This column is about helping the Democrats. And it’s not because
I like higher taxes, more lawsuits, more government waste or a more
shamefaced approach to foreign policy. It’s just that we’re better
off with two strong parties — or as economists like to say, we’re
better off with competition than monopoly.
And competition, to be effective, must be vigorous. More and
more, however, what the Democrats have tossed into the ring has
been puny, both in terms of candidates and public policy
initiatives.
As a consequence, we’re seeing a mounting monopolization of
power by one party, or as Walter Shapiro described the situation in
his recent commentary in the Los Angeles Times: “Now the
Democrats face the bleak prospect of controlling no governmental
entity larger than the state of Illinois, unless, of course,
liberals still consider Bush buddy Tony Blair an honorary member of
their downwardly mobile party.”
None of this happened overnight. Shapiro, from the perspective
of covering the last seven presidential campaigns, points to
Reagan’s election in 1980 as the pivotal event in the degeneration
of the Democratic Party. “The benchmark election that destroyed the
party’s belief in its own destiny was 1980, when incumbent
President Carter carried only six states and the Republicans gained
12 Senate seats to take control of a chamber of Congress for the
first time since the early 1950s. This was the moment when the
Democrats lost their half-century claim to be the natural governing
party of the United States.”
More significantly, that was also the moment when the big guns
in the Democratic Party began a four-year detour in exactly the
opposite direction from where the rest of the nation was heading.
By those who saw themselves as the “natural” governing elite,
Reagan was time and again painted as either dumb or a warmonger, or
evil, or all three.
On the Soviet Union, for instance, Reagan simply declared a
straightforward line of attack: “Here’s my strategy on the Cold
War: We win, they lose.” That’s something the ears at Yale and
Harvard weren’t used to hearing — but it worked.
In 1984, Reagan was re-elected with 525 electoral votes, more
than any other presidential candidate in the nation’s history, and
he came within a hair of making it a totally clean sweep. Walter
Mondale garnered only 13 electoral votes, 10 from his home state of
Minnesota and three in the District of Columbia — and even in
Minnesota, Mondale topped Reagan by only 3,761 votes, less than a
percentage point.
Fast-forward two decades, and playwright and screenwriter John
Steppling is still mad. He remembered Reagan at the time of his
death by writing that the former president had “waged a relentless
assault on the poor.” In fact, the unemployment rate fell from 7.1
percent in 1980 to 5.5 percent in 1988, inflation dropped from 13.5
percent to 4.1 percent, and the poverty population, after growing
by 7 million people in the 1970s, declined by 4 million during the
Reagan years.
Simply stated, Reagan launched an assault on stagnation, not
“the poor.”
Still, for guys like Steppling, facts don’t get in the way of
ideological hatreds. “Reagan died about 92 1/2 years too late by my
reckoning,” he wrote, “and the world would have been a better place
had he been bucketed at birth, like a deformed kitten.”
That’s ugly, but not a lot different from what Michael Feingold
wrote this time around in the Village Voice as George W.
Bush improved his share of the vote among women, Latinos, Jews,
Catholics and blacks and the GOP enlarged its hold on both the
House and Senate. The nation’s newly re-elected president,
proclaimed Feingold, was the “idiot scion of a genetically criminal
family that should have been sterilized three generations ago.”
Bottom line — loathing isn’t enough. Probably the best election
postmortem for Democrats was provided by Andrei Cherny, a former
speechwriter for John Kerry. “What we don’t have and what we sorely
need,” Cherny said, is “a worldview that makes a thematic argument
about where America is headed and where we want to take it.”
