The "Wall Street Journal" is going to charge 3.95 a month for John Fund starting the end of this month. It will be interesting to see it the strategy works. If it does, they will probably take the whole online setup to pay. (sob)
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October 14, 2003
Tuesday, October 14, 2003 1:00 p.m.
In today's Political Diary:
Democrats Crave a Rush (Limbaugh)
Republicans Fret About Minority Turnout
Gary Coleman Gets Elected to Something
Polling Tidbit of the Day
Blither (Oops, We Mean 'Whither') the Democrats?
Democrats are looking for help in getting out their message--and, incidentally, a message to get out.
Their goal is to emulate the conservative network of think tanks, pundits and talk-radio hosts (think Mr. Limbaugh) who've served as a sounding board for resurgent conservative ideas for two decades.
Al Gore is gamely trying to start a liberal cable TV network, helped by legal services kingpin Joel Hyatt and investment banker Steven Ratner. And the New York Times on Sunday unfurled a long piece about John Podesta, the former Clinton aide whose new group, Center for American Progress, aims to be the Heritage-Cato-Hoover-AEI of the left.
We wish the Democrats luck (not really) and are prepared to offer them some good advice (really).
Their first mistake is to imagine that the conservative network was a master plan, the fruit of some vast conspiracy. In reality, the network was called into existence by a thing called "demand."
Mr. Podesta rightly identifies a missing ingredient, something to put on a "bumper sticker." Conservatives have a litany of well-accepted, pithy messages: "Less Government. Lower Taxes. Strong Defense." What's a Democratic bumper sticker, the upbeat, can-do message that doesn't require liberals to stop being liberals?
How about "More Rights"? That sounds a great deal more appealing than "More Entitlements" or "More Handouts." And it's as close as they're likely to come to a coherent, honest yet not off-putting statement of their philosophy.
We'll give the Dems a little more free advice. Health care is their best entitlement issue, but you'll notice that Al Gore waited until he was defeated and out of politics before he could reveal himself as a single-payer fan.
Hillarycare was an attempted disaster. A challenge the Dems need to frame for themselves (and we wouldn't want to be the ones pushing this rock up the hill) is how to convince the public they can be trusted to fashion a grand new entitlement on the scale of Medicare for everyone without wrecking the economy.
Democrats, to put it bluntly, need to find a new way to talk about entitlements that overcomes the instinct of voters to hear a pro-handout message subliminally as an anti-growth message.
Bill Clinton was a half-fulfilled prototype of what might be called a "growth liberal." Most of his party, including the current candidate crop, still hasn't managed to eliminate the dirge of declinist pessimism from their patter. Al Gore even managed to lose the last election by unaccountably (and hilariously) running against the prosperity and wealth creation of the Clinton years.
Joe Lieberman, weenie that he is, comes closest to a pro-growth Dem in the current crowd. But we call him a weenie: He paired himself with Al Gore in the failed woe-is-everything campaign of 2000. And just yesterday he tried to revive his current sagging campaign with a new tax-the-rich theme.
Mr. Podesta would be doing his party a huge favor by helping it adopt some economic optimism for a change, making peace with the people who generate the revenues Democrats hope to spend.
It was never obvious why Big Government had to be peddled by frightening people with the specter of poverty and helplessness in their old age, though that's still the Democratic twitch. And why should "Let's use government to do good" have become permanently joined to a theme of "Let's punish success?"
These tropes may have had tactical relevance during the Great Depression (when Dems first adopted them) but they haven't been notably successful in recent presidential elections.
-- Holman W. Jenkins Jr.
Therapy for Republican Minority Turnout Fears
Conventional wisdom holds that Republican candidates are hurt by voter initiatives limiting affirmative action. The reason is voter turnout: Those who favor (or benefit from) such programs are more motivated to vote than those who don't. The same voters are also more likely to vote Democratic. Ipso facto, Republican candidates are hurt even though strong majorities in polls oppose racial preferences.
That's the theory. Such fears are now causing Michigan activists to backtrack on efforts to put a measure opposing racial and gender preferences on their state's ballot next year. But is the theory correct?
Conventional wisdom certainly wasn't validated last week when California voters rejected a racial privacy initiative (also known as Proposition 54) by an overwhelming 3 to 2 margin. The GOP had its best night in a decade, with Republican candidates for governor winning over 62% of the vote.
Voter turnout among minorities didn't skyrocket. Of those who did show up at the polls, an astonishing 23% of blacks voted for either Arnold Schwarzenegger or conservative State Senator Tom McClintock. Among Latinos, the figure was 41%. Those are unprecedented numbers for Republicans in the last two decades.
In the end, the proposal to have the state stop collecting racial identity information couldn't overcome hysterical claims that important medical and health-care data would somehow not be collected. Blacks and Latinos voted heavily against the initiative, whites somewhat less so. But the presence of Prop 54 on the ballot hardly seems to have harmed Republican candidates.
Of course, none of this means the conventional wisdom is entirely ridiculous. Gail Heriot, a law professor at the University of San Diego, points out that "certain hot-button issues do indeed affect voter turnout in the way that the theory suggests."
A case in point: California's Proposition 187, which was enacted in 1994 to bar the state from providing some services to illegal immigrants, attracted higher-than-average Latino voter turnout. Half of eligible Latino voters cast a ballot in California, compared to just 33% in the nation as a whole that year.
And, yes, the heavy Latino turnout probably helped Democratic candidates pick up a few extra votes. But the effect was small. Republican Governor Pete Wilson, who strongly supported Prop 187, was re-elected easily.
The case is even clearer when measures on the ballot would actually reverse racial preferences. There's little evidence of an increased minority turnout that works against Republicans. Take Proposition 209, Ward Connerly's successful 1996 initiative in California: Turnout among blacks was actually slightly lower than in the previous presidential year (65% versus 67%), and Latino numbers held steady at 54%.
Republicans might even be able to help themselves with minorities by attaching themselves to such initiatives. A lot more California blacks supported Mr. Connerly's Prop 209 (26%) than voted for George W. Bush four years later (9%).
Ms. Heriot says the conventional wisdom persists because supporters of racial preferences have peddled their theory about voter turnout to the media for so long that it is now usually reported as fact. Her advice is that principled opponents of racial preferences shouldn't shrink from pressing their cause at the ballot box because of phony electoral math.
-- John Fund
Show Biz, the Fallback Career
Before lawyers were allowed to advertise, some would drum up business by running for political office. Even if they didn't win, their glad-handing and political advertising would put their names in front of potential clients.
Now it appears entertainment figures have discovered politics can be a way to plug their media careers. Former child actor Gary Coleman, who entered the California recall race as a joke after a newspaper paid his filing fee, will start a new job this Friday as the "political analyst" for the All Comedy Radio network, which has a dozen affiliates around the nation.
"The way we look at it Gary was 'Arnold' before Arnold was cool," the network noted in a statement. (When Mr. Coleman appeared on the 1980s sitcom "Diff'rent Strokes," his character was named Arnold).
Porn star Mary Carey was another quasi-celeb who entered the California race strictly to enhance her entertainment career. And Arianna Huffington--well, it remains to be seen where she ends up next, but more likely on TV than pursuing political office.
-- John Fund
Polling Tidbit of the Day
So much for the theory that California represented a burst of indiscriminate anti-incumbent anger: "Americans like the idea of being able to recall state officials," but "72% of those polled outside the Golden State aren't ready to recall their own chief executive," according to a CNN/Gallup/USA Today poll.
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