May 27, 1999
Review & Outlook
The Carville Democrats
It's time for the Democratic Party to "move on." What remains to be seen is whether anyone in the party still knows the way forward.
We've been raising this subject since before the last Presidential election, wondering whether one Democrat would criticize Mr. Clinton's behavior in office. None did. Now another Presidential campaign is upon us, a good moment to wonder again about the state of our politics. While much dynamism is evident around the states and cities, in both parties Washington's politics seem in a perpetual funk.
Much of the stale air is no doubt born of the politics of distrust Bill Clinton brought to Washington, a town where trust in a man's word is the coin of the realm. Six years of counterfeiting have ruined the city's currency. Yet it is also true that Mr. Clinton's ascendancy is a sign of our times, a symptom of deeper currents.
For the Democratic Party, James Carville is of course the pre-eminent, or at least most visible, strategist of his era. In the 1992 campaign, Mr. Carville's "It's the economy, stupid" was at least an issue of sorts. By today, he represents "spin," which essentially turns press coverage in any one news cycle away from matters of substance. More specifically, as in his "war" on Kenneth Starr, it emphasizes the damage any given tactic does to one's opponent--all the while of course accusing your opponent of partisanship and bemoaning the "politics of personal destruction."
Part of the underlying current is that the Democratic Party's low ebb has reduced it to such tactics. Its postwar hold on the Congress, now based on little more than using the federal budget to buy up constituent loyalties, was eroding. Most Congressional Democrats were liberals, distrustful of Bill Clinton's purportedly "new" Democrats. And so by default, and because it worked, the Democrats adopted a politics of personal assault and demagoguery.
For months before the 1996 Congressional elections, the AFL-CIO ran TV ads against GOP incumbents, demagoguing them on pensions for the elderly and Medicare. When the political tides proved too strong to reverse, and voters handed control of the House to Republicans, Rep. David Bonior went for the jugular. He mounted an ethics assault against Newt Gingrich. It worked. Speaker Gingrich, whose package of ideas and policies called the Contract With America turned the Democrats out of power, eventually resigned his office. To be fair, Mr. Gingrich had dethroned Democratic Speaker Jim Wright on ethics charges, though the latter's real sin was involvement in the S&L fiasco. Yet just this year, the IRS exonerated Mr. Gingrich of the famous, alleged violations--the attack tactics had routed the system itself.
A few weeks ago Democrats had the opportunity to address a serious subject in Senate hearings into the future of the Independent Counsel statute. Instead, they used it to replay one of the party's favorite sports: pistol-whipping Ken Starr. The three Democrats who ran up to kick the hardest are all reliable spear-carriers in Carville's War. "Like Jack the Ripper calling for more neighborhood patrols because of the surge in victims," snorted Senator Leahy at the Starr testimony. Senator Levin whacked at Mr. Starr's prosecutorial judgment, and Bob Torricelli used the occasion to heap praise on Susan McDougal's hung jury.
When Senator Fred Thompson opened his campaign-finance hearings two years ago, he announcing that the Chinese government had illegally poured money into a U.S. Presidential campaign, and thought he had cleared the statement with Democrats and intelligence agencies. But Senator John Glenn heaped scorn on a "so-called Chinese plan," then threw roadblocks in front of the Thompson investigation. With the Cox report, Senator Thompson stands exonerated, but Mr. Cox seems to be getting a similar treatment from his Democratic colleagues (see below).
The Beltway Democrats (who are often better than this around the country) are today a hopeless tangle of patronage, subsidies, consultancies, public bond sales and law practices, all dependent on maintaining the federal colossus of bureaucratic spending that these Democrats built brick by brick for 40 years. This has become a backward-looking, survivalist politics, more appropriate to a moribund European socialist party than a party for the next century.
If it settles at this level, the Democratic Party will remain chain-ganged to Bill Clinton's, and now Al Gore's, politics: Servicing three or four static constituencies and relentlessly beating campaign money out of all their dependencies--no constructive criticism, no debate. Indeed, the party-wide silence over Bill Clinton's scandals was of a piece; for all the years when our obviously failed welfare system and public-schools were washing generations of the poor over the falls, barely a Democrat spoke up.
There are faint heartbeats to suggest some Democrats have had enough of this. At a fund-raiser for Bill Bradley in New Jersey recently, the most suggestive remarks about a possible Democratic renewal came from former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker. "I am a disturbed citizen," Mr. Volcker said. "I've seen healthy skepticism erode into a corrosive cynicism." Asserting that he wasn't singling out any Administration, Mr. Volcker nonetheless said this is "a trend that has sadly discouraged many of our best--driving them away from Washington and government," citing among Democrats former Senators Sam Nunn and David Boren.
A party has indeed been defined downward when it travels from a time when reporters sought out the substance of a Sam Nunn for comment on its positions to now, when this or that foot soldier in the "permanent campaign" muscles in front of compliant cameras to trash-talk all opposition. Just possibly, some of the party's best people are embarrassed by what the Clinton-Carville ethos has wrought, and will try to wrest the party from it. Anyone in this business would be happy to again have such people as an opposition. The state of the nation's politics could only benefit.
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