CRAWLING FROM THE WRECKAGE

The Clinton Candidate: Howard Dean didn't just come out of left field. (PETER BEINART, August 11, 2003, Wall Street Journal)

The mystery of the 2004 Democratic campaign isn't that a governor has caught on--that happens in most presidential years. The mystery is that there is only one governor in the field, and that he comes from such a tiny state. Usually, presidential fields are roughly split between governors and senators. And usually, the governors hail from large states (Bush, Reagan) or at least midsize ones (Carter, Dukakis). Even Mr. Clinton's Arkansas is four times the size of Vermont. Were there another governor in this year's Democratic pack, particularly one from a larger state, he would likely have exploited the same institutional advantages Mr. Dean has, and therefore detracted at least somewhat from the Vermonter's allure.

To understand why there is not, look at Bill Clinton's stewardship of the national Democratic Party. Any governor running for president in 2004 would have come of political age in the 1990s. And when Mr. Clinton took office in 1993, the states looked like a fertile source of eventual Democratic presidential contenders. Democrats controlled the governors' mansions in 28 states, including six of the 10 largest.

But the liberal taint of Mr. Clinton's first two years--on gays in the military, guns, and health care--decimated Democratic governors across the
country. By 1995, there were only 19, and only one in the nine largest states. Gone were heavyweights like Mario Cuomo, Ann Richards and Jim Florio, and numerous others who saw promising careers cut short. Several weeks after the 1994 disaster, Mr. Clinton invited a handful of Democratic governors to a private dinner and received an earful for having abandoned the center. Among the participants was Howard Dean, who told the Associated Press, "I can assure you there was no one at the table arguing the president should go to the left."

Mr. Clinton took their advice. And over the next few years, he capitalized on GOP radicalism to re-establish his moderate credentials and resuscitate the Democrats in Washington. By the time Mr. Clinton left office, the Democrats had regained three Senate seats and eight House ones. But in the states, where politics is generally less ideologically polarized, Republicans did not fall prey to the same overreach, and Democrats never recovered, ending the decade with even fewer governorships than they held in 1995.

So the 1990s, a productive decade for the Democratic Party in Washington, was an extremely unproductive one for Democratic governors.

The strange addendum to this is that the Democratic Party is now diving headlong back to where Bill Clinton mistakenly took it in 1993-4--on health care, gays, national security, etc.. You'd think they'd want to get back to where he was when he managed to win re-election: reforming welfare, cutting spending, putting schoolkids in uniforms, etc. Instead of getting back to the Center-Right, they seem hellbent on going way Left. Strange. Posted by Orrin Judd at August 16, 2003 7:55 AM