Don't know what they can do but if they continue to go Pelosi way left they are in for deep do do for a long time to come. The problem is that they think they ran too much to the center in the last election and they still got their heads handed to them.

They are a lost party with no rising star on the horizon. Their only hope is either a bad war or a depression or a combination of both. When as a national party that is what you are reduced to you are in big trouble.

Throw off the yoke of Hollywood liberalism. Give the Streisands and Sarandons to Nader, let him go the way of Ross Perot, publicly repudiate Moore and Chomsky and Sontag, belittle them the way the Right belittles Buchanan, or barely suffers Novak. Tell Clinton to go to Oxford and never come back. Then find some ass-kicking, hawkish black dude like Harold Ford Jr. (would have to wait for him gain a little weight and add a few wrinkles) or some cleft-chinned, Scoop Jackson-esque white dude like Evan Baye who's liberal on social issues and a hawk on foreign policy, and build the party around him.

Toss the boomers and the "stars."

It still is all about them.

Disband. Give up. Surrender.

The Dems ought to hang it up. Quit for good and for all. They got nearly all of what LBJ sought and they haven't had a new idea since.

Let the Republicans and Libertarians be the parties of the future. That would make for interesting government!

I'll give Locke this much, He at least tried to sound patriotic, and not a lip service statement. Its become rare to have a democrat politican who would talk about how "only in america" could such things happen such as his family to come here and work as a servant from China, to him as a Govenor. That bit was really good.

Just when we thought the pander bear was gone it's baaaack!

The choice of Locke smacked of tokenism. The racial set asides and quotas the Dems embrace exclude Asian-Americans.

Dude! I like that idea: Let the Republicans and Libertarians be the parties of the future.

Maybe it will come to pass. Looks like the Dems are on the way to third-party status.

how come all the democrats *say* they have a plan, but never actually tell us what it *is*?

"president bush is well-meaning, but wrong. we have a better plan. thank you."

The Democrats should align themselves with Christopher Hitchens and Oriana Fallaci. Leftist foreigners who are to the right of Bush on the War on Terror. Only when the people feel safe will they care about the other stuff that makes the Democrats smile.

Actually, although Locke's speech was dribble, the move of bring him in to give it was one of the first halfway smart thing the dems have done lately. Get an out of towner to come babble in front of the camera after Bush has yanked the rug on the discussion once again.

Relax though. There's pleanty of time for Pelosi, Daschle, Kennedy, Clinton, et al, to get into it and act stupid. They have yet to disappoint on that score...

I am a resident of WA and let me tell you, Locke is a hypocrite. One thing that struck me as interesting was his support of affirmative action. However, WA is one of only two states that got rid of affirmative action 2-3 years ago with I200. Also, Locke talked about giving more money to education, however, he has done nothing but take away education money in the past few years. Also, our state currently has a multi-billion dollar budget shortfall, yet he berates deficit spending.

Interestingly enough, many democrats in this state don't even consider Locke one of them anymore. I have a very liberal teacher who told us to watch Bush's speech and find the "lies and coerciveness" in it, but, at the same time denounced Locke and said she doesn't think he's a democrat. Maybe there is hope for our state after all...

a very liberal teacher who told us to watch Bush's speech and find the "lies and coerciveness"

Maybe that's the problem with the democratic party. Ever since the red scare they've been slowly losing ground and it seems they're finally falling off the edge.

Libertarian and Republican as the main parties... Now that would throw the Europeans through a loop. They wouldn't know which way was up anymore. What? Less government and even lesser government? But we like lots of government!

Whether you agreed w/ Locke's speech or not (and I didn't), his speech, and the choice of him to give it, signals what the Dems are thinking:

We will focus on the economy.
We will ignore (to the best of our ability) foreign policy. In the DC market, Locke's speech was preempted by the announcement that Teddy the K is going to demand that Dubya first get ANOTHER Congressional authorization to use force in Iraq.
We will emphasize domestic politics and policies (hence the choice of a state governor, rather than a Senator).
We will highlight our interest groups (minorities, in particular).
Did I mention domestic, economic policies?

I think the only thing for the Dems to do is to wait for the Boomers to die of old age. The Dems started to slide downhill in the 60's with the Civil Rights movement.

Back then they had a choice: They could take seriously Dr. King's vision of an America that treated Blacks exactly the same as Whites, with the same rights and RESPONSIBILITIES,
or
They could make Blacks into poster children for Why We Need Big Liberal Government to socialize and redistribute everything under the Sun.

They chose the easy way out. And the logical consequences of that frame their policies in Race, Foriegn Policy, the Environment, Guns and just about everything else.

But until the last person who actually experienced Segregation dies, we aren't going to be able to reconsider the consequences of the Dems 1960's racial sell-out.

Today, any criticism of Affirmative Action is considered tatamount to an endorsement of Jim Crow. But either Blacks are just as good as Whites or they are not.

If they are, then Affirmative Action is unnecessary and counterproductive. If they are not then it is useless.

The Dems have become the party of Not Facing This Issue and the consequences of it. As long as the majority of Americans are also terrified of the issue, the Dems will continue to have a place at the table

And like an alcoholic, as long as they can continue to deny that they have a problem, they will not change.

Only when the Boomers die will we be able to face the issue of Race squarely and rescue Liberalism from evasive double talk and morally inverted pandering.

Ruprecht:

Damn straight. For Hitchens and Fallaci, Sept. 11 annihilated whatever vapid multi-culti idiotarian notions they had about the gathering Islamofascist threat. I'm amazed that the rest of the sincere Left is taking so much longer to catch on. A new orientation--away from the Academy and Hollywood and toward such hawkish Leftists as Hitchens and Fallaci--would go a long way toward resurrecting the Demos as a party with an ideology that matters. Just think what America could accomplish if the Left joined with Right to bring freedom to the world, instead of simpering and sniping from the sidelines, hamstringing Bush at every opportunity. Sept. 11 woke half the American giant up; now, if the Demos would just shake off those last lingering chains of the 60's and balls-up, you'd see a Force For Good let loose in world the such as history hasn't seen since World War II.

Let the Dems sink. They've accomplished most of their socialistic goals; and all whining aside, civil rights issues are no longer a systemic problem but only an individual one... They have not found anything worthy to follow up on this. If they can't find a reason to continue to exist, they should follow the whigs into history. Irrelevent parties are not useful participants in the national discourse. (Perhaps more clearly, parties with no real platform except "we're not THEM" don't contribute much.)