Dear Abby for Dems
Ronald Brownstein of the LA Times reports on the various advice groups looking to rescue the Democratic Party:
Has anyone canvassed Dr. Phil? Or checked in with Dear Abby?
They may be the last two self-help gurus who haven’t weighed in recently with guidance for the nation’s oldest political party.
For Democrats, apparently, this is advice month.
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On Monday, three veteran Democratic thinkers — pollster Stanley B. Greenberg, public opinion analyst Ruy Teixeira and Bill Galston, a political philosopher who sometimes masquerades as a policy wonk — are launching a new online journal, the Democratic Strategist. On Tuesday, Andrei Cherny and Kenneth S. Baer, two brainy younger Democrats, are rolling out an old-fashioned, dead-tree quarterly, Democracy: A Journal of Ideas. It seems no one wanted to compete with reruns of “Lost” on Wednesday. But on Thursday, the Democrats gather again when the centrist group formerly known as the New Democrat Network — which has reinvented itself as an eclectic, future-oriented bridge between the party’s left and center known as NDN — holds a two-day conference modestly titled: “What Comes Next: A New Politics for America.”
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The current flurry of Democratic activity rests on the understandable belief that conservatives have outstripped liberals in building an “infrastructure” of think tanks and media outlets to develop and disseminate their ideas. But parties don’t live by infrastructure alone. If Democrats can’t find a candidate in 2008 that recaptures some of the voters they have lost since Bill Clinton’s reelection 10 years ago, they can book the hotel space for another round of these conferences in 2009.
