Ever since the Kerry campaign dozens of pundits and bloggers (including myself) have been begging Democrats to define themselves forcefully, yet simply. Last week Pelosi and Reid rolled out their “New Directions” platform. A few months ago they rolled out something else, I forget exactly what. A few months from now I’m sure they’ll roll out another list.

The problem is that Republicans have already written and mercilessly repeated a narrative that the lazy MSM has eagerly swallowed and now parrots: “Democrats are weak on defense, so guilty about their own personal wealth that they want to give it all away to the lazy poor, too intellectual for their own good, and when more than three of them get together they bicker for forty-five minutes about where they’ll go for an hour-long lunch.”

A laundry list of modest ideas won’t re-write that story.

Don’t worry about the MSM habitually harping on Democratic ideas as lacking in specifics. The MSM never asks Republicans for specifics. The GOP is too busy spouting catch phrases like, “cut and run” to let themselves be bogged down by specifics. Rove et al. figured out long ago that voters don’t give a damn about specifics. They care about feelings. The specifics of a piece of legislation are quite complicated. A guiding moral compass is not.

The Democratic message needs to be short, decisive and strong. It needs to be a worldview, a code to live by. Not a list of greatest hits.

Rarely in our history have Americans been so cynical about the political process. Democrats need to win them back by being everything the Republicans have not been: Progressives and Reformers. “Progress and Reform” need to be the Democratic mantra. “Progress and Reform” need to be the two words that Americans associate with the opposition party if the opposition party ever hopes to get another turn at the wheel. Progress on Iraq, on energy independence, on opportunities for the middle class. Reform of the way lobbyists write bills for themselves and against the interests of the American people; reform in the form of hearings to discover how the nation was rushed into a pointless war; reform so that Americans can once again feel that ours is a government of, by and for the people.

The Republican message thrives on fear. Fear has served them well. Yet Americans are now burnt out on fears of things that never materialized. In fact, increasingly, that fear is being replaced by anger at the ones always sounding the false alarm. That’s why the fuel to the Democratic message needs to be hope. Hope is the antidote to fear. Hope is a feeling. Hope is not a list.