Democrats: Planless or following the Truman doctrine?

Up until a few weeks ago it was vogue to claim the the Democrats had no leadership and no plan. In the past few weeks this lede has been buried benieth the Rove/Libby, Delay, Frist, and Ambramoff scandals. Suffice to say Republican leadership is going through some tough times. If I were a conservative, I'd be more than a little unhappy. Our optional war has neither brought enlightenment to the Middle-East, nor reduced the threat of Islamic extremists. Social security reform was a bust. Deficits soar as we take billions and billions in loans from China. And the president has appointed a crony to the supreme court. Add in the price of gas (for which I blame Reagan/BushI/Clinton more than BushII) and you've got an electorate that's pretty peeved at it's government.

It's enough to make me wonder whether Democrats have been advocating the cold-war policies of "containment". They may not have a plan, but conservatives need them to get one soon. someone to fight against. They need loud and proud big-government tax-and-spent liberals to demonize. They need scary stories to tell people so that the martyrs of fiscal conservatism and the martyrs of social conservatism (often very different people) can unite. With Democrats failing to show any backbone (over the last several years) the Republican party is disintegrating like the former USSR. The fact is, Bush's presidency has not held up to conservative expectations on either the fiscal or social wings. And with control of both branches of Congress, people wonder why.

The central thrust of the Cold War was that capitalism was a more competitive model, and in an evolutionary sense, more capable of surviving. Capitalisms only needed to stem the spread of communism and then wait for it to collapse under its own inefficiency. Perhaps the Democrats have a similar plan. Perhaps they feel the country is secretly liberal and will return to those roots after some flirtation with conservative mores. Rather than propsing changes or fixes or having a global plan they have chosen to simply limit long-term conservative damage (on issues like social security) and otherwise let the Republicans run the country into the ground.

Or they could be as inept as their Republican counterparts and simply have no plan. Either way containment looks like a viable plan for the nearby future.