Minority Party: Why Democrats Face Defeat in 1992 and Beyond

By Peter Brown

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• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0895265303
• ISBN13: 9780895265302
• Release Date: January 1991
• Publisher: Gateway Books
• Length: 350 Pages
• Weight: 1.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.2" x 6.4" x 1.2"

Customer Reviews

What's the Matter with the Democrats? Pete Brown knows!

Published in 1991, the subtitle belies the incredible predictive accuracy of the content of the book. Pete Brown's amazingly prescient tome was a victim, unfortunately, of a perfect storm of unlikely political events: 1. The nomination of the charismatic Bill Clinton in the Democratic primaries, the least-liberal Democrat to get the nomination since John F. Kennedy. 2. The third-party candidacy of H. Ross Perot, who drew mostly from likely Bush voters (the Reform Party's, and many liberals', absurd protestations to the contrary not withstanding), in addition to spending most of his war chest attacking Bush, and getting lavish, anti-bush coverage from a media who clearly saw Perot as a greater threat to Bush than Clinton and 3. The bottoming out of a minor recession just around election time, giving both Clinton and Perot ample ammunition with which to attack the elder Bush. But the bigger victim in this story would have to be the Democratic party, which was allowed and even encouraged to perpetuate the idea that there was nothing fundamentally wrong with their political strategies or their message, that Reagan and Bush had been a fluke and then that 1994 was a fluke. And then that 2000 was a fluke. If the Democrats had read Pete Brown's research and taken even some--not all, mind you, just some--of his advice back before 1992, they would be a much more successful party at the polls right now. Indeed, even the event that would seem to disprove his primary thesis that the Democrats face perpetual defeat at the ballot box if they don't take on fundamental change--the twice-election of Bill Clinton to the presidency--is simply the exception that proves the rule. In fact, published well before the 1992 primaries, Clinton is often quoted in Minority Party as the sort of candidate who understands what it takes to win national office. It was, arguably, doing just the sort of things Peter Brown suggests, that, along with the presence of Perot, that propelled Clinton to the top. Clinton demonstrated that he was empathetic with the middle class, not just the poor. He argued for a middle-class tax-cut (that he ultimately didn't deliver). Although he did raise taxes on small businesses once in office, he was not rhetorically anti-business the way so many Democrats still are. He rhetorically, if not practically, supported the idea of smaller government. He repudiated anti-white reverse racism in his "Sistah Souljah" moment. With the exception of tackling gays in the military and nationalized healthcare, Bill Clinton governed as a moderate Democrat, and that helped him in 1996 and almost brought Al Gore into the Whitehouse in 2000. All that could well have been cribbed from Pete Brown's book--and is just the sort of advice that has been ignored by the Democrats ever since. As a political junkie, one of the topics that fascinates me the most is why the Democrats and, more broadly, why the left just doesn't "get it". While there are a number of conservat