I couldn't agree more with Joshua Micah Marshall over at Talking Points Memo more on this issue:

A few days ago I said that the Democrats have yet to really understand what it means to be or act like a true party of opposition. I mean many things by this, which I hope to explore in the coming weeks and months. But in this case, for what we're discussing on the site now, I'm referring to how opposition can enable reformism.

Before 1994 and, to a lesser degree, before 2000, Democrats simply weren't in a position to adopt a genuine reform agenda because they were too implicated in the institutional corruption, the money chase, that is modern Washington. They could want change in some abstract way and they push for it at the margins. But their way of doing business on the Hill and in Washington generally was inseparable from it. It's how they ran Congress; it was how they raised their money to win elections; their friends (and that means personal and professional friends) who'd already cycled into the lobbying sector made their money from it; and many or most of them expected eventually to do the same.

[...]

I’ve always been a bit sour and suspicious about that political creature homo goodgovernmentus, and the allure of a politics unconnected to interests or money or patronage. There is such a thing as ‘honest graft’, to use the phrase of the old city machines. Patronage and political machines can and often do help to shape politics in beneficial ways. And to me getting good results in legislation and governance is much more important than the purity of how those results are achieved. At their worst good government or clean government types put the niceties of process and purity over the good legislation. (That's one reason why reformism has often had a hard time escaping an elitist coloration.)

Link.

I really think that one of the most potent arguments the Democrats can use in trying to win back Congress and the White House is attacking the questionable tactics of the ruling GOP. I've said it many times, but it may come down to these five words:

Government accountability and fiscal responsibility