A CARTOONIST tells it best. An elephant lies snoozing. Sensing the time is right, a crowd of Democratic mice surround it and move in for the kill. “What's the plan?” asks one. “Plan?” asks another. “Maybe we should have a meeting,” says a third. “What if we win?” frets a fourth.

The Republicans are so unpopular that any semi-competent opposition party should be sauntering to victory in the mid-term elections in November. Only 36% of Americans think George Bush is doing a good job as president. Even Republican states are lukewarm: his approval rating is above 50% only in Idaho, Nebraska, Utah and Wyoming. And Americans like the Republican-led Congress even less: a paltry 23% of them approve of its performance.

With America mired in Iraq and the Republicans mired in scandal, the Democrats have plenty of large, slow-moving targets to aim at. When they accuse Mr Bush of valuing loyalty above competence, he obligingly refuses to sack Donald Rumsfeld, the bungler-in-chief in Iraq. When they decry the ruling party's “culture of corruption”, people think of Randy “Duke” Cunningham, a bribe-trousering ex-congressman whose marble-topped commode was among many ill-gotten items the FBI auctioned last month.

Yet Pat Oliphant, the cartoonist who drew the muddled mice, is not the only one to doubt the potency of the Democrats. “For the Americans in the middle, who have no strong partisan allegiances, we have failed to articulate a real plan or vision,” say Markos Moulitsas Zúniga and Jerome Armstrong, two of the most popular Democratic bloggers. “It's not that people know what we stand for and disagree; it's that they have no idea what we stand for,” say James Carville and Paul Begala, two of the architects of Bill Clinton's winning presidential campaign in 1992. The junior senator from Illinois, Barack Obama, one of the Democrats' most admired politicians, has tried to make a joke of it. “You hear this constant refrain from our critics that Democrats don't stand for anything,” he remarked the other day. “That's really unfair. We do stand for anything.”

In fact, both parties are a tangle of contradictions. But whereas the Republicans have one clear leader—the president—the Democrats do not. Should voters pay more attention to Nancy Pelosi, their leader in the House of Representatives, Harry Reid, the top Democrat in the Senate, or one of the scrum of Democratic presidential hopefuls? And since the Democrats control no branch of the federal government, their national record of late is one of speeches and protest votes, rather than actions whose merits can be judged. All this makes it hard to predict what might happen were they to win back one or both houses of Congress in November.

A Democratic takeover is far from assured. Granted, they have a double-digit lead in the polls. In a survey by AP-Ipsos this month, 49% of respondents said they would rather the Democrats ran Congress, whereas only 33% preferred the Republicans. But polls are unreliable. Not everyone who grumbles about Mr Bush will vote: turnout in mid-term elections is typically not much more than a third. And other obstacles must be overcome.

In the House, all 435 seats are up for election, but incumbents seldom lose these days. Southern seats—those in the 11 states of the old Confederacy—became more competitive in the 1980s, but have since joined the trend elsewhere (see charts). Nowadays, no matter where they are, over 90% of those who run tend to be re-elected (98% in 2004), thanks to gerrymandering and the ease with which those in power can raise money. The Senate is unsullied by gerrymandering, since state borders cannot be redrawn. But only a third of the Senate's seats are up for election, and sitting senators are even better at raising money than incumbents in the House. In the current campaign, the Republicans have so far raised $321m and the Democrats $226m.

The Democrats need to win 15 extra seats to capture the House and six to take the Senate. The last time such a revolution hit Capitol Hill was in 1994, when the Republicans seized both Houses. That victory came partly because voters were fed up with a Democratic Party that had grown complacent after too long in office, much like today's Republicans. But it was also because Newt Gingrich and his cohorts offered a clear platform: the tax-slashing, government-shrinking “Contract with America”. The Democrats have no manifesto to compare with this, but they have been trying, in recent weeks, to give voters some idea of where they stand.





The Mommy party girds for battle

Their weakest issue has long been national security. On Iraq, the Democrats are tarred by association with the loopier critics of the war in Iraq, and by outbursts of defeatism among their own leaders. Howard Dean, the party chairman, said last year that the “idea that we're going to win the war in Iraq is an idea which is just plain wrong.” As for the broader fight against terrorism, Democrats often sound as though they do not take it as seriously as other Americans. Moreover, Democratic activists are obsessed with the idea of impeaching Mr Bush. His alleged offence is to have ordered warrantless wiretaps to catch terrorists when, many lawyers argue, warrants were required. The party leaders do not want to make this a campaign issue, because Republicans would then say Democrats cared more about terrorists' privacy than American lives.

