Senator Robert Byrd, in a speech on the floor of the Senate yesterday, may have found the Democrats’ campaign theme for 2006: “Come Home, America.”

It is time to come home, America.  Time to look within our own borders and within our own souls.  There are many questions to be answered and many missions to accomplish right here on our own soil.  We have neglected too much for too long in our own backyard.

Taken literally, it’s a little too isolationist for my taste, but it could work. And it could work even better if Democrats make it not a literal but a metaphorical homecoming  a promise of a return to better days, to fiscal sanity, to an America not bogged down in a war launched on falsehoods, to a government that can help its citizens after natural disasters.