Democrats Have a Record They Need to Flaunt

It goes without saying that Republicans have an easier time messaging their narrative. For nearly a half century, the GOP platform has effectively been described in eight words: tax cuts, less government, lower deficits, strong defense. The fact that their tax cuts have disproportionately benefitted the rich, deficits have soared, cuts in government have targeted lower income Americans (especially minorities) while spending favored by conservative voters – start with military spending and farm subsidies – has exploded (along with the deficits) are the kind of inconvenient facts Republican officeholders defiantly deflect.

Democrats unquestionably have a tougher time. If you are going to confront challenges like health care, education, the needs of seniors and the disabled, infrastructure, housing affordability, nutrition, veterans’ services, pension security – yeah, it’s expensive! It takes a while for the benefits to become evident (the “implementation gap” I have written about) and there is always a chance of underperformance or failure.

But Democrats can also point out two crucial corollaries to this list: life is far better for the overwhelming majority of Americans (even conservative Republicans!) as a result of these Democratic policies and second, we would be a much poorer, sicker, less educated and less equitable nation if we had gone the route favored by Republicans over the past century.

The challenge for Democrats is less quantifying the beneficial effectiveness of the policies the party has championed, almost always over the opposition of doomsaying Republicans, than finding a way to succinctly articulate the effectiveness of progressive policies. The many hundreds of millions of dollars Democrats have poured into the Washington political strategist machine somehow fails, election after election (not to mention between elections) to produce a credible case for these policies.

Fortunately, the hard work of documenting the effectiveness of Democratic policy initiatives is available in succinct form; the challenge is distilling that information into effectual sound bites and convincing Democrats to utilize this evidence to go on the offensive.

Co-Equal, a non-partisan research organization created to “share information and institutional knowledge that helps Congress serve the American people effectively” has done the heavy lifting. Its definitive and concise analyses document the success of programs that generations of Republicans have denounced, voted against and predicted would spell certain doom for the nation. And just in time for the Holiday dinners, should anyone be daring enough to raise the touchy subject of whether we can sit by and allow the country to go to the dogs.

Co-Equal’s report “Legislative Retrospectives” focuses on key domestic policy initiatives from Social Security to Medicare to the Affordable Care Act to George W. Bush’s landmark PEPFAR AIDS initiative, documenting the programs’ enormous achievements while reminding readers of the unrealized predictions of doom that accompanied their enactment. This is not simply an historical exercise; much of this information has relevance to issues currently before the Congress that can help inform public opinion instead of simply manipulating it like much of the current debate on Capitol Hill.

Take the Republican argument that the ACA (which conservatives pejoratively, and Democrats proudly, call “Obamacare,” a sobriquet that should never have been embraced by its supporters) has failed to cut the cost of health care. During this week’s debate on a sham Republican substitute for supporting premiums, Republican leader Sen. John Thune (SD) hauled out this duplicitous canard, insisting the ACA was to blame for “spiraling health care costs.”

But the ACA never promised to lower health care spending. ACA was designed to “bend the cost curve” and slow the rate of increase in costs that were rising faster than the rate of inflation (while also expanding coverage to more than 30 million Americans, barring discrimination against those with pre-existing conditions and more). Passing ACA, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office predicted, would save $1 trillion dollars through these lower costs. Turns out, that estimate was low; current predictions project $2 trillion, unless Trump and his clueless zealots manage to destroy the program and make America uninsured again.

The ACA is just one of many major advances in public policy have that have succeeded over the predictions of doom from Republican opponents. These major successes have occurred predominantly during brief interludes when Democrats have enjoyed the supermajorities in Congress that could overcome GOP opposition and filibuster threats: during the New Deal (1933-36), the New Frontier-Great Society (1964-1967) and the New Direction-Obama Era (2009-2010). As with the recent infrastructure law, a rare example of bipartisan legislation that nevertheless took over a decade of debate, another Democratic president and congressional determination to enact, Republicans now are enjoying the benefits of the programs whose failure they had predicted and whose passage they had widely opposed.

Far from being bereft of strong evidence of the success of their initiatives, Democrats have the data to make the case to the American people about which policies have truly benefitted the vast majority of our fellow citizens, which party deserves the credit for formulating, approving and implementing them, and which party has offered little but obstruction and unsubstantiated prognostications of doom.

You can’t present a strong offense, which is what Democrats will surely need in 2026 and 2028, if you are running from your legacy. Trashing Trump is easy but it will only go so far. Democrats need to beat the drum on why, based on their historical record, they have consistently been the party that can be trusted to lead, and why they are again. Co-Equal has already done the hard part.

How about a good historical Sherlock Holmes mystery for the Holidays? Curl up before the fire with one of these, available now online: “The Case of the Revolutionary’s Daughter”, “Sherlock Holmes and The Affair at Mayerling Lodge”, “The Undiscovered Archives of Sherlock Holmes” and “The Further Undiscovered Archives of Sherlock Holmes”