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Democrats at the moment are going through a lot of soul searching. Why did they lose the last election so decisively?

Weve already noted New York senatorChuck Schumersmea culpa on Obamacare. Former Virginia senator and potential presidential candidate Jim Webbtold an audience in Richmond last week The Democratic Party has basically turned into a party of interest groups.

Those two views are not inconsistent. Obamacare was put together by special interests insurance companies, hospitals, drug companies, you name it they all had a hand in the final product. Search high and low for any overriding principle in the health reform bill and you are unlikely to find it

Are Democrats out of new ideas? asks Ezra Klein. He goes on to say:

The last few years has been a period of policy ferment on the right in a way it hasnt been on the left. The Republican Party is thick with ambitious young politicians arguing over big ideas. Rep. Paul Ryans budgets have taken over the GOP. Sen. Rand Paul has beguna war with the neoconservatives. Sen. Mike Lee has been fighting to move Republicansbeyond supply-side tax reforms.

There is less energy in the Democratic coalition. The Obama administration has been a factory of policy ideas but now its agenda is stalled and its not clear what comes next.For Democrats, the election should in part be a warning about their overwhelming intellectual exhaustion, wrote Yuval Levin, a leader among conservative reformers, in a triumphalist, but sharp, post-election analysis.

As I noted in aprevious post, Democrats really had only two policy proposals in this last election: a higher minimum wage and equal pay for equal work. These were repeated frequently by guests on TV talk shows and in campaign speeches throughout the land. But these are hardly new ideas. Equal pay for equal work has been the law of the land since 1964 and no one really believes that passing more laws is going to have much effect on the work place anyway other than making it more expensive to hire people. Also, almost no one who actually votes earns the minimum wage which mainly applies to entry level jobs, mostly held by teenagers.

Many in the Democratic Party thought Obamacare would create a new class of voters grateful for all the newly subsidized health insurance Obamacare has given them. But as Senator Schumerpointed out, almost everyone who votes already had health insurance. The uninsured basically dont vote.

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Democrats' Dilemma