Well, the first answer has to be that we would have un-done a lot of the stupid [censored] Bush has done. Roll back tax cuts on the top 1%, install competent and professional managers for government agencies, and generally treat governing as management rather than campaigning. (Joe Klein had an excellent article about how the fundamental flaw in Bush's administration has been to handle absolutely everything as a political issue rather than a substantive one).

The GOP criticism has been that this is the extent of Democratic ideas, that we're just saying "Bush is bad," and not offering new ways to move the country forward.

Here are four big ideas that the Democrats would move on if we had the power to do so:

-A new Apollo program to develop alternative energy sources and achieve energy independence. This country had the brains and technology to build nuclear bombs in three years before computers were invented. We put a man on the moon ten years after we set our minds to it. Surely we can come up with a solar panel that gets >50% efficiency and a cheap car that gets 40 mpg.

-Basic health care for everyone at a reasonable price. America has the most expensive health care system in the world, which results in very good care for people with a lot of money, and very poor care for nearly 25% of the country. There needs to be an internal debate about how to best to implement this system (I'm partial to a plan that calls for "Medicare for everyone," along with steps to reduce the cost of care by training more doctors and closing a lot of loopholes for the pharma industry), but it's pretty clear that our current system is both inefficient and unfair, and America can do better.

-Pension reform. There is a tidal wave of pension defaults coming. Companies see that their pensions are underfunded, and recognize that they can declare bankruptcy and foist those responsibilities onto the government. The corporations and their big investors make out well, while the small investors and pensioners get screwed. That's just not fair. If Kerry were president, we'd have had corporate bankruptcy reform before we had the personal bankruptcy "reform" that passed recently.

-Make it so everyone who can get accepted into a college can afford it. For a long time, state schools offered a very good education at a very reasonable price. My mother always talks about how, when she was in college, her father sold a cow from his farm once a year to pay her tuition. It's not like that anymore. Budget cuts at the state level have forced state schools to raise their tuition, making it basically unaffordable to a lot of people who could otherwise get educated and join the middle class.

Ultimately, I think ideas like these will coalesce into a Democratic platform in late 2006, similar to the GOP's 1994 Contract with America. Everyone in the party realizes we need to project a positive vision of America in order to start winning elections, and there's no lack of good ideas out there.