In an interesting piece in National Journal, Charlie Cook makes the case that Democrats, rather ironically given their tendency to forgo personal responsibility in favor of the much less guilt-inducing finger point, have only themsleves to blame for their current popular decline.

There are many reasons for this decline in support for Democrats among certain groups. But an argument can be made that it is because Democrats have subordinated their traditional focus on helping lower- and working-class Americans move up the economic ladder in favor of other noble priorities, such as health care, the environment, and civil rights. Whether these were the right or wrong priorities is totally subjective, but they have come at a cost. Sen. Chuck Schumer recently committed the classic case of a political gaffe, once defined by Michael Kinsley as “when a politician tells the truth—some obvious truth he isn’t supposed to say.” The Democratic Left went crazy when Schumer suggested that the early focus on health care reform in 2009 and 2010, when he says Democrats should have been concentrating on economic growth and job creation, had cost them greatly (something that I have written about for over five years).

Cook believes that the modern Democrat party was born of FDR’s New Deal when the focus was helping people find work and healing the economy following the dark age of the Great Depression. He even draws a parallel between Democrat policies and the 2008 recession, including the implementation of TARP; and the Obama administration’s “rescuing [of] the automobile industry”.

But then something happened. Democrats stopped caring for the little guy and his role in the great machinery of the functioning economy (the individual within the capitalist system, put another way), and began to focus on, as Schumer alluded to, larger, broader, and tremendously expensive social programs such as programs related to healthcare, the environment, and civil rights.

While Cook believes the rightness or wrongness of this shift in focus is “totally subjective”, I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that the wrongness supercedes the rightness. For a simple reason: those large, broad, bureacratic programs are social programs in name only. Their real goal is to secure funding — lots and lots of funding — and to give the bureacuracy something to do so it survives, often at the expense of those little guys Democrats like to melodramatically fret over.

For proof, look to the newest public health threat in Ebola. While no one can reasonably deny that Ebola isn’t a real threat, the president is asking for $6 billion to be ferreted out between The State Department’s USAID and the Department of Health and Human Services — all while Republicans question why, to use one example, the presumed Ebola czar seems to have no real authority.

That’s a lot of money and a lot of unanswered questions, although it looks like the White House is confident that resistence to the request will not stop the money from rolling in.

Of course spending money to protect us from plague is difficult to question. But so far, very few little guys on the ground have contracted the disease. And, for the most part, the ones who have have been pretty handily saved by the miracles of Western medicine. So, while the money rolls in, it’s fairly difficult to determine just how all that money, split between two very large federal bureaucracies, will ultimately effect those working class people who’d like to live long enough to work their way out of the current awful economy.

And it’s that disconnect that has doomed the Democrats. At least until it all becomes the fault of Republicans again.