BODY COPY: Twelve years ago Newton Leroy Gingrich assembled an army of well-scrubbed young Republicans, equipped them with a ten-point “Contract with America” and sent them out to do battle with Democrats. All they accomplished was to win 53 seats, take over the House, and turn Bill Clinton into a Republican.

1994 was not unlike today. A President loses the confidence of the people. There’s a queasy, spreading sense of gloom: Is the country going to hell? But that similarity does not entirely explain Gingrich’s success.

Gingrich succeeded because he honored the First Law of Competition: You can’t beat something with nothing. He gave his minions ideas. They were old ideas. They were bad ideas. But they were not nothing.

Democrats: You need ideas. Without ideas you appear clueless as to how to fix the country. Go to our website: AvengingAngels.org. There you’ll find not the usual platform bed with its usual loud sounds of snoring. You’ll find ten solid, vigorous, popular proposals for change.

These planks are not nailed down. Borrow any ones you like. Then go out and fight for them. With rancor.

“Rancorous partisanship,” decried by Bill Clinton and other centrists, is just another name for conviction. Conviction isn’t a quality Bill Clinton ever had much use for. He’s a man who never fought for a damned thing in his life. But conviction is what Democrats need today. A better role model would be that earlier adulterer, Franklin Roosevelt, who said “There is nothing I love as much as a good fight!” and who gladly welcomed the hatred of his enemies.

John Kerry’s campaign failed because of his inability to deliver a cohesive indictment of the President’s wretched record. Was there no common denominator to Bush’s failures? Of course there was one. There still is one. It is ignorance.

The President ignored the redundant warnings of 9/11. He ignored the onslaught of Katrina. He ignores global warming. He ignores the coming end of oil. He ignores the outpouring of rage from a billion Muslims. He ignores the vast debts he is running up. He ebraces the retrograde cant of the worst Evangelical Right ignramuses. Worst of all, he ignores the obvious lesson that wars aren’t working anymore. He offers us only perpetual debt, perpetual fear, perpetual war.

You and I may survive his ignorance. Our children will not. We must win this election.