Captain Ed, this morning, mentions David Brody’s column this morning in which he discusses Fred Thompson’s take on the uselessness of party platforms.
I tend to agree with the basic position that the party platform has become more of a problem than the problems it was designed to solve. There are damn few things that most people can remember from each party’s platform of the last several cycles. Indeed, should the parties decide to put up a platform in the conventions in this cycle, I will guarantee you that 3/4 of the voters wouldn’t be aware they had actually produced one, much less what it says.. Of those left, I can only imagine that there would be a very small number of points that would be remembered at all. This is even true of the actual candidates. When was the last time you saw an elected official hold to his party’s platform during his tenure in office? I don’t know, but I’m willing to bet that for the last several cycles, the candidates from each party, were at odds with at least some of their party platform.
So, as Ed says:
So, considering the vulnerabilities it imposes on individual candidates, the arguments and disunity it causes when drafting it, and the complete and utter lack of interest from voters, I think the question should be asked again: why have a platform at all? Brody says that the party should have a document which delineates “the principles that unite us,” but that’s not what a platform is or does. It’s not a simple declaration of principles, which might tend to unite, but a lengthy and detailed list of policy positions that tend to divide us.
I’d say a Declaration of Principles sounds like a great idea. It should be left to the candidates to apply those principles to their own policy decisions, and then defend those positions in primary elections. Thompson was right in 1996, and his advice should probably get heeded in 2008.
I find that idea of a declaration of principles interesting, in that I wonder how such a document will ever make it past the convention? I suspect, based on the last several cycles, that the Democrats are going to have a lot easier time of putting a set of principles together on paper though I suspect that what they put out will be stretching the definition of “principles” by quite a bit.
The Republicans are different matter. I have long held the idea that one of the reasons the Republicans are currently in the electoral trouble that they’re in, is because of a lack of principles, shared or otherwise. Frankly I think the same of the Democrats… regarless of what they list as being principles… however their voters are likely to be more forgiving about a lack of principles that are the average republican voter, I think. I have always considered that regardless of whatever advantage is our given us by the republican “big tent” theory, that a lack of shared principles is invariably the largest problem with which the Republicans as a party have had to contend.
The most graphic picture of that problem, is the full on, no- holds- barred revolt in the Republican party, recently over the immigration bill, endorsed by the Democrats and the President, but rejected by the vast majority of his party. The amount of disappointment would have been averted, had both the president and the remainder of the party remained true to a shared set of principles. That didn’t happen, thus the current situation.
Given that it hasn’t been tried before, at least to my memory, one can only wonder what the larger effect of the Republic party working up a statement of principles in their convention would be. While I would certainly hope that it would tend to limit the RINO faction, ( a statement of principles would certainly seem to place limits on John McCain, for example… ) I hold no illusions about its ability to do so in the short term. But in the longer term it may serve very well indeed to bring the party back to its roots.
I for one would consider that a good thing.
Tags: BitsBlog, Democrats, Elections, Republicans
