April 1, 2002
IT AIN'T THE WAR, FRANK :
The Wimps of War (Frank Rich, March 30, 2002, NY Times)Here's how bad things are for the Democrats. During the last town meeting of liberals that still convenes on network television — Hollywood's Oscar ceremony — no one, not even the tag team of Barbra Streisand and Robert Redford, had so much as a mildly critical word to say about George W. Bush. But Nathan Lane scored one of the night's few laughs when he saluted movie animators for "creating the illusion of life — something that was never achieved with Al Gore."Such is the torpor of the Democrats these days that Mr. Gore's shaving of his beard is what passes for a galvanizing party event worthy of national polls (62 percent were pro-shave) and desperate '04 prognostication on CNN. Even the Democrats' rare legislative victory, the passage of the campaign finance bill, was robbed of its glory when the party chairman, Terry McAuliffe, almost simultaneously announced a record soft-money donation of $7 million from the "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" mogul, not to mention a spring Apollo Theater fund-raiser at which Bill Clinton will be paired with Michael Jackson, fresh from his photo op at Liza Minnelli's wedding.
If the Democrats stand for anything in a time of rapidly expanding war, it's not clear what it is.
It is apparently the thesis of Mr. Rich's column that the absence of any coherent Democrat agenda is a function of their fear of President Bush's wartime popularity. That this notion is untenable should be evident to anyone who looks back at the last thirty years of our politics, because the last national Democrat to espouse liberal ideas in a race with a conservative Republican was Walter Mondale in 1984 and the last to win was LBJ in 1964. Since then--shattered by the civil rights struggle and Vietnam protests that tore their governing coalition apart and demoralized by the failure of their Great Society antipoverty programs--the Party has essentially presented itself as little more than a moderate version of Republicanism. There really is no Democratic agenda other than to slow down Republicans. That worked well when the senior Bush raised taxes or when Newt Gingrich mouthed off, but it's pretty useless against a popular president.
The Democrats decades long dearth of ideas can be seen in the fact that the only significant expansion of government they've even proposed in recent years was Bill Clinton's Health Care program. Meanwhile, on almost all other issues (except abortion--which is an aberration) Clinton ran to George Bush's right and as soon as it became clear how unpopular Clintoncare was with the American electorate, the administration dumped it overboard and never looked back. As Clinton himself said (as reported in Bob Woodward's The Agenda), he governed as an "Eisenhower Republican".
In fact, it seems fair to say that liberals have become the reactionaries of American politics, fighting rearguard battles merely to preserve the Social Welfare Net that they built up during their sixty years in power (1932-94), but devoid of any new ideas and terrified of reiterating the old ones because the public is so hostile to them. It is conservatives who are the activists today, seeking to roll back that same Social Welfare State and to reverse the sexual revolution. The conservative program may be retrograde, but it represents monumental change and it is driven by a coherent and consistent set of beliefs. Frank Rich
may just now be noticing that the Democrats are brain-dead, but they've been on life support for thirty years.