By Joe Klein

“I think it is fair to say the Republicans were the party of ideas for a pretty long chunk of time,” Barack Obama recently told a Nevada editorial board. The Senator took some notable, if not quite accurate, grief from Hillary Clinton over that: she said he was expressing support for Republican ideas (clearly, he wasn’t). But what did he actually mean? People—and not just Republicans—have been calling the GOP the party of ideas for nearly 30 years, since Ronald Reagan transformed the mushy, defensive conservatism of his party into a sleek ideological message celebrating individual freedom, military strength and traditional moral values.

It was an easy sell, in part because the political pendulum was swinging rightward from Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, but also because the Democrats seemed to have lost confidence in their own ideas. They had lapsed into an intellectually sloppy identity politics, subdividing themselves by race, gender and sexual preference. They fixed on narrow-gauge programs rather than broad themes. All too often they sounded like Ginsu-knife salesmen on late-night cable television: “And if you buy our children’s health-care plan, we’ll throw in—absolutely free!—a $4,000 college-tuition tax credit. Plus, this special onetime offer: universal day care!” To be sure, the Republicans had their own special interests and slovenly hypocrisies—an avalanche of corporate tax breaks that made Swiss cheese out of the federal code—but they could always return to their big, clean public offer: freedom, strength, morality.

There was and is, however, one very big idea lurking at the heart of the Democratic Party, even if its leaders have been loath to unleash it. If Republicans were about individual freedom, Democrats were about national unity. If Ronald Reagan said, “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem,” Democrats can say, “Government is the ultimate expression of our public values—including our desire to create a free, fair market system.” For decades since Reagan, it has been easy for feckless demagogues to rail against the nation’s capital as if it were a deadly virus implanted on the Potomac by space invaders or the French. But that ended abruptly on Sept. 11, 2001, when Karen Hughes changed pronouns at a White House press conference: “Your Federal Government continues to function effectively.”

In 2008, a fresh, maybe even exciting federal response to the interlocking national economic, energy and security crises should be front and center of the debate, but none of the Democrats running for President seems to have the courage or sagacity to make the offer. Their timidity was obvious when George W. Bush proposed a larger economic-stimulus package—roughly $145 billion—to meet the looming recession than Clinton, Obama or John Edwards did. Worse, the Democrats seemed willing to play on the Republican side of the field, proposing short-term fixes and tax rebates rather than a more comprehensive, thematic solution to the problem. Think about it: the terrorist threat to national security, the relative decline of the American middle class, the sudden flimsiness of the international economic structure—to say nothing of the potential destruction of the planet—all are influenced by the fact that, as Clinton often says, “we borrow money from the Chinese to buy oil from the Saudis.” Somewhere in there is a big campaign theme waiting to be born.

The intensity of these problems is so obvious, even the Republicans—especially John McCain, Mike Huckabee and the latest edition of Mitt Romney—are talking about them. But GOP credibility is undercut by its antediluvian Reaganism: its reflexive opposition to any solution—and therefore any sense of nonmilitary national purpose—coming out of Washington.

All the leading Democrats have produced impressive energy-independence plans, with Clinton’s the most sophisticated, but none of them have extrapolated, none of them have made this the central theme of their campaign, the national purpose that provides the spine for their economic and national-security plans. Clinton, to her credit, threw $5 billion for weatherproofing and retrofitting into her stimulus package, but it was an afterthought. “We weren’t being as creative as we might have been,” one of her economic advisers told me.

Creative would have been to announce a Great American Renewal, to announce—for starters—that we’re going to attack the looming recession by unleashing an army of unemployed construction and manufacturing laborers to insulate every public building in America, replace every incandescent lightbulb, rebuild the rail system for high-speed travel and start building solar and wind farms to provide electricity for our military installations and every other federal building. Or whatever. But something big, something that recognizes that the word United, which appears prominently in the name of our country, is probably the biggest Democratic idea of all.