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Tuesday, November 09, 2004
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SAVING THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY FROM ITSELF
"We are an opposition party and as of right now not a particularly effective one."
-James Carville, Monday November 8, 2004
There are lots of folks out there who hold Mr. Carville in very high esteem. I'm not one of them. In his career as a political strategist, he has won precisely two impressive victories. He elected Harris Wofford to the Senate from Pennsylvania in 1991 and he elected the seemingly unelectable Bill Clinton to the presidency in 1992. Other than those two wins, his average is one of humiliating losses. Of course, he still beats his butt-buddy, Bob Shrum, who has won as many presidential races as I have. However, Carville gives good quote and he's great on TV for someone with an almost incomprehensible accent.
On Monday morning, Carville, Shrum and pollster Stanley Greenberg addressed the Christian Science Monitor breakfast and discussed the need for the Democratic Party to reform its electoral message. Carville has grown almost honest in his advanced years and recognizes the problems facing his party. And these problems are significant. Let's review them.
First, President Bush started this race much more vulnerable than his father began 1992. Every indicator pointed to his losing if only the Democratics nominated a half-competent candidate who ran on a compelling message. Instead, they nominated John Kerry whose entire message was, "I fought the Vietnam War before I fought against it."
Second, in his victory, President Bush reversed almost seventy years of history in becoming the first incumbent to increase his margins in Congress in a re-lection campaign. Presidents Nixon and Reagan won 49 states and 60% of the popular vote and still lost seats in Congress. Neither had re-election coat tails, President Bush did.
Third, there are still significant portions of the Democratic base who cling to the idea that the President stole his second election in a row. Even if proven, the voting irregulaties in Ohio still would not have given Senator Kerry enough votes to win the state and thus the Electoral College. If nothing else, Carville recognizes that the President won fairly through an execution of a superior political strategy, saying; "It is a monumental political achievement...." Greenberg followed this statement by saying, "The president acted boldly, in a very effective campaign, to keep the election focused on safety and values.... He got people to vote their feelings and their beliefs rather than to vote on his job performance or his ideas."
Carville novelly interepted this by stating, "These guys had a narrative - we're going to protect you from the terrorists in Tikrit and from the homos in Hollywood. That's it,I think we could elect somebody from Beverly Hills if they had some compelling narrative to tell people about what the country is."
If the Democratic Party hopes to win nationally anytime in the forseeable future, they are going to have to do a whole lot more than run an opposition campaign. Americans are virually unique in the world in that they tend to vote FOR something as opposed to against an incumbent. As Senator Kerry learned the hard way, a platform of, "I'm not George Bush" is hardly enough of a platform to win an election on. Actually, it is a telling testimony to just how unpoular President Bush is that Kerry's campaign garnered as many votes as it did. The President and Mr. Rove recognize that Senator Kerry, perhaps the single worst major party candidate in my lifetime, came within 130,000 votes of winning in the Electoral College.
Mr. Carville does make a significant point, however. What the Republicans stood for, however wrongheaded it may or may not have been, was at least something. This is dramatically different from the national Democrats, who appeared to stand for nothing except sending the President back to Crawford. Off of the top of my head, I can't think of another successful presidential campaign that won on this strategy. Even the Nixon campaign of 1968 and Carter campaign of '76 at least alluded to something better.
Senator Kerry never did that. His campaign seemed to say, "I'll do for the country what I did in Vietnam", which left one to wonder if that would entail working on the problems of the country, only to later protest the solutions he came up with. Kerry's campaign was not only cynical, it was cynical in a way that was demonstrably unsuccessful through American history. The Kerry campaign was much more like the Dukakis campaign of '88 than anyone would care to admit.
One of the biggest problems of the national Democrats in the last two cycles is that they hedged all of their positions. They neither supported or opposed any of the President's positions. This worked for President Clinton, but only because his charisma overshadowed the fact that, at heart, he never really stood for anything other than winning elections. John Kerry is no Bill Clinton and there is no Bill Clinton on the horizon.
