Our party struggles mightily with its identity and agenda (or, rather, with clearly communicating its identity and agenda). Sometimes it helps to simplify things.
This is a funny story that happened during the 2004 campaign. I'm not sure what brings it to mind this morning other than my own random neural firings.
I had taken my kids (then 4 and 5) to see Max Cleland at a rally in Madison, Wisconsin. There were lots of Kerry signs, naturally.
A few weeks later, we were driving along and I pointed out a Kerry sign to my 5-year-old son, who was in the midst of learning to read. "What does that say?" I asked.
"Max Cleland!" he said. I laughed and said, "Close enough. That says John Kerry. He's a Democrat, just like Daddy."
My 4-year-old daughter then asked the $64,000 question: "Daddy, what's a democrat?"
My response after the flip.
My first response was, "Ummm..." I mean, how do you frame partisan politics in a way that little kids will understand? I hemmed and hawed for a minute, searching for a reasonable answer.
At the time, the kids were munching on their favorite indulgences: Starbursts for my daughter and Skittles for my son. As I was searching for the answer to her question, my daughter unwrapped a pink strawberry Starburst and held it up in her tiny hand. "Here, Daddy, you want one?" she asked.
It dawned on me then. I thanked her and popped the Starburst in my mouth and gave her my best definition of the party:
"Democrats," I said, "are grown-ups who share."
"Republicans," I continued, "are grown-ups who don't share."
While we don't want to run the risk of oversimplification (although that's how the Republicans have won recently), I think it's not a bad idea to boil our message down to a simple phrase such as that we are the party who shares. All we ever needed to know we learned in Kindergarten, you might say.
What do you all think? Is there a better answer I might have given?