A party agenda is useful ballast. Here’s where we’d like to steer the country. Here’s what we’d do absent the exigencies and volatility the world thrusts on us. This is our conscience, and our compass.

But a party’s substantive priorities at any given moment shouldn’t be fixed. They should be responsive to the vicissitudes of life. They should chase need in the country.

This can be difficult. The temptation of mission-fulfillment will tend to drag political leaders back to generational objectives. It’s why Donald Trump cut rich people’s taxes in a high-debt, high interest-rate economy. That’s what the Republican Party is constituted to do.

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I’m thus suspicious of nascent Democratic party-building exercises centered around building support for a bunch of pre-fab ideas. Even good ideas I agree with. They can become quicksand. What will need be in 2028? We can’t possibly say for certain.

The Democratic agenda of 2008 illustrates the point pretty well. John Kerry had lost the previous election. George W. Bush had run up large deficits. Tens of millions of Americans lacked health insurance, and nothing had been done about it for a decade. Arguably nothing structural had been done about it for 40 years. So that topped the agenda. Lawmakers, including some Republican,s finally understood that climate change required a policy solution. It went on the agenda, too.

But then the housing bubble burst. A few weeks before the election financial markets failed and the economy collapsed. It was an all consuming crisis. And obviously it’s not as if the Obama administration just ignored it. But the lure of the mission was very strong, and President Obama returned to it as quickly as he could. I’m glad we got Obamacare. But arguably Democrats and America would be better off today if Obama had shelved his campaign white papers, all of which were written before the economic emergency, did quick and dirty expansions of Medicare and Medicaid, and reoriented his presidency around recovery from and accountability for the great recession.

HORIZON SURPRIZONS

Hindsight’s cheap, though. ...