The Democrats Slide Back into Folly; The Old Glory Bonfire; Powell's a Giant?
The make-believe centrism Democrats have successfully marketed for almost a decade is beginning to unravel?or, to put it more precisely, the real centrism of President Clinton has proved a highly personal thing, unable to survive his departure. In fact, driven into a frustrated rage by an election that Al Gore managed to lose despite getting more votes than any Democratic candidate in history, they're reverting to the party that Republicans rejoiced to run against in the 1980s, one that makes a lot of voter-alienating noise while lacking the discipline to get any of its programs passed.
Given that Americans have spent the last quarter-century voting against the party they hate rather than for the party they like, this is dire news for Democrats. A month ago, Democrats promised they'd go to the wall to block Bush's proposed $1.3 trillion tax cut. But last week, the entire poll-obsessed party, from right to left, caved in, and began promising not just tax cuts, but big ones. Bush may not get everything he wants. He may have to divide his package into little legislative chunkettes, as House Speaker Dennis Hastert has urged, to allow turncoat Democrats to save face. But Bush has already secured much of his tax plan without firing a shot. Repeal of the marriage penalty looks like a done deal. So does estate-tax reform. It's true that House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt insisted on a fair distribution for the cuts, but that was just more face-saving. Given the structure of the tax base, in which the upper middle class pays the vast majority of taxes and the genuinely "poor" pay none at all, the cuts are bound to go to Bush's constituents rather than to Gephardt's. With unemployment claims at their highest level in two and a half years, even the New Jersey investment banker Jon Corzine, who took his place last week as the leftmost Democrat in the Senate, asked only that the cuts be "pro-cyclical," i.e., that they come now, in order to keep us out of recession.
Just as Republicans used to do at the height of the Gingrich era, when they were getting their butts kicked up and down Pennsylvania Ave., Democrats have been reduced to bragging that their "own" programs have been "stolen" by their political opponents and pretending to be "happy" for the country. Remember when Republicans proclaimed their delight that Bill Clinton had declared the era of big government over? Democrats are doing the same when they point to "diversity" in Bush's cabinet as a triumph for their own understanding of affirmative action. In a sense they're absolutely right, of course. But they don't look happy?and their attempts to scuttle bipartisan comity make it clear that they're not happy for the country at all.
Democrats have chosen to throw all their eggs into the basket of stymieing the nomination of former Missouri Sen. John Ashcroft, whom George W. Bush has just nominated for attorney general. Their goal is to go to the Republicans-as-Dangerous-Radicals well one more time. The likely result will be the same one Republicans obtained when they dusted off their Democrats-as-McGovernik-Subversives rhetoric 10 years after it had any resonance with the American public.
Democrats are trying to derail the Ashcroft nomination on two grounds. First, Ashcroft opposes abortion. This is not even open to argument. But since Bush has made it crystal clear that he will not stand for an overturning of Roe v. Wade, all the Democrats do with their protests (aside from allowing Kate Michelman and the National Abortion Rights Action League to raise bundles of money from gullible housewives nationwide) is shore up Bush with his base, allowing him to steal votes in the center.
The second line is that Ashcroft is a racist. One piece of evidence is that Ashcroft voted not to confirm a judge named Ronnie White, on the grounds that White had overturned the death penalty for certain grisly murders. But imputing this decision to race is risible. Ashcroft has voted yes on 23 of 26 black judicial nominees. His wife teaches at historically black Howard University. And it was he who as governor of Missouri signed the Martin Luther King holiday into law. Another piece of "racist" evidence comes from an interview Ashcroft gave to Southern Partisan magazine in 1998, in which he said, "Your magazine also helps set the record straight. You've got a heritage of doing that, of defending Southern patriots like Lee, Jackson and Davis... We've all got to stand up and speak in this respect, or else we'll be taught that these people were giving their lives, subscribing their sacred fortunes and their honor to some perverted agenda."
What's interesting is watching Ashcroft's Democratic opponents tie themselves into knots over the interview. They all want to use Ashcroft's Civil War comment to scare him out of the nomination, but not one of them is willing to endorse the proposition that the Confederate cause was a "perverted agenda," for fear of alienating Southern voters. The other night, Brit Hume asked Nevada Democratic Sen. Harry Reid what exactly Ashcroft had done that was so radical. Said Reid, who's worked closely with Ashcroft for the better part of a decade: "I really don't know, and I don't think anyone knows at this stage. Some have said he's said something about Confederate soldiers being patriots. I don't know if that's good or bad [You don't? one wanted to interject. Don't you think you ought to figure it out?) or why he said it, in what context. We have to look at everything that he's said and everything that he's done. That's why we have the nomination process."