The election might have been very different if only the national party took clear stands on the issues. As much as you might have disagreed with the President's positions, at least you understood what they were. President Bush was for invading Iraq and winning the war there. Senator Kerry, on the other hand, said that it was "the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time" yet would have still authorized the invasion had he knew then what he knows now. I'm not sure that a suburban housewife in Cleveland could understand that when many of the major figures in his own party couldn't.
The President clearly opposed gay marriage, going so far as to support a Constitutional Amendment prohibiting it. Senator Kerry essentially said, "I oppose gay marriage but support civil unions, which is the same as marriage but not as likely to offend you hillbillies." All this managed to do was offend hillbillies and homosexuals.
If the national party only took clear positions, they would be in a better position today. Had they have said, "This war has all the earmarks of Vietnam and we cannot support it" or, "As soon as you can point out how a loving marriage between anyone is a threat to civilization, we'll rethink how this is anything other than an issue of fsirness", they may still have lost, but at least they would have a direction on which they can build for the next four years.
Instead, the Democrats are indicating that they are going to merely oppose the President. This is fraught with danger, in that it means that they are relying on the Republicans losing the next election instead of the Democrats actively winning it.
Once upon a time, there was a very popular president named Eisenhower. For the first two years of his term, the minority Democrats in the Senate attempted to obstruct the programs on which he was elected. Then in 1954, a Senator from Texas named Lyndon Johnson was elected Minority Leader and understood that mere opposition would endlessly relegate them to the minority. Johnson decided that if he helped the President pass his program, particularly issues where he faced opposition from the Republican right wing, he could then go to the country and say the Democrats were more committed to passing the President's agenda than the Republicans are. He did and the Democrats won majorities for the balance of Eisenhower's term, then went on to recapture the White House in 1960. In fact, this lead to the Democrats holding the Senate until 1980.
If the Senate Democrats elect a leader to replace the defeated Senator Daschle, they could very well make some gains in the near term. There is currently an issue where they could begin. The President has proposed immigration reform that would allow illegal workers to register as "guest workers." This would, at least in theory, allow them union representation and concievably allow for a greater minority base upon which they can build. The added benefit is that a number of Congressional Republicans oppose the President on this measure.
Passing significant parts of the President's agenda over the opposition of his own party would place the Democrats to at least hold on to what they have in 2006, if not actually make gains. If President Bush were to attempt to change the issue to something like gay marriage again, the Democrats could very easily say that the administration is looking for division when there is much that they are prepared to work with him on. This would place the burden of obstructionism on both the President and the Republican caucus. The Democrats could undermine the President by working with him. This has the added benefit of marginilizing the more extreme members of the Republican Party, particularly in the House.
As far as gay marriage goes, if the federal courts do not resolve the issue in the next four years, which I fully expect them to, the Republican Party will have a serious conflict itself over the issue in 2008. Serious candidates like former New York Mayor, Rudolph Guilianni and current New York Governor, George Pataki are on the record as supporting it. Senator John McCain has indicated that he has no serious problem with it. If you include California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, the most popular Republicans except the President are either for gay marriage or agnostic on it. If the Democrats just step aside on the issue, the Republican conservatives could easily marginalize themselves on the issue.
While it was easy to paint John Kerry as a "liberal fag lover", it would be decidedly more difficult to so portray Rudy Giulianni or John McCain.
Of course, all of this goes out the window if the Democrats are serious about nominating a polarizing loser like Senator Clinton. The former First Lady is seen as being far more liberal and divisive than Senator Kerry could ever dream of being. Unless the Republicans nominated someone like Trent Lott, Hillary would be incapable of winning more than 5 states unless her husband cheated on her just before the debates.....then she might win 8 states.
The national Democrats are in a bad place right now. This neednt be a permanent position, but it will take a grown-up political realist to take the party's collective hand away from the self-destruct button.
Oh, and it will also require having Bob Shrum put to sleep.
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