This year's political flu
By Barry Casselman
It is well known that influenza mutates and reappears in various forms each year. There is also a political influenza that affects both major American political parties quadrennially, especially those parties that don't have an incumbent running for president.
This year's political flu strain is called Deanitis. (It is no small irony that the candidate for whom it is named is a physician.) Previous strains of political flu could be named for McGovern, Carter (2nd term), Mondale and Dukakis — all Democrats. But in the 1930s, the strains were Republican, i.e., Hoover (2nd term), Landon and Wilkie. The symptom of this political malady is a motion sickness that drives a party from the political center to gratify its political base. (I have not mentioned Barry Goldwater and Gary Hart because, although they lost, they were actually foreshadowing new and successful political party identities that led to the popular elections of Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton.)
Most of the excitement in this premature presidential nominating campaign has come from the candidacy of Howard Dean, whose strategists, of course, knew that the surest route to attention in a large, prominent yet undynamic field of Democratic candidates was to appeal to the left liberal base of the party. This group, which comprises a large number of Democratic primary voters, but only a small part of the whole electorate, was embittered by the 2000 election. September 11 redirected the misgivingsofamajorityof Americans about President Bush, who not only then successfully oversaw two military actions, but also (in a manner not dissimilar to what Ronald Reagan did) transformed the national agenda toward conservative principles. The left liberal base, infuriated by an administration which represents virtually everything they oppose, has become obsessed with a loathing for the president and everything he says or does.
The Dean strategy is clear. It is to create a grass-roots momentum that is stirred by the enduring hatred of President Bush and his policies, reinforced by populist and class warfare rhetoric and narrowed to exploit the national ambivalence about present conditions in the country. As the lone major candidate to oppose the war in Iraq, Dean has also led a bandwagon of lamentations about the public relations of the administration that preceded the Iraq war, and the frustrating conditions after the war. At the same time, as the economy grows slowly stronger, but with contrary signals, Mr. Dean has led an attack on the Bush domestic agenda, promising solutions for unemployment and health care issues. He has seemed to leave his Democratic rivals, most of whom are more knowledgeable and experienced, scrambling to catch up. The undoubted military success in Iraq has been followed by an inevitable period of consolidation and repair. The Bush administration has made some mistakes, and its opponents have jumped on them.
As he, like the piper of Hamelin, leads his party away from the center, however, Mr. Dean creates a much larger political space for Mr. Bush to occupy. President Bush (under the eye of Karl Rove) has steered himself to the conservative center. Those who would occupy the liberal center — including Joe Lieberman, John Kerry, John Edwards and Dick Gephardt — find themselves inevitably pulled away from it by Mr. Dean's success with the resentful left Democratic political base which alwaysseemstorequireits rhetoric strictly tartare.
None of this is lost on the electorate at large, however — an electorate whose pivotal voters will not fully engage until well into the 2004 political calendar. Some Dean supporters suggest that, once nominated, he will return to talking about his fiscally moderate record in Vermont. This will be an unprecedented acrobatic act, inasmuch as Mr. Dean will have spent more than a year promising new programs and policies that are anything but moderate or conservative, all of this on the record and on videotape. Furthermore, Mr. Dean's gamble in mid-to-late 2003 is that the economy, undeniably sputtering as it seems to have bottomed from its recession, will either continue to do so or head back down.
He is also betting that our problems in Iraq will continue without correction. Anything can happen, especially in the world of terrorism we are now in, but Mr. Dean's bet is against American optimism and ingenuity.
Mr. Dean has more than just temporary momentum.He has organization, and now he has money. He could become unstoppable before Punxatawny Phil ends his dark winter dreams..
What the Democrats now seem to need is a candidate who demonstrates that Mr. Dean doesn't know what he is talking about, while at the same time puts forward a clearly Democratic alternative to the policies of Mr. Bush that has appeal to independent voters in the center. This would require the Democratic Party to take a flu shot before the flu season begins. Ironically, it is Dr. Dean who knows best how hard it is for most people to practice preventative medicine.
Barry Casselman has reported on and analyzed presidential elections since 1972. E-mail: barcass@mr.net. |
