A REEVES PARALYZED FROM THE NECK UP :

WHY THE DEMOCRATS HAVE TO BOUNCE TERRY MCAULIFFE (Richard Reeves, July 18, 2002)

The word is that Terry McAuliffe, that charmer, is doing a great job as chairman of the Democratic National Committee. He is recruiting more good men and women to the party, collecting more money than his predecessors, and is getting a good deal of credit for some surprising local victories in the 2001 elections.

And he should be fired or retired tomorrow -- if not today.

Let's say that corporate corruption is going to be the big issue of this year's mid-term elections, which is exactly what many Democrats are saying. And let's say that Republicans are seen as the party voters "blame" for the fact that chief executives now earn more than 400 times as much as their companies' hourly employees make -- and what they don't earn they steal from the employees, or shareholders, or from the government, taking anything they can get their greedy little hands on.

All by himself, McAuliffe neutralizes that issue. Instead of Democrats exploiting the traditional business image (and reality) of Republicans, and Democrats benefiting from their tradional image as the friend of the little guy, the McAuliffe story will make the blame game and the issue of corporate greed a bipartisan affair. A wash.

It's only Monday but Mr. Reeves has aggressively staked a claim for silliest column of the week. To begin with, no one, but no one, in America has any idea who Terry McAuliffe is. If his name recognition is over 25% nationally I'll send him a check. (Quick, here's a test : Who's the GOP Chairman and who preceded McAuliffe?) Second, while the notion that Democrats care about maintaining ethical purity is rather quaint and touching (and impossible to reconcile with either his initial appointment or the Clinton presidency), the notion that they'd jettison a fund-raising deity over it is simply delusional. Third, there's no way on God's green Earth that the press will let Republicans make an issue of the Democrats' ties to business scandals. Just take a look at their failure to go after Tom Daschle, whose wife is a lobbyist and who is himself implicated in a scandal involving a fatal airplane crash, and you can imagine how little they'll care about the DNC chairman. Which may make sense, because, fourth, Democrat corruption by big business just doesn't fit the storyline. We all know that the GOP is in bed with business and Democrats are the mortal foes of evil corporations. That this no longer reflects reality doesn't much matter--it's what we all believe and the press isn't going to waste time digging into the real story when the spadework is already done on the easier-to-tell caricature.
Posted by Orrin Judd at July 22, 2002 7:56 PM