To combat the charge that they have a “pre-9/11 world view”, Democratic leaders have done their best to recruit ex-servicemen to run for the party. And last month the top two Democrats in Congress, Mr Reid and Ms Pelosi, surrounded themselves with fire-fighters, police and veterans to unveil a strategy for “Real Security”. This document would be more convincing as a call to arms if it did not read like a string of phrases chosen for their popularity with focus-groups and then crammed into one sentence after another. For example: “To Ensure Unparalleled Military Strength and Honour our Troops, we will rebuild a state-of-the-art military by making the needed investments in equipment and manpower so that we can project power to protect America wherever and whenever necessary.”

Churchillian it may not be, but most of “Real Security” is sensible. The trouble is that its main hard proposals—kill Osama bin Laden, train more special forces, reduce dependence on Middle Eastern oil and make 2006 “a year of significant transition to full Iraqi sovereignty”—sound awfully similar to Mr Bush's plans.

Where the details differ, the Democrats' suggestions are sometimes footling (create “a national tyre fuel-efficiency programme”) or daft (criminal penalties for energy companies that “price-gouge”). One throwaway commitment casually promises to reshape the world: the Democrats would “[e]liminate terrorist breeding-grounds by combating the economic, social and political conditions that allow extremism to thrive.”

To be fair, it is difficult to produce a national-security platform that amounts to much in a year when the presidency is not being contested. Even if the Democrats win both houses of Congress, Mr Bush will remain commander-in-chief. In the end, the national-security debate boils down to this. Voters doubt that the Democrats take terrorism as seriously as the Republicans do, but they also doubt that the Democrats could be as incompetent in fighting it. One recent poll showed that the Republicans' long-standing advantage as the party people trust to protect America had dwindled to nothing. That should scare the party of Dwight Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan and George Bush senior.

On most other issues, people tell pollsters that they prefer the Democrats. On the economy, there are some good reasons to do so—though tempered by doubts. America's most urgent macroeconomic ill is the federal government's budget. Under Mr Bush, this has slithered from showing a surplus of $236 billion in 2000 to running a deficit of $318 billion in 2005. That would be worrying enough in normal circumstances, but with the baby-boom generation about to retire and start claiming Social Security (government pensions) and Medicare (government health care for the elderly), it heralds catastrophe.

The Democrats are trying hard to sound fierce about the deficit. Hillary Clinton, their most prominent presidential aspirant, declared recently that “red-ink fiscal policies will undermine America's competitiveness”. The party promises to restore the “pay-as-you-go” principle that was scrapped in 2002. In other words, all new tax cuts or spending would have to be balanced by new savings. But do the Democrats propose any specific tax increases or spending cuts that might actually bridge the deficit? Apart from promising to repeal Mr Bush's tax cuts for “the rich”—whom they take care not to define too clearly—no. In opposition, anyway, they have clamoured above all for more spending.





All cheques, no balances

The two strongest reasons for thinking that voting Democratic might improve fiscal discipline have nothing to do with the Democrats' campaign promises. One is that the Republicans have been so profligate. The other is that divided government would give both parties a scapegoat. If Mr Bush had to share power, he could blame the Democrats for everything that hurt his supporters, and they could blame him for everything that hurt theirs. That way, something might be done.

But in truth, neither party has a serious plan for grappling with the long-term shortfall that will be caused by the baby-boomers' retirement. Economists close to the Democratic Party understand the problem. In a recent paper for the Brookings Institution, a Washington think-tank, Alan Auerbach, William Gale and Peter Orszag predict that the boomers' demand for doctors, drugs and pensions will help inflate the federal budget deficit to a crippling 10.8% of GDP. But, they sigh, “Dealing with these imbalances will require spending cuts or tax increases that are far beyond the scale of anything currently considered politically palatable.”

One topic on which the Democrats are plainly less liberal than the Republicans is trade. Bill Clinton may have had the courage to push through the North American Free-Trade Agreement in 1993, but his party is now increasingly protectionist. Mrs Clinton describes herself as “a very staunch supporter” of trade agreements, but voted against the Central American Free-Trade Agreement last year, and also against granting the president clear authority to negotiate such deals. Only 25% of Senate Democrats backed the Central American one, and only 15 out of 202 Democrats in the House.

Party leaders deny that they are protectionist. They prefer to say they support “fair trade”. That is, they want to impose rich-world labour standards on countries whose competitive advantage is low labour costs. This is old-fashioned protectionism masquerading as compassion. If “fair trade” became American policy, the results would be higher prices for American consumers and higher unemployment in the rest of the world.

Some Democrats argue that if support for globalisation is to be maintained, more must be done to ease the plight of those who are hurt by it. Fair enough, but they would sound more convincing on this if they did not also shamelessly scaremonger about China, outsourcing abroad and the prospect of Arabs running American ports. A Democrat-controlled Congress would pose a grave threat to the further liberalisation of world trade—and so to world prosperity—unless power prompted the party to become more responsible.





