Responsibility. Community. Competence.

The Democrats, in searching for a message, seem to have gotten stuck on a slogan: “Together, America can do better....”—or as the bizarrely-chosen Tim Kaine tweaked it in his post-State-of-the-Union speech refrain, “There is/ a better/ way.” It’s certainly true that the Democrats are in vital need of something crisp and coherent to say about themselves: if the party doesn’t begin to pose some intelligent, thoughtful alternatives to the way things are going in this country it will blow an incredible opportunity to regain some control over the Federal government. But attempting to encode the message into a snappy sound-bite (especially one as bland and generic as this) risks turning into yet another case where the Democrats try to emulate the Republicans and end up Republican-lite.

What the process truly demands is less sloganeering and more rigorous examination. If the Democrats took the time to sift through the essentials of what they hold in common, and to look at the way the most persuasive of their number talk about issues when they’re at the top of their game, they’d realize that the elements of a Democratic vision are present in the underlying concepts they’d discover. The message exists: the task is to define it, not to poll and consult endlessly in order to invent it. The result would be a kind of grid, a framework of basic principles under which many separate issues could be parsed.

It’s a reality that the Democratic Party is larger and more diverse than the Republican Party—something its leading members should emphasize with pride rather than lament. This means that Democrats simply are never going to be as patly disciplined and on-point as the GOP, that mystical apotheosis various party leaders keep pining after. (Or as disciplined and on-point as the GOP used to be—the divisions now among Republicans on subjects like fiscal conservatism and nation-building and government interference in private matters make the Democrats’ big-tent problems look puny by comparison.)

What the Democrats do have uniquely available to them, however, and more usefully than an array of hot-button phrases, are some fundamental precepts about how the country ought to be governed—ideas that are in stark contrast to what the Republicans have to offer, partly because they are ideas, in a way that “lower taxes” and “strong defense” are not. If the Democrats concentrated on these precepts, these key words, and used them as a framework to define their message, they’d be far better off than if they keep grasping for a single slogan.

Responsibility. Community. Competence. The first and last words aren’t traditionally associated with the Democratic Party—indeed they sound downright Republican—but all the better. Anomalously enough, these days you could say that Democrats have essentially become the new Republicans—in that nearly everything valuable at the core of the traditional Republican message has been trashed by the Bush administration and its leaders in Congress, and it’s now the Democrats who are advocating for fiscal discipline, and lack of government interference in private life; for doing things more effectively and less wastefully; for carefully considering before leaping into foreign adventures.

So a closer look would put these concepts—along with a more familiar Democratic emphasis on the irrefutable interdependence of all the country’s citizens—at the center of the Democrats’ message. It then could function not merely as a slogan, but as method of inquiry, a framework with which to analyze actions and policy, both the Republicans’ and their own. Used as the linchpins of such a framework, the words’ sheer unexpectedness would supply a contagious extra jolt.