GEORGE WILL - NEWSWEEK
Dean and Big Differences
The "Make love not war" cohort is now older and, well, older. It says, "Make threats, not war." Or "Make trade wars, not the other kind "
Sept. 15 issue - If it was not already as plain as a pikestaff, last week's events made it so: In 2004 there will be no talk, as there was in 2000, of the presidential election's being about "the narcissism of small differences." The differences between the parties are now sufficiently stark that even Wesley Clark, the retired Army general who fancies himself a president, has suddenly discovered, in his 59th year, that he is a Democrat.
THE NEXT ELECTION will turn on big differences about two questions. What should be America's role in the world? And how should the Constitution be construed?
Last week another of the Senate Democrats' filibusters against the most important of President Bush's appellate-court nominees succeeded when Miguel Estrada withdrew from consideration. Republicans will be eager to trumpet the Democrats' seven successes in blocking, as they probably will have done by next November, confirmation of: a Roman Catholic and Hispanic immigrant (Estrada), an African-American woman (Justice Janice Rogers Brown of the California Supreme Court), a Southern woman (Priscilla Owen of the Texas Supreme Court), a Catholic woman (Carolyn Kuhl of California?s Superior Court) and three white Southerners (Attorney General William Pryor of Alabama; Charles Pickering, a Mississippi judge, and Terrence Boyle, a North Carolina judge).
More and more voters understand that judges are generally more important than elected officials. That is one reason why more and more nonvoters think that choosing elected officials is not worth the bother. On matters ranging from abortion to capital punishment, from college admissions to gay marriage (concerning which Massachusetts and New Jersey courts may soon issue decisions), judges increasingly set the agenda of social argument and set the course of the culture.
This agenda drives the "blue state/red state" division on the map of the Gore and Bush states in 2000. American politics remains remarkably regional because it remains organized by cultural more than economic issues.
In his new book "A National Party No More," Sen. Zell Miller, the Georgia Democrat who is retiring, says that whereas FDR said, "I see one third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished," today's typical national Democratic leader says, "I see one third of a nation and it can go to hell."
That one third, the South, seized the interest of Bostonian John Kerry when a poll showed him trailing Howard Dean by 21 points in New Hampshire. The most important primary immediately after New Hampshire is in South Carolina, so thither John Kerry went to break the big news: He is running for president! The "official" launching of Kerry's already marathonic presidential campaign had a slightly surreal feel, like the national anthem played during a seventh-inning stretch: Why now ?
In South Carolina Kerry said he had voted to authorize the president to "threaten" war. It would have been very jolly to have been a fly on the wall when the Kerry campaign's deepest thinkers, probably including Kerry, explained to one another why it would be clever to pretend that the threat of war, not the real thing, was all that Kerry's vote authorized.
Such a semantic sleight of hand might please a party nostalgic for Mr. It Depends on What the Meaning of "Is" Is. The "Make love, not war" cohort is now older and, well, older. It says, "Make threats, not war." But the rise of Howard Dean suggests that Democrats' nostalgia for Clintonian slipperiness is now trumped by their desire for fiery clarity.
Besides, the evidence of last Thursday's debate in New Mexico is that the Democratic candidates' real motto is "Make trade wars, not the other kind of wars." Free trade is out of favor with the base of the Democratic Party. This is a momentous development, considering that free trade, the engine of postwar prosperity, has been pursued by every president, never mind occasional apostasies for certain constituencies, since 1945.
Among Democrats nervous about Dean's shrillness, there is some surreal talk that Dean might be stopped by the "Democratic establishment." Oh, sure: It will come riding to the rescue on the back of the Loch Ness monster.
Nessie, unlike the Democratic establishment, never existed. Two generations ago that establishment did. It secured the nomination of Vice President Hubert Humphrey rather than Gene McCarthy at the riotous 1968 convention in Chicago. But by 1972 democracy, as then under-stood by Democrats, had come to their nomination process, producing a convention at which Shirley MacLaine could be a delegate but Richard Daley, then in his fifth term as mayor of the nation?s second largest city, could not be.
The Democratic establishment's last hurrah may have been in 1984, when it rallied to Walter Mondale, preventing the nomination of Gary Hart. Mondale went on to sweep Minnesota. Would Hart have done worse? Will Dean do better? He already has done much: By radicalizing the nomination contest, he has guaranteed that this will be an election about big differences. |