Then Tom Daschle was asked by Tim Russert whether mere positions on the issues were enough to disqualify a nominee. "I don't think so, unless that nominee falls at either end of the political spectrum," Daschle said. "I think it's very difficult for us as people who try to govern from the center to accept that kind of a nominee." Russert should have asked him, since Daschle brought up that business about "either end of the political spectrum," who in the Democratic Party is far enough to the left to be disqualified from serving in the federal government. Was Clinton Justice Dept. civil-rights lawyer Bill Lann Lee? Was Ronnie White?
The most pathetic response to Ashcroft's nomination has come from the NAACP, which has vowed to oppose him on the grounds that he got an F on the "report card" the organization uses to measure racial tolerance. A group called the National Council for a Republican Congress points out that of the votes on which the NAACP bases its grading system, virtually none are about race. They include (1, 2) the two Clinton impeachment votes, (3) a bill to hire more teachers, (4) a bill to close the "gun-show loophole" in the Brady bill, (5) a bill to increase the minimum wage, (6) a bill on the Democratic version of the Patients' Bill of Rights, (7, 8, 9) confirmation votes on White and Marsha Berzon (another judge), and on former Sen. Carol Moseley-Braun's nomination as ambassador to New Zealand. In other words, the "scorecard" doesn't measure attitudes toward civil rights. It simply measures whether you're a Democrat or a Republican.
This attempt to drag race into everything, even where it has no place, does two things. First, it leaves the public convinced (as it was in the 1980s) that the NAACP stands not for justice but for the protection of corrupt mediocrities such as Carol Moseley-Braun. Second, since it applies the word "racist" to anyone who disagrees with an extremely narrow partisan agenda, it will remove much of the stigma from the word "racist."
The press has behaved even more oddly. Robert Scheer of the Los Angeles Times wrote, "It's perfectly reasonable to question whether an attorney general who has celebrated the angry mobs demonstrating at abortion clinics will also defend the legal right of those clinics to function." Celebrated the angry mobs is hyperbole, but there was a lot of it in the air. Take Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuvel, who went nuts over the entire Bush cabinet. "There is no ideological diversity in this team," she said. Really? Between Christie Whitman and John Ashcroft? Between Norman Mineta and Gale Norton? She continued, "We have to look beyond the smiling faces, to the stealth politics." But what's stealthy about sending a dozen people before the Senate for confirmation? It's not clear. The only thing that is is that George W. Bush, for some as-yet-unknowable reason, drives the left out of its mind.
The final?and dispositive?evidence that Democrats are beginning the long slide back into folly is that one name being mentioned prominently as a potential 2004 nominee is that of Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin.
Generally I consider myself as patriotic as the next guy, but there are moments when I'd gladly join the ACLU at an Old Glory Bonfire. There were two such moments last week. The first came when Jim McGreevey, mayor of Woodbridge, NJ, and the favorite to become the Democratic candidate for governor this fall, put forward a city mandate that American flags be flown over all new shopping developments. "The flag is the most basic and profound symbol of our nation," McGreevey sniffed, "and, as such, we want to foster a sense of pride and respect [for it] at every opportunity." This is one of the oldest pieces of demagoguery in the book. In turning the American flag into a symbol not of "our nation" but of coercion and bureaucracy, McGreevey hopes to goad some irate ACLU-allied shopkeepers into filing suit against him on First Amendment grounds. At that point, McGreevey will respond with that favorite rallying cry of political scoundrels everywhere: "I may be too dumb ta unnerstann Freedom o' Speech, but I shore love my country!" A winner every time.
Second was the inescapable tv discussion of Colin Powell, about whom more baloney gets talked than practically anyone in American public life outside of Hillary "Men Are So Frightened of Strong Women" Clinton. Powell will be fine as secretary of state?excellent, in fact, if his well-earned military timidity keeps us out of Kosovo-type adventurism. But it's clear that Powellolatry is getting out of control when Chris Matthews describes this competent but unspectacular general as "probably the most impressive Cabinet appointment since Jefferson or whatever, back in the early days of our republic." Here's an instance where "whatever" is actually the mot juste. Matthews, whose entire value system has been formed by television, clearly means "the most famous" or "the most popular." Because has anyone outside of Bush campaign headquarters ever, for an instant, considered Powell more impressive than Daniel Webster? John C. Calhoun? William Seward? John Hay? William Howard Taft? William Jennings Bryan? Andrew Mellon? Herbert Hoover? Henry Morgenthau? George Marshall? Dean Acheson? Henry Kissinger?
Brookings Institution analyst Stephen Hess was more measured. He felt the appointments of Powell and others showed a commendable modesty on Bush's part. "Unlike Bill Clinton," said Hess, "he doesn't have to be the smartest person in the room." Just imagine if he did. Then we could inspire five- and six-year-olds across this Great Nation of Ours by telling them, "You, too, can be a Cabinet official. Right now, in fact!"