If you had to paraphrase the Washington Post op-ed from Democratic Leadership Council chairman Harold Ford, Jr., today, it would go something like this: “Democrats, George W. Bush has screwed up so badly that all you need to do to win is show up. Dear God, please don’t rock the boat.” George W. Bush has presented Democrats with a “Hoover moment” and Democrats ought to react with restraint.
Like, you know, Franklin Roosevelt did after the last Hoover moment. Imagine the lasting damage Democrats would have suffered had FDR responded to the wreckage he inherited from Herbert Hoover by implementing a sweeping, liberal social and economic agenda.
You probably think I’m kidding, but no: the lesson that the well-educated, articulate and apparently fully conscious Ford derives from Roosevelt, whose policies inaugurated a half-century of Democratic congressional majorities, is that Democrats must not, under any circumstances, emulate Roosevelt.
Ford says that there’s danger ahead because “[a]s the caucuses and primaries approach, candidates will come under increasing pressure to ignore the broader electorate and appeal to the party faithful. But the opportunity to build a historic majority is too great — and too rare — to pass up.”
Got that? Democrats should not go out of their way to appeal to Democrats. And what is it that Democrats want Democrats to do? What are these hideously alienating, divisive policies that Democrats would have Democrats pursue?
Well, Ford doesn’t say, other than obliquely. But he fears that Democrats will force Democrats to actually move toward a withdrawal from Iraq, and he fears that Democrats will force Democrats to actually punish the Bush administration for operating an ongoing criminal enterprise.
He fears that Democrats will force Democrats to espouse a health care policy that actually provides health care to everyone in the country without taking care not to bruise the sensibilities of health care profiteers. He fears that Democrats will force Democrats to push an energy policy that scares big business (one that, in a word, works).
Above all, he fears that Democrats will force Democrats to be Democrats. Old Democrats, like Roosevelt, instead of New Democrats, like the Clintons. Like every champion of the creeping center, Ford invokes Bill Clinton and insists that the happy-footed political genius Clinton drew upon to survive eight years of Republican congressional insanity represents a philosophical model that current Democrats must cleave to or die. Like every Clinton sycophant, he mistakes survival for triumph; he thinks that Democrats cannot win a large congressional majority in 2008, or if they win one cannot hold it, unless the Democratic presidential nominee promises to govern as Bill Clinton was forced to do by his at first slender and ultimately almost nonexistent support from Congress.
Long-time New Republic contributing editor Noam Scheiber, in a widely remarked New York Times op-ed piece a week or so ago, accurately pegged what it is that Ford fears. Among other things, he said that the DLC has rendered itself irrelevant by picking fights with the party base, a tradition Ford continued today. He said that the influence of the DLC has faded because it no longer has a pipeline into the White House as it did when Clinton frolicked there.
But the sad fact is that the DLC isn’t irrelevant: that was just wishful thinking, looking at cracks in the plaster on the wall and mistaking them for writing. It remains the same malignant, anti-progressive force among Democrats as it has been for the better part of two decades. If Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton wins the presidency in 2008, that pipeline will be back, and only a massive, largely progressive Democratic congressional majority will have any hope of overcoming the foot-dragging from the White House. The next president Clinton is, if anything, less liberal than the first, not very liberal one. President Obama’s populist impulse is barely more pronounced than the Clintons’. A mandate to enact genuinely progressive policies would terrify them.
Gore Vidal once said of the US that “we are beyond law, which is not uncommon for an empire; unfortunately, we are also beyond common sense.” Neither Obama nor Clinton threaten to break that mold on the first point, and whether they would on the second seems more a matter of luck than design. Like Ford, like Evan Bayh and other “New Democrats” — who are really just unsophisticated versions of the moderate and liberal Republicans killed off by the Jacobins who came to power in Reagan’s GOP — they appear at times to think the capacity for massive violence equals the capacity for actually protecting the country and advancing its interests. Obama at least recognized in advance that the Iraq invasion was stupid, but that’s no guarantee he wouldn’t concoct stupidities of his own, the right to which he’s already laid claim.
And so on. There’s more than a bit of sick irony in Ford’s position. George Bush and congressional Republicans have been governing, if you can call it that, as though they had won the White House by a landslide. Democrats could, if they define and defend an agenda including policies that large majorities of Americans already in principle support — getting out of Iraq, adopting a coherent universal health care plan, sane energy policies, fair trade policies, domestic economic policies that deliver on FDR’s social contracts, etc. — win both the White House and Congress by landslide margins in 2008, and Ford wants them to govern as if from a position of weakness.
