As I sat down to listen to Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., Monday night, I was filled with immense optimism. After years of neglect in the hands of the Republican party, one of our most influential and important committees, the Senate Armed Services Committee, is finally in the hands of an articulate and responsible adult who understands the fundamental principle of the rule of law and the basic concept that our reputation abroad is a vital national security concern. As I listened to Levin's speech and his responses to questions, however, I felt a bit of that optimism being sucked away. What disturbed me was not so much his words, indeed they were forceful and often stirring in their evocation of American ideals. Rather, what disappointed me was his simplistic belief in the power of a single day of voting, Nov. 4, 2008, to actually make an impact. Don't get me wrong; no reasonable American could assert after eight years of the Bush presidency that who rules the country is irrelevant, but putting a Democrat in the White House is not a sufficient change to bring about a true framework shift.

Levin almost instantly dismissed the notion that Democrats are foolishly fighting against overwhelming odds in a rhetorical arena defined by the fringe right, but that is exactly what is happening, and we will never be able to move our country in a truly progressive direction until we realize and confront this truth. As someone who has been involved in debate in high school and here at Brandeis, my experience has clearly taught me one simple truism: Definitions and case construction matter.

What is commonly called the "war on terrorism" is a perfect example of the imposition of a constraining framework for debate. Under this construct, the neo-conservative extremists have been able to lead us astray. Instead, allowing us focus on defeating our foes in al-Qaida while stripping away the basis for their legitimacy and support, the right has been extremely successful at labeling disparate foes part of a nebulous global menace and making us act recklessly and without proper vision.

It is this school of thought that has led us to the inopportune disaster in Iraq, but we have not learned our lesson yet. We still give the bully pulpit of premium slots at our most well-read magazines and newspapers-such as Time Magazine or The New York Times-to those who were wrong time and time again, such as The Washington Post's hiring of Karl Rove as a regular columnist. Indeed, unless our nation is a sucker for punishment and failure, there is no conceivable reason why those who misled us into Iraq should be relied on as experts when we debate what policy measures to take toward Iran or the rest of the Middle East. The only reasonable explanation is that, even though the result of heeding their advice was a disaster, their dangerous school of thought, which emphasizes regime change, pre-emption and American hegemony, has yet to be intellectually challenged by Democrats.

Another area that has been a colossal failure for Democrats has been in preventing the right-ward frame shift on countless issues of vital importance. National security is the first and perhaps most prominent example of this-the fact that we are even debating seriously whether torture can be justified as official policy shows that fringe groups have already won.

However, we have ceded ground on many other fronts:

Draconian anti-immigrant measures, such as massive round ups and forced evictions, are now being debated as if they are sane and reasonable solutions. Vouchers for private religious parochial schools have been fed to us as a solution to our education woes so readily that we are willing to seriously contemplate this endeavor. Creationism nearly found its way back into our public schools under the rhetorical guise of intelligent design and intellectual fairness. We have fallen prey to the rhetoric of a crisis with social security-contemplating disruptive attempts at privatization-even though in reality the way to make the fund salient involves simple changes such as raising the cap on taxable income or raising the retirement age to adjust for increases in life expectancy.

In the past, Congress was able to come up with salient solutions to problems. We have forged bi-partisan and moderate immigration reform before and come together to implement mutually agreed upon changes to social security tax structure particularly in the 1970s. We have forged a common moral understanding in how we treat detainee and when military action is justified. What has changed since then is that the poisonous fangs of extremism have struck our national discourse and we have yet to realize the severity of the venom coursing through our veins. Until Democratic leaders such as Levin realize that taking on right-wing frameworks is the major challenge facing the party, we may win electoral victories, but we will never achieve our vision of a thriving and united America.