PHILIP TERZIAN Dems need to examine selves

WASHINGTON -- It is sometimes said that one of Margaret Thatcher's greatest achievements is the modern Labor Party. That is to say, her political success was so devastating to Britain's socialists that they had no choice but to throw socialism overboard to win elections.
Something comparable might happen to the Democrats, but I wouldn't bank on it.
Two weeks afterwards, the shock of George W. Bush's re-election has hardly worn off, and the three "r's" -- reassessment, recrimination and renewal -- are getting under way again. The Democrats are becoming expert at post-defeat post-mortems: They remind me of Sylvia Plath's Lady Lazarus, who explains that "Dying / Is an art, like everything else. / I do it exceptionally well."
Are the Democrats dying? The quick answer is no. John Kerry, for all his liabilities as a candidate, won 48 percent of the popular vote, a higher percentage than Bill Clinton, and 10 million more votes than Clinton received in 1992. The Democrats remain a viable minority in Congress, and roughly held their own among governorships and state legislatures. The same percentage of voters who identify themselves to pollsters as Republicans call themselves Democrats.
But in politics, modest differences in voter allegiance amount to vast divergences in power. Since 1968, the White House has been in GOP hands for 24 of the past 36 years. No Democrat from outside the South has been elected president since John F. Kennedy -- who, lest we forget, squeaked by Richard Nixon in dubious circumstances. A one-vote majority in Congress (remember Jim Jeffords?) is all it takes to control the machinery of the legislative branch.
The next three or four justices of the Supreme Court are likely to be nominated by Bush.
Bleak prospects
This does not mean that the Democrats are "a national party no longer," as Zell Miller puts it; but prospects are bleak. In the long term, it is now possible to see that the Democratic Party has been in a historic decline since Lyndon Johnson's defeat of Barry Goldwater, in 1964.
"The Solid South," which once meant the solidly Democratic South, is now solidly Republican, and Ronald Reagan broke the allegiance of blue-collar voters to Democrats. The GOP has controlled both houses of Congress since 1994, with the exception of 2001 to early 2003, when James Jeffords' shift from Republican to independent let Democrats briefly take over the Senate. Further, Bush is the first Republican president since William McKinley, in 1900, to win re-election and retain control of Congress. Even Hispanics seem to be slipping from the Democrats' grasp: Bush won 44 percent of their votes this year, a big increase from 2000, and the next Republican presidential candidate could gain a majority of Hispanic voters in 2008.
I cite these figures not to rub it in, but to emphasize the Democrats' challenge: Either they examine themselves very carefully in the mirror, and make adjustments, or the differences between the two parties will grow more unbalanced.
Democrats have been so accustomed to their (former) status as the natural party of government that they have failed to grasp the meaning of their decline. In their view, Republicans never win elections by legitimate means, but through fraud, deception or appeals to bigotry. Reagan, they assert, was an amiable B-movie actor who hypnotized the electorate. George H.W. Bush, they say, catapulted to power on the shoulders of Willie Horton. The incumbent President Bush, they complain, was "selected" by a bare majority of the Supreme Court, and has ridden to victory this year with lies and shameless appeals to chauvinism and religious zealotry.
Informed choices
As long as Democrats console themselves in such terms, things can only get worse. They need to recognize that most voters who cast Republican ballots are not stupid, or misguided, or malevolent, but citizens assessing their own, and the nation's, interests and making informed choices.
Since the late 1960s, Democrats have been in thrall to special interests (teacher unions, trial lawyers, affirmative action) and uncomfortable with the use of force in defense of national interest and religious faith as an expression of ethical values. John Edwards notwithstanding, they are not the party of the Little Guy, but the Guys and Gals who look with horror on the Little Guy's beliefs about marriage, patriotism or abortion.
X Philip Terzian, The Providence Journal's associate editor, writes a column from Washington. Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service.