With the Republican White House and Republican Congress suffering abysmal poll numbers, Republican candidates will not "nationalize" the election by running on a coordinated message and agenda.

Instead, some candidates will be putting distance between themselves and Dubya on issues like Iraq, immigration and spending.

Typically, when the party in power is unpopular, weak and in disarray, the opposition party is eager to nationalize the election and secure a mandate for a different ldeological direction.

Washington Democrats have seemed conflicted over whether that was the right strategy.

But last month, they unveiled "A New Direction For America" which featured the "Six For '06" Agenda, outlining what Dems would do if voters returned them to power.

The Carpetbagger Report assessed it best:

These are six solid points that hit all of the major concerns [but] the agenda has a vague laundry-list quality, and there's no real theme or narrative that ties the points together.

In turn, while there's been no real quibbling over the substance, individual Dem candidates have not been impressed enough with the overall package to adopt it as the basis of their campaign strategy.

Furthermore, there's been no real follow-through by the Washington Dems to inform voters about their agenda. (Can you recall the six points?)

At last month's announcement, Harry Reid dismissed the political significance of Newt Gingrich's 1994 "Contract With America."

That was a sign that "Six For '06" was not intended to be all that prominent.

In other words, they're not interested in nationalizing the election.

Is that a bad thing?

Not necessarily in the short-term.

It doesn't always take a "Contract" to take back Congress. Disgust with incumbents may well be enough to get the job done.

But Democrats still have a long-term problem with voters losing a sense of what the party fundamentally stands for.

Winning Congress doesn't automatically solve that problem.

If anything, it puts major pressure on the party to show that they know where they want to take country, and to act.

So if Dems haven't already hammered out consensus among themselves about what a "New Direction" really means, they'll be stuck hashing it out in the spotlight.

And if it becomes a squabble-fest, victory will be fleeting.

The point is: a national party has to have national principles, and eventually, has to lay them on the line for the nation to consider if it wants to hold a long-lasting majority.

You can do it now. You can do it later.

But if you wait too long, voters will start to think that you don't stand for anything.