The Case for a Democratic Marker

Journalist and historian Rick Perlstein's new book, The Stock Ticker and the Superjumbo: How the Democrats Can Once Again Become America's Dominant Political Party, begins with a "political parable" about the rise and decline of the American airplane giant Boeing. Founded in 1917 with a singular vision of cheap, accessible commercial air travel despite its huge risks, Boeing ultimately became one of the country's most successful companies by sticking to its ambitious vision through thick and thin. In the '80s, just as they were abandoning this long-term thinking for the quarterly profit-driven tactics approved by Wall Street, the upstart Airbus came onto the scene with their own long-term vision of the superjumbo. Boeing thought it folly, but it now appears that Airbus will get the last laugh--their new plane, the world's largest passenger aircraft, made its maiden voyage in April. For Perlstein, author of Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, this story serves as an analogy for the fortunes of the Democrats, who abandoned their own long-term project in the centrist '90s to please the "stock ticker" of the next election. Perlstein took time away from work on his forthcoming sequel to Before the Storm to talk about why Democrats must recommit to a long-term vision and stop playing by stock ticker rules.

You have this analogy between Boeing's multi-generational devotion to building the first jumbo jet and the Democratic Party's multi-generational commitment to insuring economic security. How have successive generations of Democrats built on the same project?

Take something like federal aid to education. That was an idea Democrats had ever since the New Deal. It never succeeded for various political reasons, but they just kept at it and by 1965 Lyndon Johnson finally passed the thing. By that time, everyone knew what the Democrats were about: They were the party that supported federal aid for education. Compare that to when the Clintons proposed their health care plan in the early '90s. He ran and won on the idea that he was going to deliver health care to all Americans, and for various complicated reasons he lost that battle. But instead of saying well, this is what the Democrats are about, we're going to stick to it despite the setback, Hillary Clinton very explicitly said: What I learned was that you have to do things in small steps and incrementally. She specifically backed off the marker that the Democrats laid down, that we are the party defined by our pledge to deliver health care to everyone.

I like this term 'marker.' What's it mean?

It's a gambling term. A marker basically is a commitment to pay. In Guys and Dolls, Nathan Detroit would say, "that guy holds my marker." It's something you can't back out of, on pain of getting your knees broken. The marker that Republicans have is that everyone who runs for office has to sign a pledge--it's enforced by their own knee-breaker, Grover Norquist--that on pain of political death they're not going to raise taxes.

My thesis is that a commitment that doesn't waver adds value by the very fact of the commitment. The evidence is that even though the individual initiatives that make up the conservative project poll quite poorly, they've managed to succeed simply because everyone knows what the Republicans stand for. And the most profound exit poll finding in the last election had nothing to do with moral values, it was all the people who said that they disagreed with the Republicans on individual issues, but they voted for George W. Bush anyway because they knew what he stood for.

He'd given them a marker.

Exactly. The world is an uncertain and scary place and there's value just in making credible demonstrations of fortitude. Now the amazing thing about this is that it's a virtuous circle for the Democrats. Not only can we increase the devotion of an electorate that looks at Democrats as piddling and feckless, it just so happens that when you poll the public on what they want, it looks much more like the Democratic agenda than the Republican agenda.