Good luck to Howard Dean, but what the Democratic Party really needs is Super Nanny.

Have you seen this reality TV show? Super Nanny, a British child-care expert, arrives at the home of a disorderly, undisciplined family and, within a week, she has the kids calm and cordial and the parents making decisions with consistency and confidence. Speak in a united voice, she tells the parents. Remember your core principles. Be clear and firm. Don't worry about the kids "not liking you." You can be nurturing and tough-minded at the same time.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi is doing her level best -- having raised children of her own -- to whip the Democrats into shape. But she's up against years and years of dysfunction. While Republicans have been marching the family through precise formations and drilling them on party catechism, the Democrats are still chasing each other around the coffee table. They seem almost hopeless, really, unable to get themselves organized into a cohesive unit that can confidently articulate, and consistently follow, its shared values.

"They are still struggling to present what they believe from a moral or commonsense point of view," said George Lakoff, a Democratic consultant and linguistics professor at UC Berkeley.

"They don't have the language to present what they really believe. ... They need to identify the values and messages that people can agree on and not sneer at those who disagree. They need to see that they can speak in one voice while still being themselves within the family."

Super Nanny would tell them to ditch the rambling, all-encompassing dissertations that try to please everyone and instead to distill their principles and goals to a list they can tape to the fridge. The Democrats need, in other words, their own version of Lewis Powell's famous 1971 memo to the United States Chamber of Commerce.

In it, the future Supreme Court justice laid out an ambitious plan to create influential academic and cultural institutions that, over the course of time, would reframe the public debate to be more in line with the Republican Party. From this plan sprouted the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, Accuracy in Media and other conservative groups. It also gave birth to media outlets that spread the party's message.

Super Nanny would also tell them about the importance of regular family meetings. The Democrats need their own version of Grover Norquist's Wednesday morning gatherings. Norquist, who the Washington Post called "the gardener of the conservative grassroots," invites more than 100 Republican lobbyists, activists, analysts and Capitol Hill and White House staffers to his Americans for Tax Reform offices in Washington, D.C., every week. They discuss issues, agree on talking points and, by the evening news, are united in their message, repeating it over and over until it begins to pass for conventional wisdom.

As Norquist told the Post: Despite varying agendas, Republicans "play nicely together."

That they do, and the Democrats ought to be taking notes. But the Republicans could benefit from a visit from Super Nanny themselves.

They are, as Lakoff has written, the "Strict Father" party. The dad rules the roost, and everyone obeys. This makes for a more orderly household, but a less thinking and less compassionate one. The father squelches dissent. He rules from the standpoint that the world is a dangerous place and he keeps the family safe by whatever means necessary.

The problem with this, as Super Nanny will tell you, is that decisions based on the father's beliefs, not an examination of the facts, inevitably lead to poor decisions -- sometimes truly hurtful and damaging ones. Because he doesn't solicit information from the rest of the family, he has little sense of the complexities of situations and the potential impact of his decisions. And because he sees himself as all-powerful and all-knowing, the mistakes go uncorrected.

Clearly, Democrats don't want to become Republicans. That isn't the answer to healing its dysfunction. The party of FDR believes in its traditional values: a government that is both compassionate and demanding, that is unwavering in its ideals and flexible in its problem solving. This core belief system is something Super Nanny can't teach. It is either in the family or it's not.

But all the heart in the world doesn't get the toys picked up or the garbage taken out or the homework done. Heart has to be balanced by practicality and discipline and responsibility. In the TV show, Super Nanny swoops in, fixes up the family and leaves at the end of the week. I always wonder how the families fare after the cameras leave. Were they fundamentally changed for the long haul?

That's what the Democrats must finally confront for themselves, right now, as they head into a new era with a new party chairman. What matters isn't what happens when the cameras are on. What matters is the hard, focused work day in and day out, so that four years from now, maybe the Democrats won't end up, yet again, muttering to themselves in the naughty corner.