Dems, Beware Electability Trap

With her campaign on life support, Hillary Clinton is making the one political argument that could hold the greatest sway with national Democrats: She is more electable.

It's hardly a surprising approach. Convinced of the party's vulnerabilities with the electorate and intimidated by opponents seen as masters of the black art of negative campaigning, Democrats are long accustomed to making electability their political lodestar.

But history shows that this is a shallow and counterproductive game -- one that can and should finally be put to rest in this election cycle.

Electability took on heightened significance for Democrats after the disastrous 1984 (Mondale) and 1988 (Dukakis) losses. But instead of asking whether their ideas remained relevant, the party began a nearly 20-year process of "checklisting" their presidential candidates -- Southern (check), moderate (check), supports the death penalty (check), tough on national security (check).

The checklist wasn't developed affirmatively, but simply and cynically -- to blunt perceived Republican advantages and stave off the anticipated loss of swing voters in the fall.

Republicans have had their bouts of "me-tooism," nominating moderates in the '40s and '50s, when Democrats controlled the nation's political agenda. But when conservatives forced the party to nominate Barry Goldwater in 1964 -- with disastrous consequences -- it did not lead to the demise of conservatism; it brought its ascendancy. Rather than echoing Democrats, Republicans presented a governing philosophy with fresh ideas about the role of government, winning on ideology, not imitation.

But for Democrats, ideas have seemingly become a secondary consideration in choosing a nominee. In 1992, liberals played coy over the choice of the moderate Bill Clinton because he seemed more electable in a national election -- then complained bitterly when he followed through on his campaign pledge to move the party to the center.

After 2000, when Al Gore downplayed his positions on the environment and guns and played the populist, in a transparent and failed appeal to swing voters, the party again returned to electability. John Kerry's nomination in 2004 was born of the belief that, in the wake of 9/11, his military record would neutralize the party's endemic weakness on national security -- never mind if he was a compelling candidate.

As an African-American, Barack Obama clearly puts long-held inclinations over electability to the test. Still, he is running into the old buzz saw of Democratic hand-wringing.

Democrats worry: How can Obama broaden his appeal beyond his supposedly "elite" base? When Obama described Pennsylvania working-class voters as "bitter," many party figures feared his candidacy was doomed. When he refused to wear a lapel flag pin, they worried that it lent credence to the absurd charge he didn't love America.

Republicans rarely experience such paroxysms of self-doubt. When John McCain made the politically damaging comment that it would be okay if American troops were in Iraq for 100 years, the GOP did not fan itself in horror -- it counterattacked aggressively.

The path to victory for Democrats is not the construction of political artifices, designed to deflect inevitable GOP caricatures -- but the presentation of a compelling political narrative that energizes voters.

Twenty years ago, when the Democratic Party had vulnerabilities on crime, welfare and taxes, neutralization was necessary. Today, Democrats are preferred on a majority of issues. They ought not lack the self-confidence to make an affirmative case for change. It would be fitting indeed if the person who relieves Democrats of their electability crutch is an African-American man named Barack Hussein Obama.