This past weekend, Democrats released the preliminary findings from the Democratic Victory Task Force, a committee designed to analyze the source of the party’s recent troubles and formulate a solution to solve them.
Given the party’s lackluster results in November’s midterms, the very creation of this task force should be seen as a step in the right direction. But Democrats should hope the task force presents something more substantive than the rhetoric on display in the preliminary findings.
The document is filled with morally sound but realistically meaningless lines like, “As Democrats, we believe in an economy where hard work is rewarded, where everyone pays his or her fair share and plays by the rules.”
That’s fantastic, except, of course, for the fact that most Republicans would probably say the same things about themselves.
While there are certain objectives that both Republicans and Democrats purportedly wish to achieve — bolstering the middle class, for example — the policies each party would prescribe are usually dissimilar.
And Democrats must not be reticent to delineate these differences.
If they are, then they simply shouldn’t be running in the Democratic Party, for they are confounding the party’s already incoherent message.
Instead, Democrats must be more explicit in stating what policies they will enact, how their policies will help voters and why each policy is superior to alternatives.
Intriguingly, the task force recommends a “values-based narrative” and a “common set of core values.”