If there’s been a gratifying story so far this year, it’s that the GOP majority in the Minnesota Legislature isn’t wasting any time.  It’s going out and taking the fight to the DFL bright and early, with proposals to pare back the current budget, curb automatic budget increases, and trim the headcount at the state’s largest employer, The State.

It’s what the Tea Party sent ’em there to do; that’s all to the good.

The DFL, for its part, is doing what parties that are used to be one-party governing bodies tend to do; sitting back and hoping that it’s all a big aberration.

According to Dave Schultz, left-leaning Hamline prof and occasional blogger, it’s a bad idea.

For the DFL, anyway:

This is a naive strategy. It is effectively one that says when the voters regain their sanity they will again vote for Democrats. This is a purely defensive and passive strategy. It depends on the steps and missteps of others in order to get elected. This is the fundamental problem with the Democrats for the last 40 years. In 1972 McGovern’s slogan was “Come home America.” Notice how well it worked. In 1984 Mondale’s was “America needs a change.” It did not work. The failure of both candidates was in part the inability of Democrats to offer a compelling narrative to counteract that of the Republicans. Democrats cannot always count on disgust with the GOP and missteps by the latter to get elected. They need to offer a narrative, to provide a set of policies that serve as an alternative. They need to stand for something

Additionally, Democrats need to fight back if they want to win.

The problem is, the DFL hasn’t had to stand  for anything other than its institutional imperatives (“More union jobs”, “more spending”) in recent memory.  And it’s only been recently that they had to “fight” for anything; it’s only been in the past eight years that the MNGOP didn’t work almost as hard as the DFL to enact DFL policies; it  was only in this past eight years that the MNGOP differed enough from the DFL in terms of concrete policy to be measured and had enough power to make it matter.

The Republicans know how to do that. The Democrats don’t. After 2008 the GOP developed a plan, a message, recruited well, and they took advantage of the Democrats screwing up or failing to define themselves and the GOP. Right now I see little sign that the state DFL is doing any of that.

I disagree; the DFL is trying to define the GOP.  That’s why you’re hearing all of the “continuing the failed policies of the last eight years” talk.  Unfortunately for them, they’re trying to define the GOP as something a majority of MN voters agreed with last November.

Yes, the opposition making mistakes creates an opportunity. But you need to do more than that to win and then to govern effectively. Begin now defining the narrative and themes for what the party stands for. Do focus groups, recruit candidates, and develop a game plan now regarding how you plan to take back the legislature and govern.

And there’s the DFL’s problem.  For all their barbering about “who’s the bigger tent?”, the fact is they are defined by the people whose hands are inside the puppet; the government and trade unions, and the metro left.  The DFL is not amenable to being overtaken by a transformational groundwell, as the GOP was by the Tea Party, growing pains and all.

The DFL is going to have to put ever-thicker layers of lipstick on the union-jacketed pig to try to fool the gullible.

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Thursday, January 20th, 2011 at 12:22 pm and is filed under Minnesota Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.