The election of 2006 isn't quite over yet, there's unfinished business with two run off elections. I've always liked run off elections, they are the Monday night football of the campaign season, a last bit of hoopla before getting back to business. Almost immediately Karen Carter in LA-02 made her self a rising star by taking on a corrupt Democratic incumbent. Rep.Carter is more progressive down the line than Jefferson. It points to one of the most important facets of what is becoming the Democratic Renewal of America - the ability of the Democratic Party to challenge its own and set a higher standard.

The Democratic Party is going to come to town and find a horribly broken Federal Government. The first thing that should go in the trash is the word "reform". Reform is a Republican brand name for "execute a leveraged buy out of a liberal program and disburse the profits in the form of capital gains tax cuts." Think about "Welfare Reform" and "Tax Reform". Instead, our words are "overhaul" and "renewal".

Overhaul

"Whosoever desires constant success must change his conduct with the times."

Niccolo Machiavelli

Times change. Every program, however well intentioned, gets out of sync with reality. More over, programs accumulate what programs call "cruft" - bits of useless addition, often either not removed when they should have been, or inserted by very specific interests. Decrufting is part of the normal process of maintaining any symbolic system. Under normal circumstances this passes by almost without notice - it yields bill titles with arcane sounding names, which go through in relentless detail, changing specific words in US titles or regulations, and is then forgotten about.

"Reform" is a word that can be good for progressives. We are often labelled "reformers". However, reform has become a brand name for the right wing process of redirecting the benefits of some program to their supporters. Privatization, for example, is "reform".

Overhaul, however, suggests that you are not changing the net effect of a program, but replacing worn out, broken or obsolete parts of it. Overhaul tells the public that you are going to make things work correctly again, not change their intent. It is, if you will, the conservative aspect of progressivism - fix what is broken, repair what is worn down, replace what is obsolete - but for the purpose of keeping things running as they are.

There are three big overhauls that this Democratic Congress can pursue. Medicare D, Accounting, Military Procurement. Doing overhauls is not the most exciting part of governing, but it is the part which generates rewards. The point of an overhaul is to get rid of waste, inefficiency and irritation. Often mere irritants have been used by the right as a way of opening up a particular can of worms. If you look at the entire "Contract With America" - it deals with irritants, not substansive problems. And yet this was the ammunition for the Republican Revolution just ended.

Overhauls give you resources to either do more with the old program - extending coverage - or to pursue other projects.

This leads to the next part of the equation, which is "Renewal".

Renewal

Renewal tells the public that you are going to take something which has become a tired fixture and make it bright and vibrant again. Renewal often means starting with overhaul. Replace the engine before painting racing stripes - it works better.

Renewal tells people that some aspect of their existence, to which they have some affection, but which is no longer active and growing in their minds, is about to returned front and center. The Republicans want a military renewal, and pushed a religious renewal. These led us to Iraq.

Renewal, again, is not reform. It does not open the door for the benefits of change to be siphoned away into the ground some place, the way, for example, privatization does. With privatization, the public gets the bill, and the friends of the Republican governor get the profits. The public supports initiatives like this, not because they work, but because of a rough vengence. As our jobs are more unstable, so too do we become offended by those whose jobs are not - say, public sector jobs. Governments uphold their promises to workers better than corporations do. This too, is not a new observation.

The Democratic Party needs to understand that it is not a party of geography, or even demographics - the clear stratification of voting by income is breaking down. Instead, it is a party of psychographics, and of a system - namely the metrolpolitan production economy. To the extent that people are woven into this economy, they tend to vote more and more Democratic. To the extent that they have the ability to push back on this economy, they can make economic progress. For most people, that means being in a Union. As Ian Welsh points out the bicoastal Democratic base is aligned with the Union base. The two points reinforce each other - unions help Democrats, Democrats help unions.

This means that if the Democratic Party wants to continue to grow, it must engage in renewal of unions. There are obvious ways to do this - make union credit unions easier, integrate portable pensions with unions, instead of giving tax credits to corporations for providing health insurance, find ways of having unions provide health insurance. The more unions can do for people, the more they will want to join them. This also means overturning various anti-union decisions made by the NLRB and labor courts packed with reactionaries. Such as reclassifying millions of people as "managers".

