Democrats Looking For Fact-Based Ideas

Some Democrats have decided to join us in the 21 century and are forming new groups with “the goal of generating fact-based, empirically tested theories that might help Democrats resolve their policy differences and win more elections”. The groups share a belief “that Democrats have ridden for too long on what are the fumes of the New Deal and the Great Society, which sustained Democrats for half a century”.

Doug Hattaway, a Democratic communications consultant who worked for Al Gore's presidential campaign in 2000, recalled a moment of epiphany during a focus group of Democratic operatives and marketing professionals he attended last year. The participants were asked to say what Democratic accomplishments they were most proud of. Their responses filled several pages on a flip chart set up in the focus group facility. "We all realized there was nothing there within the past 30 years," Hattaway said.

Betsy Newmark writes, “I'd love to see that flip chart and try to match up their list of accomplishments with what those programs had actually accomplished and whether the unintended consequences of some of those solutions had actually created more problems than the solutions.”