Correct me if I’m wrong, but haven’t the Democrats already laid out an election agenda? They unveiled the grammatically implausible “Together, America Can Do Better” slogan last October, and that was fun. And then back in May the Post found the Democrats announcing that they would “raise the minimum wage, roll back parts of the Republican prescription drug law, implement homeland security measures and reinstate lapsed budget deficit controls” if they get elected this fall. That sounds like an agenda to me.
But now the AP’s reporting that today is really the day that House and Senate Democrats are laying out their election agenda, which includes pushing for a minimum wage hike and pressing for “tough, smart” national security. The latter sounds dubious to me; at the moment, Democrats have decided to back Israel to the hilt in its offensive against Lebanon, supporting a war that is neither tough nor smart. Odds are that a Democratic foreign policy will entail some version of “progressive realism,” meaning that the U.S. will still meddle abroad and tell other countries what’s best for them, but it will all be marginally more competent than the Bush administration’s catastrophic foreign policy. Sounds exciting.