Renewal tells Americans that we look forward with nostalgia, to use Eisenhower's phrase, that rather than being the bringers of some strange and unrecognizable future which frightens them, we are the restorers of what was once rightfully the American Dream. Overhaul sets the stage for renewal.

Renewal is a powerful brand name because of an aging America - it wants renewal more than anything, because it has reached the age where it is hard to avoid seeing that age itself weighs upon them. But the way to make people young again, is to give them ways of feeling young.

The Politics of Overhaul

The Democratic Party has, since 1988, increasingly been based in the same coalition that sent Lincoln to the White House, and kept the 19th century Republican Party in power with a string of presidents from Ohio. It is the coalition of industrial growth, versus the coalition of rent.

Tom Schaller has been the most comprehensive in both documenting how this is happening, and in showing why it is a vector for the future. Not the correspondance of the CNN map of Democratic gains with the Union map from Ian. Schaller analyzes the results this way:

REGION #GOP-HELD SEATS #FLIPPED FLIP RATE
Northeast 36 11 30.6
Midwest 60 9 15.0
Far West 44 4 9.1
South 91 5 5.5
TOTAL 231 29 12.6

The epicenters of change are in two boxes that I drew in 2003 as the core of the new Democratic majority: a box in the upper midwest, and a box in the north east. The key lack this election was the failure of the Democratic Party to push hard into the third important area of growth: the southwest, where there are 5 seats just waiting to be taken by a Democratic Party that understands that where there is growth, there are Democrats.

The confluence of these two realities produces an irrefutable fact: "The Union Coalition" is now the Democratic Coalition. This plays on the two aspects that Democrats should realize. Democrats lose the white disorganized labor vote, they win the union white vote. Democrats lose badly outside of the old Union, they win handily inside of it. The Democratic Party should realize that many of the close losses of this election are simply seats that are waiting for the right President with the right coattails. Consider New York 25, New York 26, New York 29, Connecticut 29, Pennsylvania 06, Pennsylvania 15 and Pennsylvania 18 as battleground districts, where the Democratic Party can create the solid impression that these seats are naturally Democratic over the longer term.

However, this does not mean abandoning the South, but instead looking at cracking the solid south. The Republicans did not win the south in an election cycle. Instead, they began from the deep south, and spread outwards. The Democratic Party can reverse this trend - by concentrating on the Atlantic Coast South, Florida and the river South - Arkansas and Louisiana.

The basis of this coalition is the America that stands to gain from the renewal of America as the leading nation in a global system of innovation.

The Democratic Renewal

Americans voted for a restoration of the America they thought they knew, an end to an endless adventure in Iraq, an end to corruption, an end to the confused stagnation of an economy booming - for other people. They did not vote for a specific program. No one is talking about "The New Direction" plan released, but it is a phrase that can be filled with whatever is to be done. "The New Deal" didn't mean what it came to mean, until Roosevelt and the Democratic Congress gave it substance.

One of the most important projects for the new Democratic Congress is to be fiscally disciplined. This has two important benefits. First, don't let George Bush spend money. It's easy to be fiscally disciplined in opposition - just as the Republicans were under Clinton. Second, it is essential for cementing the swath of districts, that run from the Seacoast of New Hampshire - though Vermont isn't really a Democratic Pickup - along the old northern road west. The horizontal stratification of America, while obscured by time, is returning as a force in poltics. The people who took the northern route are shifting from being Republicans, to being Democats.

However, it is not an end in itself, but a step towards a larger project, namely, getting control of our destiny again. Right now, increasingly, we have sold off autonomy to pay for current consumption. This loss of autonomy has a cost - growth in wages and investment here in the US. The public has voted, rather clearly, to slam the door shut on trade unless we can fix the wages problem. To fix the wages problem means having public investment.

Democrats are winning with unions, and winning in the industrial economy states, because those are the areas where the present lack of investment supply is hammering people, or hindering their growth. Lack of investment supply means lack of wage growth, it also means relatively stagnant growth for assets. The very wealthy have raced to the top looking for very risky plays on leverage to get returns. Mr. and Mrs. 401k are stuck with lackluster large cap performance. In devaluing dollars. This problem comes from neo-mercantilism and thactherization over liberalization. Solve these, and the world wide economic log jam will break and even the recent fast pace of growth will seem slow in comparison. But doing so will take effort and investment.

And that will be the source of a real Democratic Renewal.