Volume 53, Number 16 · October 19, 2006
Ideas for Democrats?
By Frank Rich
The Good Fight: Why Liberals—and Only Liberals— Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again
by Peter Beinart
HarperCollins, 288 pp., $25.95
The Plan: Big Ideas for America
by Rahm Emanuel and Bruce Reed
Public Affairs, 205 pp., $19.95
The Courage of Our Convictions: A Manifesto for Democrats
by Gary Hart
Times Books, 206 pp., $22.00
America Back on Track
by Senator Edward M. Kennedy
Viking, 210 pp., $24.95
It is not easy to be a professional Democrat in 2006. Out of power for six years and widely damned as out of intellectual steam, the party is regarded in nearly every political precinct and publication as a chronic invalid, doomed to obsolescence even though nearly all the stars are in alignment for a national rejection of all things Bush. When others aren't kicking the Democrats, they are more than happy to kick themselves. The former Clinton hands Rahm Emanuel, now a hard-charging Democratic congressman from Illinois, and Bruce Reed, the president of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, set the defensive tone of their election-year policy manifesto by quoting the Beckett-inflected soliloquy of Ross Perot's ticket mate, Admiral James Stockdale, from the vice-presidential debate of 1992: 'Who am I? Why am I here?' These days the Democrats would seem to have fewer answers to such existential questions than the sadly disoriented Stockdale did.
Review, 4109 words
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