Democrats go to extremes
ajc.com
While waiting for his car in downtown Atlanta, House Speaker Terry Coleman (D-Eastman) makes small talk with two young men of college age, interns perhaps, at least one of whom plans to run for office.
As a reporter approaches from behind, the speaker is asking whether the lad intends to run as a Democrat or a Republican.
"A Republican, I'm sure," the young man replies.
"Well, you can talk like one and be a Democrat," Coleman advises.
Coleman, unaware of the reporter's presence, has not inadvertently revealed the Coca-Cola formula. He has simply declared what every Southern Democrat knows to be true: If you talk like a national Democrat in Georgia, you win Atlanta and Decatur and are trounced elsewhere. You can, as former U.S. Sen. Max Cleland did, vote with the national Democratic Party, but not blatantly and religiously. Or you lose.
Those who know that gathered in Philadelphia last week with a message to a party that is losing the middle class nationally in its leftward drift. "Do we want to vent or do we want to govern?" asked U.S. Sen. Evan Bayh (D-Ind.), chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council, an organization of moderate Democrats.
Without a Democrat in the White House and without a majority in Congress, the party is positioned by its dominant constituencies, some of them pretty extreme.
Last week, for example, Senate Democrats, while touting diversity, filibustered two women judicial nominees, one Catholic, one Hispanic and one senior citizen. They are prepared to filibuster an Arab-American, Henry Saad, nominated by President Bush for the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati. Miguel Estrada, a nominee to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals and Saad would be firsts.
Pettiness blocks Saad. But others are being blocked by abortion-rights organizations, who see all potential Supreme Court candidates through the prism of Roe v. Wade.
The devout Catholic, Alabama Attorney General William Pryor, especially frightens them. When his nomination to Atlanta's 11th Circuit Court of Appeals came up last week, only two Democratic senators -- Zell Miller and Ben Nelson of Nebraska -- voted for him.
After the vote, U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) declared:
"If [Pryor] can't get confirmed, then about 90 percent of the people that I grew up with can't be a federal judge, because 90 percent of the people that I grew up with have strongly held beliefs about life and death."
Another sign of the party's drift leftward, back to its big-government roots, is the battle over reauthorization of Head Start, a 38-year-old program.
President Bush has proposed a five-year pilot program to allow eight states, probably to include Georgia, to run Head Start -- something Georgia can probably do better.
Senate Democrats balked. Bush proposed to raise standards and to experiment with different delivery models. Democrats, driven by their beneficiary interest groups, countered in typical big-government fashion: increasing spending from $6.7 billion this year to $16 billion by 2008, while dropping the state experiments.
On taxes, leading Democratic presidential contenders, such as Howard Dean, are already talking about raising them while repealing or reducing Bush's tax cuts. On Iraq, they offer no coherent message or alternative, appearing to depend on bad news from the front to find openings.
As it drifts, the party is losing the middle class. "Among middle-class voters, the Democratic Party is a shadow of its former self," Democratic pollster Mark J. Penn told the DLC this week. If it doesn't find a way to appeal to more conservative mainstream voters, next year could be a disaster in this region, with Republicans winning Senate seats in Georgia, Florida, South Carolina and North Carolina.
George McGovern, your party is waiting. |
