Why battered Democrats stick with the Clintons.
by John Fund
Friday, February 2, 2001 11:22 a.m.
It looks as if the Democratic Party is still going to be run by the Clintons. Is this good for the party?
Terry McAuliffe, the Clintons' handpicked chairman of the Democratic National Committee, will take the reins during a meeting in Washington this weekend. Mr. McAuliffe is so superglued to the Clintons that he was the original guarantor of their mortgage on the house they bought in Chappaqua, N.Y., before public outrage that a first couple would be so indebted to a party fund-raiser forced a search for more conventional financing.
"The Democrats show no sign of shucking their dependence on Clinton, the nonpareil fundraiser," writes worried liberal columnist Mary McGrory in the Washington Post. Now the fund raiser in chief's favorite fund raiser will chair the party.
The chutzpah of choosing Mr. McAuliffe is breathtaking. Just this week, former Teamster president Ron Carey was arraigned on federal perjury charges in connection with his efforts to finance his 1996 re-election campaign with $885,000 in union funds. His political director, William Hamilton, was convicted of fraud and conspiracy in a trial that implicated not only Mr. Carey but Mr. McAuliffe, who was identified as a participant in the illegal swap while he was finance chairman of the Clinton-Gore campaign. As my colleague Micah Morrison points out, while Mr. McAuliffe has shown a remarkable ability to skate away from legal danger, he may yet be indicted.
None of this fazes the hyperactive Mr. McAuliffe, who once wrestled an alligator on a dare in order to secure a campaign contribution. On Thursday night, he gave a remarkable interview to Black Entertainment Television laying out his aggressive plans as party chairman. When asked what the Gore campaign could have done to win the election, Mr. McAuliffe tried to rewrite history: "We won the campaign, we just didn't get the prize." He preposterously claimed inside knowledge that media re-re-recounts of Florida ballots would show within a month that Al Gore had won the state by 25,000 votes.
But Mr. McAuliffe isn't just looking backward. He also says he will triple the budget of the party's communications and research divisions overnight and launch an aggressive campaign to mobilize the party's base voters.
He says the party will join with civil-rights groups--whose nonprofit status increasingly masks their pure partisanship--to hold "hearings" in Florida on how to combat the "voter suppression" Mr. McAuliffe claims handed the election to President Bush.
Later this year, he says, he'll take his so-called hearings on the road to Virginia and New Jersey. He claims both states have a "tradition of voter suppression and intimidation." More to the point, they are the only states that elect governors this year, and Democrats are eager to recapture the statehouses in Richmond and Trenton. So the party that complains that John Ashcroft is "divisive" will campaign for political power by stoking phony racial fears about the legitimacy of elections.
That the Democrats have to resort to such despicable tactics is a sign of the party's weakness in the wake of Bill Clinton. Mr. Clinton may have won the White House twice, but his party was battered during his eight years in office, as Republicans won control of Congress, the majority of governorships and a good many state legislative chambers.
Why, then, do Democrats stand by the Clintons? It may all come down to fund raising. In 1998 I asked Rep. Gary Ackerman, a New York Democrat, what accounted for the Clintons' hold on the party. "He's a good provider," Mr. Ackerman sighed, sounding a little like an unhappy wife trying to explain why she stays in a bad marriage.
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