Walter Cronkite on the Democrats lack of a platform

Walter Cronkite writes:

The Kerry campaign and the Democratic Party have blown a chance to be far ahead today in the presidential campaign and the equally important campaigns across the country for control of the Senate and the House of Representatives. They have clung to past routine in drawing up their 2004 platform while ignoring an important lesson that polls revealed about their losses in the elections of 2000 and 2002. Pollsters then found that many of those who might have voted Democratic said they did not do so because they did not know what the Democrats stood for.

I think that this is a huge problem for Kerry's campaign in particular and the Democrats in general. The old adage is that you can't beat something with nothing and the Democrat's don't have anything. In many ways they have become the more conservative of the two parties, standing for preservation of affirmative action, preservation of the current eduacational system (opposing vouchers and teacher accountability) even in the abortion debate they are merely for the status quo. The big economic issue for the democrats appears to be outsourcing and jobs flowing overseas. Environmentalism, especially the quasi-religious environmentalism of the left, is also focused solely on preserving what we have, not improving or making things better. The common theme of democratic policies seems to me to be fear of the future, fear of change. Even the opposition to the Iraq War and the seeming lukewarm approach to the War on Terror seem connected by this theme of fear. We should do nothing because anything we do will make things worse. Regardless of the merits of any of these policies, lack of anything new to be pushing for is a real political problem. I don't think a platform that consists of merely Republicans are bad and George Bush is the devil has much chance of success.