If he gets his wish, as it looks he may, Democrats will be lucky to gain and hold the White House for a single term. They haven’t earned the historic opportunity with which they’re faced — neither had Roosevelt — but that’s no excuse for throwing it away.
A masterful commentary, WB. The ‘holding pattern’ vs. ‘breakthrough’ emboldened visions of governance (and, even more so, perhaps, in campaigning) have seemed to schizophrenize this nation’s politics. Recalling that Harold Ford tried to unseat Pelosi’s path to Speaker reminds me that the Speakership could be in far worse hands. We’ve all had our chagrins, to say the least, with Madame Speaker, at her own punches pulled, but he at the time was the alternative, and the only serious one, as I recall. She surely won that largely on ‘chits’ but is it possible too that the schizophrenia in Congress makes the majority of them as well still envision themselves as emboldened, even as they keep short-sheeting themselves?
A holding pattern is what you’re in when you never really land and you never really take off. Or at least you think you can’t. Democrats need to have the lessons and visions that were integral to original liberalism refreshed with some nightly reading of The Little Engine That Could…. or, as RFK preferred, of GB Shaw. And not just to dream and ask “why not?” about their own individual electoral victories but about what they’ll do with them if/when they come. So far, I still don’t hear anyone doing that broader and bolder vision more than Edwards is.
Democrats have been down so long that down looks like up to them. They’ve lost their way, their core values, their ability to lead, and their courage. I, too, think those Blue Dog Democrats are moderate Republicans in disguise. I thought this about Bill Clinton, and often said so, and I think this about Hillary, too.
And far too many regular Democrats are voting with Blue Dogs on too many issues of great importance to their true constituencies, whom they abandon without a look back as they stuff their campaign coffers with Big Money’s money.
I’m no more certain that the Democratic Party can revive itself than I am that we as a nation can ever repair the damage done by Republicans since 1980. Since Bush came into office, the damage has accelerated in direct proportion to the disintegration of the Democratic Party.
The fact that the Republican Party seems to be marginalizing itself is of slight comfort when Democrats themselves are so weak in character and conviction, and in awareness of what it’s supposed to mean to be a Democrat. We cannot depend on moderate Republicans, whatever party they claim to belong to, to pick up the pieces of the national disaster that is George Bush and the 107th, 108th, 109th, and it’s beginning to look like the 110th Congresses. It’s the Humpty-Dumpty syndrome.
And so, Monty, politically what do you recommend we do come election time?
I’ll take your question at face value, Jack, despite the inference I’m drawing from it. I’d say, Oh, just do the usual. Vote for the least of the evils.
To me that means candidates as far left as you can go – and by that I most certainly do not mean traditional socialism or worse. I’m not ideological and I don’t trust ideologues. I mean the most humanistic, egalitarian, empathic, and honest candidates available. Not that there would be very many of them, and they’d often probably lose – corporations, interest groups and big donors usually won’t trust them with a lot of money.
But Paul Wellstone was a standout in my mind. So is weird little Dennis Kucinich.
I vote differently in primaries than in generals. The primaries I reserve for my favorite hopeless cases. In the generals I take one of two paths: If my state is a given for a Democrat, I don’t vote since my vote really doesn’t make a difference because of the Electoral College (winner takes all), and this means I don’t have to violate my precious principles and vote for someone who doesn’t meet my prerequisites (see above). In both my former state (Hawai`i) and my current one (California), it’s just about guaranteed the Democrat will win the popular and thus the electoral vote.
If it were a national popular vote, then I would definitely vote, probably holding my nose, because then my vote is far more likely to make a difference. Under the Electoral College system, if I lived in a swing state, I’d also hold my nose and vote for the lesser of the evils. Voting in a swing state is a must.
But the nature of that choice is to me the saddest thing about our political system – the two parties, the money, the Electoral College, the gerrymandered districts, the media image-making – these all make it virtually impossible to vote for a truly good person.
CA has to fear the district by district proposal that is being floated.
As to safe seat general election voting, I think a vote is a special personal act, and would vote even if it was a “lost” vote. The perfect can’t be the enemy of the good, so the above the fray Naderite approach in ’00 was stupid (in some states), but in general, I disagree that a lost vote via the Electoral College means not voting is a good idea.
A sound approach would be instant runoff voting, but that’s in the dream category at the moment. Anyway, the primary post was very good. It also suggests the recent FISA vote was not just a matter of a sliver of Dems voting with Rs. The DLC is a Clinton org. It’s a bigger reach than that.
And, even among those who voted against the FISA legislation, the “don’t rock the boat” sentiment was there. Such timidity is not the path to success.