"It's my paycheck, stupid," Representative Steve Israel, the former chief of the House Democratic campaign committee, told me last fall, offering a twist on the famous Bill Clinton line that he has repeated many times since. That was also the basic sentiment behind the blunter electoral post-mortem offered by another New York Democrat, Senator Charles Schumer, who scolded his party for passing a polarizing healthcare law rather than more economic stimulus in the early part of the Obama presidency. Saving the planet from environmental ruin, preventing the American political system from devolving into an oligarchy, and allowing millions of undocumented immigrants to live without fear of deportation—just to take three examples—are grand goals that key elements of the Democratic coalition may set for themselves. And all of them have profound macroeconomic impacts on the country. But do they really speak to the daily concerns of people who either stayed home or voted Republican last November? As Democrats learned in 2010, providing health care to an additional 10 or 20 million people represents a generational policy victory, but it's a tougher sell to the millions more who already had insurance and believe, accurately or not, that they are paying for someone else's entitlement.

These goals are not mutually exclusive. Democrats don't have to choose between fighting to combat climate change and championing equal pay, or between passing immigration reform and offering tax cuts for the middle class. But the lesson they seem to be learning from 2014 is that their message was too muddled, and that if they aren't willing to jettison items from the party's platform, they at least need to do a better job of connecting the dots. The National Narrative Project, however, doesn't inspire much confidence. Just a few pages after expressing disdain for "Beltway consultants who recommend cookie-cutter campaigns," the party announces an initiative whose amorphous name could only have been coined by a consultant.

The DNC task force rightly pointed out that the party needed to "reclaim voters we've lost, including white Southern voters," as well as "excite key constituencies such as African American women and Latinas, and mobilize

the broadest coalition of voters possible to not only recapture state houses but also Congress." But it said nothing about how, or even if, those objectives could be pursued simultaneously. The report also acknowledged that losses in state and local races had decimated the Democratic bench, and it pledged a six-year plan to rebuild the party from the ground up, with an eye toward the next round of congressional redistricting in 2022. Here, too, the details were a little thin.

Aside from backing a constitutional amendment guaranteeing an "explicit right to vote," it offered no major policy recommendations. Democrats may have been wary of repeating the experience of their GOP counterparts, who in an autopsy of the 2012 election loss urged the party to "embrace and champion comprehensive immigration reform" only to watch the Republican House majority reject that proposal in 2013 and 2014. While skipping specifics, the DNC report did nod toward populism with a quotation from the Great Commoner, William Jennings Bryan, the three-time failed presidential candidate who was given a place of prominence usually reserved for Kennedy or Roosevelt. (The DNC is quick to emphasize the report is preliminary, and an aide noted that one reason for releasing an early, incomplete draft is to gather input that could be incorporated into the final version.)