Grieving Democrats quietly fade into insignificance
March 27, 2001
BY WILLIAM O'ROURKE
Though Bill Clinton has not removed himself from public view, most of the Democratic Party seems to have disappeared. As President Bush erases by fiat and proxy, largely without public debate, as much of the work of the Clinton administration as possible, the Democrats in Congress have kept a lower profile than does the new president himself.
It is usual for former presidents to stay off the public stage, but not usual for a new president to do so. The Democrats, too, are especially invisible these days, as policies are reversed, regulations ended, the American Bar Association's 50-year review of federal judgeships canceled.
The disappearance of the Democrats has been blamed on a leadership vacuum--a vacuum large enough to bring forward Teddy Kennedy once again as titular leader of the party. And if Kennedy is the party's new leader, all hope is gone.
The Al Gore defeat, of course, is responsible for this state of affairs. It mimics the five stages of grief. For many months Democrats have been in the first stage, denial. There certainly were good reasons to be in denial, since Gore won the national popular vote.
The AFL-CIO bet the farm on a Gore victory, turning out 4 million more union votes than in 1996. But it was all for naught. If you want to get under the skin of AFL-CIO President John Sweeney, just mention in his presence that Gore "lost" the election. Sweeney quickly and testily reminds the speaker that Gore got more votes.
But whatever happened to the former vice president, Gore is not president. Nor is he the leader, or spokesman, of his party. What Gore does is bring famous people, such as Rupert Murdoch and Alan Greenspan, to his journalism class at Columbia University to spare himself the trouble of lecturing.
Most of the Democratic Party is done with denial. It is now into the second stage, anger, but Bush has found a way to defuse anger. He rolls out bipartisanship rhetoric, pleas for civility, attempts to set a new tone, the charm offensive. Bush gets to meet and greet and talk to friendly audiences, doing his humble pie, regular guy routine, while his juggernaut continues to roll on, unhampered by any notable opposition.
Except for Sen. John McCain. It appears McCain, although a Republican, has taken on the most public oppositional role. But real campaign finance reform seems unlikely now that some Democrats and the AFL-CIO have joined the opposition to McCain-Feingold. Nonetheless, Republican PR firms continue to manufacture "grass-roots support" rallies for their turn-back-the-clock policies, as they did during the Florida recount, summoning their troops to pose as workers (hard hats provided!) to applaud the passage of the president's tax bill.
Hillary Clinton (the most prominent new Democrat, though far from being the party's leader) is ahead of the curve again, having reached grief's third stage, bargaining. She voted for the credit-card-industry championed changes to the bankruptcy laws and rented the most expensive congressional offices in history, $500,000 worth of Manhattan real estate, big enough to house all her "volunteers." Her vote echoes her pronouncement during the '92 campaign that if you were a lawyer you had "to work for banks." And she still does, it appears.
Something called campaign finance reform may pass, though a good many Americans judge it will have little effect since money, like water, finds its way regardless of dams and rechanneling projects. That is why campaign finance reform polls so poorly as an important issue (the fourth stage is depression). Whatever passes, it will go the way of the famous 1995 photo of Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich, then speaker of the House, shaking hands, swearing that they would do something about campaign finance reform.
What they (and, apparently, the current Congress) would do about it, of course, is nothing at all. Grief's last stage, unfortunately, is acceptance.
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