Advice to Democrats from www.redstate.org

Here's some great advice for Democrats from www.redstate.org Voters are fed up with the Republican leadership's inability to get control over illegal immigration and the growing Bush deficit. If only the Democrats had the courage to get out in front on these issues and move to the center on social issues.

The first party to aggressively push for policies to control illegal immigration will earn tremendous political capital with the American public.
Right now, illegal immigration is the one issue on which the vast majority of the American public is at odds with both major political parties. I defy anyone to consider one single other issue in which less than 40% of the U. S. Population approves of the way at least one of the parties is handling it at any given time.
The reality is that right now, the only reason one party hasn't politically overwhelmed the other on this issue is that frankly, the American public is disgusted with the way both parties are handling this. What makes this an especially dangerous issue for both parties is that the rank and file, dyed-in-the-wool members of the party are showing a growing restlessness, and willing to shift voting patterns on this issue alone.
The Republican party shot themselves in the foot when the Bush administration treated Tom Tankredo disrespectfully over his immigration legislation - but thankfully, few outside of Colorado know who Tankredo is, so the Elephants still have a reasonable shot of assimilating his message. On the other hand, if the Democrats get smart, and give national air-time to four or five Tankredos of their own (especially if they are from the southwest), the public could well send the GOP a wake-up call in 2006.
2. The first party to act like deficit hawks will earn enormous political capital with the American public.
There is ample evidence already that the Democrats realize the potential political gain of playing this card - and we are hearing more and more Democrats bemoan "deficit spending." The problem for Democrats is that they have about six decades of irrational spending history to run against, and further their entire agenda as a political party is built around spending more, not less. Ergo, the Democrat plan for becoming a deficit hawk is always tax more - and running on that platform is a political funeral waiting to happen. The Republicans could successfully run on a deficit hawk agenda in the 90s because their solution, spend less, was more palatable with the American public. We will see whether the Democrat approach can be as successful.
However, Republicans perhaps have an even greater hill to climb in this discussion, because they have in practice abandoned spend less as a political rallying cry. This buffoonery and abandonment of conservative principles has allowed the Democrats to bemoan deficit spending and gain traction, without having to actually articulate how they would fix the deficit (tax hikes).
The long and short of it is, if the Republicans can haul spending back under control, they will remove a huge bullet from the Democrats' gun. If they fail to do so, they will allow the opposition party an easy and virtually free sounding board on an issue that is of deep concern to almost all Americans.
3. If Democrats are to regain national power, they must abandon the pro-choice litmus test.
Much hay has been made recently about voters who vote according to "moral values", and their significance in the last election. Democrats would do well to look back on the last few decades of history, and wonder why it is that they have lost credibility with deeply religious voters - voters who in times past either went Democrat or split more or less down the middle.
Smart Democrats will realize that this shift has been a gradual one - not one that appeared in the vacuum of 2004. The last three decades have seen the most pronounced shift in mainline Protestant and Catholic voters from blue to red, and this as much as anything has contributed to the loss of the national majority by the Democrats. While other issues surely exist at the periphery of the morals debate, only one moral issue has stood front-and-center during the entire shift: abortion.
In the early days of Roe, this was not so much of a political party issue as it was a regional issue. Therefore, southern Democrats (especially) could run on comfortably pro-life platforms, while sticking with their bread-and-butter economic issues. However, somewhere along the way, abortion became a litmus test for Democrats who wished to assume the national stage. One after another, prominent Democrats like Jesse Jackson, Al Gore, Bill Clinton, and Dick Gephardt were forced to toe the pro-choice line, and it became clear that strongly pro-life voters had no home in the Democratic party. If the donkeys are to regain power, they need to see this for what it is: one of the more boneheaded political maneuvers in this century.
As a strongly pro-life voter, I hated 2004's GOP national convention, but I had to admit that in all its cynicism, it was a cunning bit of political theater. What the GOP has realized and capitalized on is that a party that is seen as at least tolerant of those on both sides of the abortion debate stands to gain huge swaths of the American public who are fed up with the extremists on both sides. The Democrats in '08 can steal huge amounts of Republican thunder by running a single prime-time speaker who makes one single pro-life remark. Just one. Just a 30 minute appearance by Casey Jr. saying that someone who is pro-life like him has a home in the national Democratic party. Their failure to do this will equate to a continued downward spiral in the polls.