IT'S METASTISIZING

Losing battle: Why the Democrats should pursue defeat in 2004 (Alan Wolfe, 7/6/2003, Boston Globe)

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH and his Republican allies, following a course of avid partisanship and truth-be-damned rhetoric, have changed the rules of American politics. Would-be Democratic presidential candidates in 2004 therefore face a dilemma. They can play by the new rules and increase their chance of winning, but at the risk of weakening the country. Or they can opt for responsible, moderate proposals that would strengthen American society-and almost certainly consign themselves to immediate electoral defeat.

Politicians are intensely partisan creatures. Still, they have typically agreed to practices that placed restraints on win-at-any-cost tactics. Three such practices in particular once played an important role in Washington life but no longer seem much in evidence.

The first is that sometimes a leader ought to do the right thing rather than the politically advantageous thing. No better example can be provided than Lyndon Johnson's decision to back effective civil-rights legislation in the 1960s. LBJ knew that his action would doom his party to electoral defeat (as it did, in 1968). Yet he also understood how poisonous segregation had been to American democracy. His choice, however politically suicidal at the time, is now widely admired; even conservatives who oppose affirmative action proclaim their allegiance to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. [...]

Forced to choose between the responsible course and the winning course, Democrats may be better off insisting on doing the right things in the right way, no matter what the immediate political disadvantage. For only then can they position themselves to become the governing party when Americans begin to care about the unhappy state of their country.

Here's more on the Democrats' hilarious new "we lose 'cause we're too decent" theme. The argument is amusing enough in its own right, but perpetrators boost the entertainment value by the way they torture reality until it fits their myth. Take for example Mr. Wolfe's bizarre notion that Lyndon Johnson engaged in an act of courage where Civil Rights were concerned, even though he knew it would damage the Party. One would not know from reading this that LBJ won a landslide of epic proportions in 1964 after passing the Civil Rights Act and that he ran while trying to pass the Voting Rights Act--which incidentally passed in 1965 , with such massive majorities (House of Representatives [333 to 48] and the Senate [77 to 19]) that it should be impossible to argue it was a political risk. Meanwhile, the 1968 loss that Mr. Wolfe refers to was one of the closest elections in history and surely would have gone to LBJ himself had he not been mishandling Vietnam so badly, rather than leaving it to his VP to lose to Richard Nixon. Suffice it to say, Democrats maintained control of the House--and usually the Senate--for another thirty years, despite their "suicidal" advocacy of civil-rights legislation. Is a tactic that returns you to office personally and your party to office perennially more likely the "right" thing or the expedient thing? Or, possibly, both? Posted by Orrin Judd at July 6, 2003 10:32 PM