Ed Kilgore, the political director of the Democratic Leadership Council, last appeared in this space a few weeks ago to point out the crucial importance for Democrats of regaining their appeal in the American south. He’s now turned his formidable political intelligence to devising how that might happen.

Specifically, what kind of agenda can Democrats formulate to broaden their electoral base beyond sociology professors, New York Times columnists, and Cameron Diaz? Is such a thing even possible?

It is, says Mr. Kilgore, it is. The magic word is reform. An effective reform agenda is made possible, in turn, by the one unignorable fact of American politics: The federal government is now the property of Republicans – and their sole responsibility.

“Republicans are no longer the opposition party, and they haven’t been for some time,” he says. “They’re the ones who have to take the blame for the way government works or doesn’t work. Democrats are the opposition party now, and being in the opposition gives you all sorts of opportunities.”

The reform agenda Mr. Kilgore and his colleagues at the DLC envision has three parts, each dealing with some aspect of a malfunctioning political system.

First comes the electoral system itself. Mr. Kilgore is skeptical of conspiracy-mongers on his party’s left flank who, for example, made wild claims of vote fraud in Ohio last fall. But he does believe that 2002’s Help America Vote Act, which aimed to correct deficiencies exposed by the Florida fiasco of 2000, may have made things worse.

“We essentially created incentives for voter challenges without offering the money, or the training, or the political infrastructure for adjudicating them,” he says. “There’s no uniformity from state to state.” A national administrative oversight of election processes might address the specter of disenfranchisement encouraged by the present chaotic system.

Next on Mr. Kilgore’s agenda is congressional redistricting – perhaps the greatest unsung scandal in the federal government.

The Cook Political Report, a respected political tip sheet in Washington, calculated recently that only 45 congressional races were “competitive” in 2004. Thanks to rigged schemes for drawing congressional boundaries, congressmen are now effectively elected for 10-year terms, until the next decennial census rolls around and the district lines are redrawn.

Sclerosis has seized the Congress, with disastrous effects. Foremost among them is polarization. Their re-election assured members of Congress needn’t worry about reaching beyond their own party’s ideological base. Congressional Democrats thus get more liberal and Republicans more conservative, leaving the political center orphaned.

As an opposition party in the 1980s, Republicans proposed congressional term limits to churn the Democratic establishment on Capitol Hill. Now safely cocooned in an establishment of their own making, they don’t talk much about term limits anymore.

Mr. Kilgore proposes a grassroots campaign to reform redistricting state by state. In Iowa, for example, decennial redistricting was taken out of the hands of the partisan legislature and administered by an independent board, with great success. Democrats elsewhere could make the Iowa model a cause in their own states.

All of which sounds great. It also sounds (go ahead – admit it) boring. Process questions don’t get an activist’s heart started in the morning.

Mr. Kilgore takes the point. “That’s the stereotype, that this stuff is so dull,” he says. “But there’s a hunger there that can be tapped. Campaign finance was considered boring too until John McCain built a presidential campaign around it. The deficit was a boring abstraction until Ross Perot made it real for people.”

What may be needed, Mr. Kilgore acknowledges, is a disenchantment with the federal government in general and Congress in particular, and here the Republicans seem happy to oblige.

The third item on Mr. Kilgore’s reform agenda couldn’t be more timely: ethics and lobbying reform. It’s illuminating – and for a Republican, sobering – that GOP congressmen spent their first day of the new Congress last week bickering about ethics rules.

Tammany Hall

Close associates of Majority Leader Tom DeLay have been indicted in Texas for fundraising abuses. Mr. DeLay himself has been admonished three times by the House ethics committee for strong-arm tactics befitting a Tammany Hall political boss.

According to the Washington Post, meanwhile, FBI and Internal Revenue Service investigators are looking into dealings between casino-owning Indian tribes and one Jack Abramoff, the most successful Republican lobbyist in Washington, whose tentacles reach deep into the congressional leadership.

Republican partisans dismiss these ethical infractions as technical and overblown. Maybe. But they should remember their history.

After 40 years of consolidating power and ruling Capitol Hill with dictatorial discipline, the Democratic congressional establishment began to crack under similarly minor ethical lapses.

First to fall was the Democratic speaker of the House, Jim Wright, in 1989, followed by a protege, Tony Coelho, who left Congress under a cloud. Next to go was Dan Rostenkowski, the powerful chairman of the House Ways and Means committee, forced to relinquish his chairmanship in early 1994. Finally, the whole corrupt edifice fell to Republican reformers, who won control of the House later that year.

Have congressional Republicans, after only 10 years, succumbed to the same arrogance of power that toppled their Democratic counterparts? If the answer is yes, Mr. Kilgore and his colleagues in the opposition party will be happy to exploit it, carrying the magic banner of “reform.”

Mr. Ferguson is a columnist for Bloomberg News.