, or even a senator, who won because of a single plan or even a set of plans on how to address anything -- the economy, a military foe, job creation, etc. Bush didn't. Clinton didn't. (Yes, they offered plans, but those plans were not meaningful elements of their success). Democrats shouldn't feel like they need to, individually or even as a party. (And media gatekeepers should stop acting like plans are prerequisites for valid criticism: No one requires theater critics to rewrite scenes before explaining why a play stinks).

In fact, Democrats should let the Republicans run on plans. Democrats should stipulate that they're not running on the basis of plan superiority. Democrats can run and win, instead, not just on personality superiority (which, unfortunately, looms far too largely in electoral decision-making) but also on philosophical superiority. Because where once the parties shared the same goals and basic philosophies of American governance, that's no longer the case. The White House has opened up a philosophical divide and most of the Congressional leadership has followed. Democrats should make the next elections a referendum on the philosophies on either side of that divide.

This country wasn't founded on plans for how best to organize executive-branch agencies or how to ensure independence from foreign supplies. This country was founded on the philosophy of how to go about deciding our plans and what system best embodies that philosophy. That system was intended to be both open and adversarial. We -- Americans -- were and are supposed to know as much as we can about everything, and then fight about it. That's why the plans were less important than establishing a system of three branches -- each somewhat insulated from and answerable to the others -- to determine the plans.

President Bush and the Republican Congress have not wounded this country's economic strength, its national security and its standing in the world because they had bad plans -- they have done so because they formulated and executed their plans by rejecting and subverting the governing systems that embody core American principles.

This fact is central to understanding the political and popular fallout from the Dubai Ports deal, the Katrina failures, the wiretapping debate, renditioning, Abu Ghraib and the war with Iraq itself. Each and every one of these was made possible by congressional abdication of its role as a check on the executive branch. Even the Cheney shooting gained traction because it embodied both the administration's lack of accountability and its lack of communication internally and externally.

Democrats don't need to run on lengthy, detailed plans for how they propose not to let companies owned by foreign dictatorships run our ports, not to botch disaster preparedness and response, not to violate the Constitution by spying on Americans without warrants, not to torture people and not to launch pre-emptive wars based on not skewing and not cherry-picking intelligence instead of not not continuing the hunt for Osama bin Laden. All that Democrats need to run on is a return to the American way of life: Engaging all of America's voices in healthy debate about America's future and then building consensus for how to get there. That's how we used to do things in this country not that long ago. Polls historically have shown that Americans are happiest, in fact, when neither party controls both the legislative and executive branches.

The only argument Bush has had to justify not governing this way has been the need for secrecy that national security entails. The reason that argument no longer holds is that Americans have now seen enough empirical evidence -- Iraq, Katrina, wiretapping, Dubai -- that the Bush administration lacks the basic competence we were promised from the wartime, CEO president. That means Americans are no longer willing to defer to him. And that means Democrats can and should run on one plan and one plan only: Expanding American-style democracy to America.