Democrats Have Two Years to Show Americans They Mean Business on War, Health and Reform

Most mothers tell their children that "actions speak louder than words." Either Barbara Bush didn't tell her son the president that, or he forgot. The result? Sometime in the past two years voters stopped trusting their president. By Election Day, the dissonance between the words Bush said and the reality that the rest of America lived had become so pervasive that, in the president's own words, his party took a "thumpin'."

It all started when he told us he went to war because Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Then he told us that going to war in Iraq would help us fight the war on terror. But terrorists' attacks continued around the world, and the Taliban regrouped. He told us Iran and North Korea were part of the axis of evil but sat by while they developed nuclear weapons.

He said as president he'd be a "uniter, not a divider." But he pursued a strategy of playing to the base of his party and vilifying anyone in the other party who opposed him. In his State of the Union address he sounded the alarm over America's "addiction" to oil, then did nothing about it. He told Michael Brown, the hapless director of the emergency management agency, that he was doing "a heck of a job" after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. Clearly, he wasn't.

Bush's own party loyalists were just as dismayed by the contradictions. In Bush's re-election campaign he talked about the importance of marriage being between a man and a woman, but once it was over, evangelical voters complained that he was using his post-election political capital not on their agenda, but on an ill-fated plan to privatize Social Security. That, however, was only a warm-up to the betrayal two years later when the Republican Party failed to discipline and remove then Rep. Mark Foley (R-Fla.), who was making sexual advances to high school pages. Devout "values voters" felt they'd been had.

Other parts of the Republican Party were also in a funk. The conservative Cato Institute "outed" Bush early on as the biggest spender since Lyndon Johnson was president. And libertarians who had stuck with the Republican Party because they wanted the government out of their personal business began to fear that under this president the government might stay out of their factories but crawl into their bedrooms.

What was clear on Tuesday was that by the sixth year of a presidency, results matter. The vaunted Republican political machine was in place and in shape. Way too much has been made of whether Karl Rove ran a bad campaign. No campaign could make up for the fact that George W. Bush ran a bad government.

So what do the Democrats do now? With the exception of Sen. John "I-can't-tell-a-joke" Kerry, they ran a disciplined campaign and kept the focus on Bush. But what was good enough for midterms will not be good enough for the future. They've got two years to deliver a few things that Americans really care about.

Start with the war in Iraq. The Senate is the natural lead on foreign policy. Sen. Joseph Biden of Delaware, the next chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, needs to force the notoriously stubborn president to consider new options, and Democrats need to support the president if and when he does. But caution is in order — they can't let the White House make the failed war into a bipartisan problem. It belongs to Bush.

Second, Democrats finally won the heart of the middle class. So the House should take the lead on passing a few big pieces of legislation that will matter to those voters. Raising the minimum wage isn't enough. Try a real fix in the prescription drug program, and make college tuition tax-deductible. That will get their attention.

Third, the House needs to show America that it can cut waste. Don't let a week pass without overturning a piece of Republican pork.

Fourth, raise taxes — on oil companies only. That should be enough. Need I say more?

Finally, avoid guns and gays but don't avoid God. Democrats made some progress among religious voters and among Catholics. Helping the poor and saving the planet — and putting those policies in terms of core values — are good starting points for a continuing relationship with the faithful.

Americans gave George W. Bush six years in which to match his actions to his words. He didn't. They won't be so patient next time around.

Elaine Kamarck is a lecturer at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government and was a senior adviser to Vice President Al Gore.