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Commenting on the Democratic debacle on election night 2002, James Carville remarked that the Democrats have to understand that people won't believe you'll fight for them if you won't fight for yourself. It's an insight that Howard Dean, at least, appears to have taken to heart. But is that posture enough to defeat George Bush in 2004? Probably not. It's not just their greater combativeness that has given Republicans an electoral edge. They have been much more adept than Democrats at articulating neat, clean positions and yoking them to a larger social vision that speaks to people's hopes and anxieties and that contrasts sharply with the worldviews attributed to their opponents.

Republicans are so bold, in fact, that it doesn't even matter that the policies they advance to embody those positions do exactly the opposite of what they claim--as in "No Child Left Behind" or Medicare reform to provide prescription drug relief or "middle-class tax cuts." They can count on the compelling nature of the larger vision they invoke, their disciplined insistence on their message, the reality that most people aren't policy wonks who will study the fine print, and the complicity of cable news networks to neutralize opposition.

A key part of this strategy is defining wedge issues that divide the electorate in ways that will deliver a voting majority. A good wedge issue works because it can fasten a broad constituency to an apparently simple program that resonates symbolically with widely shared concerns and notions of a properly ordered society.

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