Issue by issue

On microeconomic issues, the Democrats offer a grab-bag of policies. They want to raise the minimum wage. They would extend Medicaid (health insurance for the poor) to include more, slightly-better-off people. They would offer a tax credit to help small firms and the self-employed with their health costs. They would let all 55-65-year-olds buy their health insurance from Medicare. They would subsidise saving for retirement by up to $1,000 a person for 100m less-well-off Americans.

Taken as a whole, the party's various economic manifestos sound cautious but fairly expensive. More eye-catching ideas can be found among the party's independent advisers. The Hamilton Project, for example, has a new idea for schools. Since studies suggest that the current system of teacher certification is worse than useless (it puts off clever would-be teachers), the Hamiltonians propose that schools should ignore it and simply hire teachers with good academic qualifications, whose teaching ability would then be assessed after two years. This has worked in Los Angeles. The teachers' unions would surely oppose it. By embracing it, the Democrats would show they can stand up to one of their own interest-groups.

In “Crashing the Gate”, Mr Armstrong and Mr Moulitsas complain that

single-issue groups not only hurt the Democratic Party in its search for a common identity, but they help provide the Republicans with a treasure trove of attack opportunities. While the Democratic Party should be the party of people, it has become, with a lot of help from Republican framing, a party of “immoral” abortionists, “extremist” tree-huggers, “corrupt” labour officials, “greedy” trial lawyers, “predatory” homosexuals and “anti-white” minority activists. After all, these are the loudest and most influential voices in our party...so it's not a stretch for demagogic Republicans to paint Democrats as a loose collection of selfish people who are fanatical about their specific cause and have no larger concerns—for the economy, the military, or the country.

This is a shrewd analysis. The Republicans have a crackpot fringe, too, but the Democratic Party often sounds as though it consists of little else. Democrats seeking public office are besieged by single-issue groups urging them to adopt policies that most Americans disagree with, such as support for racial quotas and unrestricted late-term abortion.

Some Democratic politicians simply say no. Brian Schweitzer won the governorship of Montana in part because he binned all the questionnaires that single-issue groups sent him to complete. All but one—the form from the National Rifle Association. “You've got to fill that one out,” he told Mr Armstrong and Mr Moulitsas. “In order to get an ‘A-plus', you've got to shoot somebody.”

Mr Schweitzer is an exception, however. Many more Democratic politicians have, over the past 30 years, tried to duck controversial moral issues by leaving them to the courts. Judges have stepped into the legislative vacuum, often infuriating conservatives and making Democrats sound ridiculous. In January, for example, during the confirmation hearings for Samuel Alito, Mr Bush's latest choice for the Supreme Court, some Democratic senators upbraided the judge for wanting to apply the law, not make it. Surely it would be better, “to ensure social progress”, if judges took “a more expansive, imaginative view of the constitution?” wheedled Senator Herb Kohl of Wisconsin. In other words, Mr Kohl, a legislator, wants judges to do his job for him. This is how abortion was legalised in America, how prayer was barred in schools and how gay marriage came to Massachusetts.

Another group with whom the party has stormy relations is typified by Mr Moulitsas, whose website, DailyKos.com, is the meeting-place for hundreds of thousands of people who hate Mr Bush. Online activists, or “netroots”, as they call themselves, raise lots of money and provide lots of publicity for Democrats. Since Mr Dean's bid for the presidential nomination in 2004, which was buoyed by large numbers of small donations raised online, party elders have paid respectful attention to young lefty bloggers. Mr Reid, the Senate minority leader, has agreed to speak at the Daily Kos convention in June. Mark Warner, one of Mrs Clinton's rivals for the presidential nomination in 2008, employs Mr Armstrong as an adviser.

The embrace is awkward, though, because the netroots are always goading the party to get as angry as they are. They tend to favour the most frothingly anti-war, Bush-bashing candidates, who usually lose at the polls. And they express themselves in terms both crude and petulant. Four-letter words and wishes for Mr Bush's slow death are common on left-wing blogs.

Somehow, the Democrats must harness their activists' rage without themselves sounding unelectably shrill. And it would help if they offered voters some bold, purposeful reasons to back them. Their current platform is not, as Newt Gingrich put it, a mere “Contract with San Francisco and Vermont”. But neither is it a compelling vision of America's future. That said, it may be enough to win in November. After looking at the latest opinion surveys, a Republican pollster called Tony Fabrizio said: “The good news is Democrats don't have much of a plan. The bad news is they may not need one.”