Democrats have tried to avoid discussing concrete proposals for hard issues, like Iraq. This is not how a party of "grown-ups" treats issues of great importance.

Democrats aren't trusted with the economy. I know of one Fortune 200 CEO who almost abandoned Kerry when he did his "Benedict Arnold CEOs" shtick during the debates. In general, many Democrats rail against business interests in the US, while forgetting where the power of the United States actually comes from: an economy powered by those very same business interests. Another example: when we talk about providing a living wage for everyone, without requiring people to invest in developing their own skills, smart people write us off as hopeless idealists, rather than pragmatists who should be in charge.

Democrats have let the other side define our position on abortion in a ridiculous fashion, as if we support abortion on demand for 7-9 month old fetuses.

Democrats aren't coming up with proposals that help most people in this country. Our abandonment of the health care issue after the demise of Hilary Clinton's proposal is one example thatq simply defies understanding. It makes me wonder whether the Democrats have any gumption at all.

Democrats seem unwilling to stand up for unpopular principles, even when they're our core principles. For example, we should be shutting down the Senate to get McCain's anti-torture amendment passed into law, not to continue to wave a red flag about how we got *into* Iraq.

In addition, we suffer from an unclear message. Ask a dozen Democrats what the party really stands for, and you'll get a dozen and one different answers. Yet we have an opportunity to fragment the Republican party along the social conservative / socially liberal divide; this would *gut* the Republican party. To do so, we have to pay more attention to reality, and we have to enunciate some clear principles that feed into all of our proposals. I'll end this flame with some core principles that I think can guide us to some decent and popular proposals.

America is the land of opportunity. We as a society must ensure that people from any background or walk of life can make use of their God-given talents. It helps noone for people to be stuck poor, uneducated and unproductive, just because they were born in the wrong part of the country, have the wrong color skin, or observe the wrong religion.

Competiton is good. Government should be the solution to problems when, and *only* when, it is clearly the best solution. There are areas where government solutions really do seem to be required (health insurance comes to mind as an area where private insurance has utterly failed to deliver, for example).

Liberty is good. The government should stay out of people's lives as much as possible.

Our foreign policy should encourage economic and political individual freedoms throughout the world.

In later posts, I'm going to throw out some proposals that should be both true to our principles, and popular.