OT/WSJ: Bloody Tuesday
November 8, 2002
COMMENTARY
Bloody Tuesday
By TED VAN DYK
"The voters are not fools" -- political scientist V.O. Key
Tuesday's electoral results should move the Democratic Party to a cleansing re-examination of where it has been, where it is, and what, if anything, it stands for. Absent that re-examination, President George W. Bush is well on his way to building a Republican base in the country which could rival the base President Franklin Roosevelt constructed out of the New Deal and World War II.
There are many interpretations of what happened to Democrats on bloody Tuesday. But the most obvious is that voters went with their common sense.
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The party's strongest and defining modern ground was that on which President John F. Kennedy ran and won in 1960.
• A strong national defense and a willingness to use military force in appropriate circumstance, coupled with an unyielding commitment in the world to certain universal principles while recognizing that nations would follow their own paths ("We arm to parley" . . . "We aim to make the world safe for diversity").
• A consonant commitment to nuclear arms-control and other measures which would keep dangerous weapons from dangerous leaders and lessen the chances for military confrontation.
• An appeal to a new, postwar generation to subsume itself in causes higher than themselves ("Ask not what your country can do for you . . .).
• A strongly pro-growth, pro-market economic policy which featured tax cuts to stimulate both investment and consumption and the historic Trade Expansion Act which committed the country to global liberalization of trade ("Get America moving again" . . . "a rising tide lifts all boats").
That platform is not far from President Bush's current platform. For the most part, Democrats reflexively have been opposing it.
Democrats underwent a sea change from which they have yet to emerge with the election in 1976 of Jimmy Carter. Mr. Carter has been an exemplary ex-president. But in his presidential campaign and subsequent presidency he set about mainly to demonstrate that he was "a different kind of Democrat." He was.
With a brief, one-term Georgia governorship behind him, he had no notion of national policy -- merely a vague impulse toward good works. His presidency, though well intended, left his party without any rallying point. It began with an initiative to bring to heel the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, with which he had long feuded, and ended with a military debacle in the Middle East desert and an economy wracked by inflation and record high interest rates.
Our next Democratic president was another southern ex-governor. Bill Clinton, as Mr. Carter before him, based his candidacy for the Democratic nomination on the premise that he was a New Democrat. The Clinton presidency was not, like Mr. Carter's, grounded in fuzzy moralism but was an existential, day-by-day exercise in political expediency. Thanks in large part to the presence in his administration of Treasury Secretary Bob Rubin, President Clinton avoided President Carter's economic and financial policy blunders. But his principal legacy to the Democratic Party, regrettably, has been its addiction to "spin," tactical political moves, and whatever-it-takes policy shifts which have left it without commitments to much of anything except political survival.
Tuesday's voters knew what they would get if they voted for Republican Senatorial and House candidates: A Congress prepared to act on -- rather than obstruct and delay -- President Bush's federal judicial nominations, tax proposals, national-security, energy, prescription-drug, Social Security reform, and other notions.
Voters were not necessarily in agreement with the president on those matters. They were, however, fed up with a Democratic Party trying to prosper, collectively and individually, by frightening senior citizens about loss of their Social Security or by reflexively characterizing as "racist" or "right-wing extremist" almost any Bush proposal or nominee usable to inflame emotions among core Democratic constituencies. And they saw no credible Democratic alternative platform.
The chickens came home to roost Tuesday.
While Mr. Clinton's party chairman, Terry McAuliffe, plowed Democratic resources fruitlessly into an effort to get even with Florida Governor Jeb Bush for his brother's 2000 victory, a number of Democratic senatorial and congressional candidates lost razor-thin contests for lack of those resources. Mr. Clinton himself, a proven fund-raiser and crowd builder within the party, was omnipresent on television screens in battleground states, thus energizing voter turnout among Republicans and independents who were repelled by his presence.
What happens now will and should be wrenching. In the wake of the debacle, House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt already has stepped down rather than be challenged from within the caucus. Senate Democratic Leader Tom Daschle, principal author of obstruct-and-delay tactics which he thought would cement his party's majority status in that body, also is under pressure. Both have sharply lessened their chances of remaining on the short list of possible 2004 Democratic Presidential nominees.
Mr. McAuliffe recently told a gathering of Democratic financial hitters that campaign-finance reform was nonsense and that he had new ways to evade the law. He has no evident political values except that winning is preferable to losing because the winners, such as himself, can get rich through their contact with wheeler-dealer donors and deal makers. He should be dumped.
The party's most visible non-elected talking heads are CNN personalities James Carville and Paul Begala, Clinton alumni who live by spin but are empty of substance. One cannot imagine the late Paul Wellstone, JFK, Lyndon Johnson, Hubert Humphrey, Paul Tsongas, or any Democratic candidate with views or political instincts of his own using these people for anything but carefully defined operational tasks.
JFK, in a passage famous in 1960, was being briefed by pollster Lou Harris. Harris presented polling data and then proceeded to interpret them and offer campaign suggestions. Kennedy quickly cut him off: "Just give me the (epithet) numbers, Lou," he said, "I'm smart enough to figure out the rest."
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Democrats really should be smart enough to figure out the rest. To begin, ask the question: What are the country's needs? Then: What policies might best meet those needs? Then: How can we promote those policies?
If we Democrats will ask and answer those questions, and then take our positive agenda to the people, we might deserve to be trusted again with governance.
Mr. Van Dyk, now a Seattle columnist and scholar,
was for 40 years active in Democratic national policy
and politics. |
