Essay #3

This essay was originally intended to be the fourth in the series, but today I found two news items that show that future history is not waiting to be written – it’s happening all the time.

The Drudge Report listed both items: Howard Dean is considering a run to replace DNC Chairman Terry McAuliffe, and pundit James Carville said that the Democratic Party needs to be “born again” and find a compelling message to tell the American people. Carville, a Democrat, essentially agrees with my second essay, saying that Bush won because he presented a coherent worldview. The Democrats failed, he says, because they were too scattered.

So can the Dems succeed in retaking control of policy-making in this country? Carville thinks so. So does Dean. But they have radically different visions of what the Democratic Party needs to become. With Daschle gone and Nancy Pelosi a relative newcomer to Democratic leadership, the DNC chairmanship will be a very important post. Depending on which branch of the party gets it, we’ll see very different dynamics – and, in my opinion very different results – in the coming years.

This essay will be written unfolding like history actually does, showing one series of events and strategies that could propel the Democrats to power, just as Essay #2 showed the possibility of Republican ascendancy. This is by no means guaranteed, even in its broad theme, but it is, I believe, a distinct possibility.

The People’s Party

The Democratic base is liberal. They like men with names like Mondale, Dukakis, Gore, and Kerry. They also like men with names like Kennedy, Johnson, and Carter. And they like men and women with names like Clinton. They live in big cities. More of them have graduate degrees than Republicans; but more of them also have no college at all. They belong to or have great sympathy for various groups that do not fit into Norman Rockwell paintings. Even rich minorities (Jews, Asians) vote Democratic; there’s something about the party that makes people feel included and accepted.

However, as Democrats everywhere are realizing now, there is something very important about the Democratic base: it is smaller than the Republicans’. The party of minorities is in the minority, and has shown a serious deficiency in getting the majority to accept its message. But that is only a recent phenomenon.

From the stock market crash of 1932 until the Republican Revolution of 1994, the Democrats had the majority in fifty of the sixty-two legislatures. They won ten of the seventeen presidential elections during that time. Few would have characterized the Democratic Party as minority-based or out of touch with America’s heartland.

After a successful centrist presidency (Clinton’s) with a powerful and personable chief executive, the Democratic Party awoke in 2000 to find itself further from the American center than it had been since the 1800’s. Somehow, the People’s Party had become the Party of the Elite. The rift deepened in 2004.

After a period of heavy drinking, a period of navel-gazing, and a period of soul-searching, the Democrats realized in early 2005 that something had to be done. Pundits began to theorize they were just waiting for Iraq to collapse; but Middle Americans were rallying behind the flag despite setbacks.

Nancy Pelosi lost her job to Evan Bayh of Indiana. Horrified at the prospect of Howard Dean leading the party into Vermont-style reactionism and withdrawal, Terry McAuliffe and other 1990’s New Democrats prevailed upon Bill Clinton to leave the speaking circuit and take up his party’s chairmanship. Under his charismatic leadership, the socialists and cultural crusaders were shunted to the sidelines. In a Nixon-visits-China sequence, the man who embodied American immorality became the enforcer of a morally conscious platform.

Meanwhile, President Bush realized that Iraq was looking more and more like Vietnam every day. Ayad Allawi was assassinated. The Islamists pulled out of the government. The civil war expanded to include Kurdish and Shiite secessionists. The American military could, of course, still destroy anything it could identify, but identification was becoming more and more of a problem.

With midterm elections looming, Bush set April 1st, 2006, as the final withdrawal date for American forces, excepting a few bases on the Iranian, Kuwaiti, and Jordanian borders. The pullout was in fact complete by March 18th. Bush tried to play it like a victory. Clinton turned it into a political nuke in primetime on the 19th. By admitting a mistake of his own – the Somalia intervention of 1993 – he was able to come across as honest and open, and said their initial mistakes were similar, but it took Bush three years and 3,000 American lives to get out, while Clinton realized he had no chance of success in Somalia after a few months and one bad ambush. Bush’s poll numbers plummeted, and Democrats became energized as the midterm elections approached.

With the typically low turnout and low energy of midterm elections, a motivated base can make the difference, as it did for the Republicans in 1994. With Clinton at the helm, Democrats successfully parlayed disgust with the Iraq failure into a referendum on Bush – though he was not on the ballot. With Republican voters hiding at home, Democrats turned out and turned the House over to Evan Bayh, and reduced the Senate to a 51-48-1 division. With Iraq shattered into bitterly warring provinces, anything less would have seemed like an acquittal.

Clinton was weakening, and he recruited a trio of up-and-coming strategists to be his “hit men”. They applied painful pressure to House Democrats, and forced the party into a straitjacket of fiscal and party-line discipline. He knew, and others now recognized, that to capitalize on their gains in 2006 they would need to attract centrist voters and Republicans disgusted with the derisively labeled “Bush Dividend” – large and growing deficits from the party long associated with fiscal soundness.

Some Republicans also tried to move to the center; the party wonks lined up behind John McCain in the primaries. However, he split votes with George Pataki and Rudy Giuliani, and eventually lost the nomination to Kansas Senator Sam Brownback. The Republican base is conservative.

By convincing his own wife not to run for president, and nominating instead Evan Bayh, who had gone from being known as a little-known “nice guy” from Indiana to being the toughest pork-slasher in Congress, the Republicans found themselves outflanked on economics. The Democrats had successfully used cross-campaigning against pork in 2006, showing each district a litany pork projects in other districts that their candidate had voted for. This they reprised in 2008, often using outdated data, to cement their gains in the House and tip the Senate over by just one vote. Evan Bayh became president in an election that reminded a relieved America that ’00 and ’04 were anomalies, not the norm.

Now in charge, and without Clinton, who stepped down and then passed away, the Democrats had the task of creating a legislative framework that would last beyond the Bush hangover. Certainly fiscal discipline was a centerpiece, though not going as far as a balanced budget amendment. They did, however, champion and pass an amendment prohibiting the overseas deployment of offensive troops without a declaration of war ratified by the Senate.

They raised taxes, introduced a universal health care system, and took the teeth out of the “No Child Left Behind” program, proclaiming their commitment to local control. They shunted social issues to the side; leaving states to decide unsettled matters, and allowing members the rare pleasure of straying from party lines only on moral matters.

Like the Republicans in Essay #2, this robust Democratic majority was formed and will last based on winning American hearts and minds. They found issues neglected by the Republicans that hit home with voters. Fiscal discipline is a virtue; so is peace. By taking serious action to achieve both, they cemented their reputation as the party of the American people. Businessmen, Christians, neo-conservatives, and libertarians remained firmly entrenched in the Republican camp. Some gays, environmentalists, and socialists fled to the Green Party, but the loss on the left wing was far outweighed by serious and lasting gain in the center. Without issues that expand beyond the Republican base, the G.O.P. was firmly planted on the margins, awaiting its turn to capitalize on a failure and win back the hearts and minds of American voters.