www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/dhenninger/?id=110002593
EST It turns out that the Democrats' turnout miracle that painted half the country blue in the 2000 election was, after all, a miracle. Democratic National Committee chairman Terry McAuliffe had so convinced himself that the Florida 2000 tie was the result of something real that he poured millions of Hollywood's box-office receipts into the state to burn down the Bush brothers. Jeb's win was the biggest rout in the contested elections. It now appears that all that blue on the landscape was a frozen political lake, covered with ice about a half-inch thick. Under pressure, it cracked, and now the Democratic Party is engulfed. The politics of frenzy has to tire you eventually, something it looks like we all learned in the days following the historic Wellstone memorial riot. That's the day, it appears, the music died for the Democrats. Democrats have historically believed that their greatest possession is the culture--the Zeitgeist, what's goin' on. For example, in the party's long-running mythology, currently being bruited by people like Harry Belafonte, the liberating achievement of the civil rights movement in the 1960s invested them for all time with cultural supremacy, and because the mythology further holds that all Republicans fought to thwart the very idea of civil rights, the Republicans are forever shunned from approved political society. This is "the culture" of moral entitlement that Democrats understand as theirs alone. Thus were they willing to turn opposition to a Robert Bork into a death struggle. What is not mythology is the political model of LBJ's Great Society. This was the decade of federally forced rights and subsidized entitlements that ended with the passage of Medicaid and Medicare in 1965. Efficacy aside, what's noteworthy about this legacy is that nothing's changed in the national Democratic Party's legislative model since that time. What of any significance is left for them to do, short of erecting a Germanic nationalized health-care system, an idea just rejected in a referendum by 79% of Oregon's voters? Some Democratic thinkers have proposed rationalizing what government we've already got. In the election campaign just ended Tuesday, most congressional Democrats, following their leadership and pundits, opposed tax cuts, school voucher programs, any change in Social Security, and trade liberalization. As official party policy they literally ran for "no change" in Social Security. It has finally become clear what the national Democrats most resemble--Mexico's Institutional Revolutionary Party, the PRI. Under the Latin American model, a political party is essentially the manager of an economic spoils system whose first function is to preserve the party's vast membership. The private sector, where most jobs are created, is seen as a kind of distant planet supplying oxygen to the party. Irrefutable proof that the Democrats have become the PRI (with the cheerful connivance of Republicans) is the recent gerrymander of congressional districts, which made it pointless Tuesday to vote in some 420 House races; The McAuliffe-Clinton Democrats (if you raise the money, you get the title) now resemble the country-club Republican party of the 1960s and '70s, an outsider party of reflexive obstruction. Exhibit A, displayed in the shadow of the election and the September 11 anniversary, was the Democratic carping over an Iraq resolution. Like Bob Michel's hapless GOP of yesteryear, they ultimately went along, and got no credit from the public for their votes. But of late the Democrats have let an unattractive sourness creep into almost anything they touch. As if allowing a Miguel Estrada onto the federal bench would somehow topple the culture, at least as they understand it. Harry Belafonte's assault on Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice was a singular sort of public embarrassment, but obviously only a warm-up act to the Wellstone memorial. But even this outburst was merely an extension of the almost immeasurable bitterness that has gripped and obsessed the party since the contested 2000 election. Normally in American politics, the professionals get over it, as Nixon did in 1960. But you watch enough of a James Carville spewing invective on TV or read the sort of bilious letters from the left recently described by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof ("Dick Cheney is a maggot . What the McAuliffe-Clinton Democrats need to move forward is not an army of 10,000 lawyers. It needs intellectual prodding from its money base, donors who know that 1965 isn't coming back. The GOP came back to life, in large part, when a generation of donors gave money to people with provocative ideas, who in turn explained them in See Spot Run language to the GOP's politicians. Much of the Democrats' current donor base sits in Hollywood and upper Manhattan, laughing over dinner at how dumb George Bush is. Henninger is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page.
|
http://csua.com/feed/