Responsibility. Community. Competence.

Here are some examples of how a range of subjects might be parsed under this framework, which is striking and easy to remember, and has the advantage of enlisting the intelligence of the voters—and of the media—by eliciting their participation, instead of further perpetrating the impression (which the repeated use of a single slogan always conveys) of trying to put something over on them.

1) Responsibility. Mutual responsibility between the people and their government. This concept means that citizens pay taxes, serve on juries, serve in the armed forces, vote in elections, obey the law. It means that the government has a parallel obligation to look after its citizens: it doesn’t send them to war under a pretext that’s radically different from the actual reasons; doesn’t tax the middle-class to give to money to the rich; doesn’t give jobs to utterly unqualified people because they’re buddies or contributors; protects the environment of the United States from irreparable degradation and the environment of the world from avoidable catastrophe; doesn’t interfere with the decisions of a family concerning end of life; doesn’t have thousands of homeless sleeping in the streets while CEOs make 800 times the salary of the average worker.

2) Community. This precept calls for a government that recognizes the United States of America as an indivisible entity, something that belongs to all of us and makes demands on all of us; a government that realizes the only way we can genuinely prosper and stay secure is if it respects and pays attention to the theoretical equality and interdependence the country was founded on. It would mean, for instance, that you don’t simultaneously have a health system under which 45 million people are uninsured and drug companies are making profits well beyond any reasonable or historical expectation of return, without restriction of their television ads for proprietary medications, and with a huge new government program that stands to increase their profits even further. It’s this principle that might have suggested to a president with any sense of tradition or history that when a catastrophic storm affects a major region of the country, he not display his priorities by flying to a fundraiser half a continent away, without finding the time to show up at the site of the disaster until days later.

3) Competence. Citizens have the right to expect the same competence and efficiency from their government that they would demand from any corporation they invest in. This means that no matter what a citizen’s individual view of a war, or how righteous the government believes its cause to be, what’s completely unacceptable is for the government to send soldiers off to fight without body armor or reinforced vehicles, or without sufficient troops to carry out the mission, or without training the troops in guerilla warfare when a guerilla war is what they’re heading into, or without sufficient drinking water when they’re deployed in a desert. It means that people in the government should be prepared and qualified to undertake a coordinated job of disaster relief. Applying this concept in a way the Democrats haven't done, very notably it should mean that you don’t impose a national education policy—a policy that alters instructional techniques and uses unfunded mandates to suck the money away from local school systems—on the basis of a set of statistics drawn from one sole state’s experience, and flawed at that: specifically, public school graduation rates in Texas in the 90’s, the “objective” premise of “No Child Left Behind,” which turned out later to have been derived without the inclusion of drop-outs in the computations. It certainly means you don’t prattle about homeland security while leaving ports and nuclear plants undefended. Here’s a place where Democrats, instead of cowering in fear that a Republican mention of “national security” will trump anything they have to say on any subject, could float a slogan emphasizing what a genuinely strong national security and homeland defense would consist of: “Minus competence, there is no strength.”