Picking up from last night–today E.J. Dionne explains why it is vital for the Democratic Party to have a clearly articulated agenda:

It has long been said that Americans have short attention spans, but this is ridiculous: Our bold, urgent, far-reaching, post-Katrina war on poverty lasted maybe a month.

Credit for our ability to reach rapid closure on the poverty issue goes first to a group of congressional conservatives who seized the post-Katrina initiative before advocates of poverty reduction could get their plans off the ground.

And you know how they did this. While the progressives were busily studying the details and working out a sensible plan for actually reducing poverty, the Right got in front of cameras with pre-digested talking points and their same old Coolidge-era agenda repackaged for Bush-era consumers. And now that they’ve seized the initiative, any chance the progressives might have had to do some good is pretty much dead.

Dionne continues,

If it didn’t matter, I’d be inclined to salute the agenda-setting genius of the right wing. But since we need a national conversation on poverty, it’s worth considering that conservatives were successful in pushing it back in part because of weaknesses on the liberal side.

Right out of the box, conservatives started blaming the persistent poverty unearthed by Katrina on the failure of “liberal programs.” If there was a liberal retort, it didn’t get much coverage in the supposedly liberal media.

It’s conservatives, after all, who spent almost a decade touting the genius of the 1996 welfare reform and claiming that because so many people had been driven off the welfare rolls, poverty was no longer a problem.

From day one, Democrats should have been in front of cameras, speaking in one voice, stating the grand themes of the progressive agenda discussed in the last post. Rebuild America first! Make work pay (no suspension of Davis-Bacon)! Keep the promise of opportunity for all Americans, not just Dick Cheney’s corporate cronies! Real security for America!

This is not to say that all of these themes shouldn’t be backed up by detailed, workable policy plans. Of course they should, which would distinguish them from the empty talking points of the Right. We want to be serious about governing, not just bamboozling the public into voting for us. I’m saying this is what needs to be done if progressives are ever going to have a say in the national agenda. While the Left debates details, the Right gets out in front and starts marching–inevitably in the wrong direction. But when people want a leader, they’ll get behind someone who appears to be going somewhere. Even if it’s off a cliff.