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archived: 12 - 18 Feb, 2006 Back Next UPDATED: February 14, 2006 THE DEMOCRATS’ DILEMMA “George Bush would be in severe political trouble if there were an opposition political party in the country. Just about every day, they're shooting themselves in the foot. The striking fact about contemporary American politics is that the Democrats are making almost no gain from this. The only gain that they're getting is that the Republicans are losing support. Now, again, an opposition party would be making hay, but the Democrats are so close in policy to the Republicans that they can't do anything about it. When they try to say something about Iraq, George Bush turns back to them, or Karl Rove turns back to them, and says, ‘How can you criticize it? You all voted for it.’ And, yeah, they're basically correct.”
-- Noam Chomsky The American people deeply disapprove of their plight. The Bush administration is down deeply in the polls. The Republican Party is down deeply in the polls. The centerpiece of the Bush-Cheney White House, the war in Iraq, is deeply unpopular. Where are the Democrats? They are down in the polls, and they do not know what to do about it. In fact, it might be said that for the most part, the average professional Democrat does not even have a clue. At this point in their history, the Democrats are having a very public identity crisis. In the wake of the collapse of the neoconservative paradigm, you would have thought that Chomsky would be right and the Democrats would be making up for lost time. For example, you would have thought that the Democrats would have called for an end to the US occupation of Iraq by the end of this year at the very latest. That is the proposal of Zbigniew Brzezinski, but the official Democratic position on the withdrawal, now termed, ‘strategic redeployment,’ is for a pullout to begin two years from today. Lawrence Korb, a former Reagan administration official who now works for the allegedly progressive Center for American Progress, is the architect of the Democratic plan for this extenuated withdrawal. Korb’s timetable is so lackadaisical that it might even permit Bush to move to the Democrats’ left and launch a phased withdrawal before the midterm elections later this year. That is merely problem number one. Inside the Democratic Party, there is a deep division opening up into a darkening schism. The internecine division of the Democratic Party came into a very sharp focus during the Senate confirmation hearings and floor debate over the nomination of the arch-conservative Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court. After determining that Alito was an enemy of: women’s rights to abortion; civil rights; voting rights; affirmative action; the environment and that he was a proponent of: a growth spurt in presidential power, states’ rights, gerrymandering and Opus Dei, the Democrats could not agree that he should be filibustered. Nineteen Democrats out of forty-four in the Senate voted in favor of cloture to prevent a filibuster after Senator John Kerry announced his intention to talk the Senate out of confirming Alito. That all but three Democrats voted against Alito did nothing to paper over the glaringly obvious chasm opening up between the Senators who stood against Alito and the nineteen who collaborated with the Republicans in confirming his nomination. A front page story in the New York Times by Adam Nagourney points out that there is a widening gap in opinion about the Democratic Party’s identity, its message and its fundamental strategy. While many want to project a forceful message for change, others want a more cautious approach aimed at the theoretically moderate center of the American body politic that would emphasize the safe issues of cheaper prescription drugs for seniors, funding for higher education and job creation. In her scathing comment on Nagourney’s story, Arianna Huffington lashed out at Robert Shrum and Stanley Greenberg as the architects of the malaise of caution, uncertainty and political incompetence engulfing the Democratic Party. Last week, I attended a lecture by Stanley Greenberg in London. Greenberg became prominent through his role in the 1992 presidential campaign of Bill Clinton. Needless to say, he and far too many others ascribe Clinton’s victory to his portfolio of center-right policies: moderation on taxes, strong defense, free trade, workfare and balanced budgets. As I have written before, none of these positions had anything whatsoever to do with Clinton’s victory in 1992. Clinton won the Democratic nomination because he became the ‘Comeback Kid’ who admitted he had caused pain in his marriage, but he and his wife had risen above it. From that moment on Clinton seemed to tell the truth making him virtually unique among politicians of his generation. An American Everyman, Clinton was not afraid to admit his human frailty. Bill Clinton’s humanity and his humanity alone drove the engine of his presidential popularity – not his posturing on the non-issues praised by his descendants in the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC). Bill Clinton was elected and re-elected because he represented a deeply humane model of the American experience wrapped up in all its frailty, guile and honesty. Throughout his presidency, he personally accepted blame for his mistakes. Clinton identified with people’s problems and felt their pains, and when he did so, people believed in him because he had confessed his own frailties. Clinton apologized to his wife and family as well as to the nation after he had lied about his affair with Monica Lewinsky. Bill Clinton won the presidency and maintained it because he was Bill Clinton, not because he followed a center-right strategic architecture. “It’s the economy, Stupid,” was his battle cry, and the stark, raving honesty of that mantra and the man who delivered it appealed to the common humanity of Americans. Today, Stanley Greenberg remains the primary pollster for the Democratic Party. He is also the primary pollster for the Labour Party in Britain and the Labour Party in Israel. In the intervening years, Greenberg has become one of the most financially successful pollsters in world history. He and his business partners, James Carville and Philip Gould, have earned what some have claimed to be fabulous sums running into hundreds of millions of dollars paid to them as fees by their galaxy of clients who believed in the validity of the single central idea that they had steered Clinton into the White House on a center-right trajectory. Inside political consulting circles, this claim is rejected as hype for the reasons stated above. Another Democratic political consultant who has become fabulously wealthy at the expense of the Democratic Party and its candidates is a man named, Robert Shrum. In addition to his work for the presidential campaign of Albert Gore in 2000, Shrum was the primary consultant for John Kerry in 2004. Estimates in Washington political circles suggest that over the years of his handling a string of Democratic political campaigns, Shrum and his partners have earned more than a hundred million dollars in fees. Shrum has worked in several presidential campaigns, all losers. When Howard Dean was elected to head the Democratic National Committee, he vowed to abandon the aristocracy of consultants. By that, Dean meant he wanted to jettison the likes of Shrum and Greenberg, both of whom have driven the Party to adopt its centrist strategy of running to the imaginary middle ground with a campaign based on little more than vacuous platitudes and the vaporous, virtual reality of their ambiguous polls. During his talk in London, Greenberg actually urged the party to move against gay marriage in order to win over one or two or, perhaps, even three red states. Greenberg praised the work of the former ballet dancer, Rahm Emanuel, a darling of the right-leaning Democratic Leadership Council who has been linked to conservative policies in the Middle East and the Israeli intelligence organization, Mossad. Rahm Emanuel strongly supported Bush’s war against Saddam Hussein, and he is one of those Scoop Jackson Democrats like Joseph Lieberman who tend to be conservative on foreign and somewhat more liberal on domestic issues like women’s rights. Since 2000, Emanuel has tended to support Bush’s doctrines of neoconservative, unilateralist, pre-emptive war and global hegemony via prolific military intervention. Rahm Emanuel is precisely Stanley Greenberg’s sort of ideal Democrat for that is exactly what he told us in London. To capstone his address, Greenberg actually advocated the Democrats adopting a campaign strategy based on lower costs for the prescription drugs of senior citizens. Greenberg never mentioned the war as a campaign advantage even though the vast majority of Americans now support withdrawal, and a majority support impeachment. My guess is that Greenberg’s political affinities in foreign policy are similar to Emanuel’s, neoconservative, aggressive, unilateralist. While his strategic recommendations were feckless, Greenberg did make more cogent remarks about the future presidential prospects of Hillary Clinton. Saying, “Her numbers will be high,” Greenberg predicted that she would be a formidable candidate in the primaries of 2008. This prognostication does not make Greenberg a prophet for virtually every eight-grader in America could predict exactly the same thing. Greenberg did say that Hillary would be assailed by Feingold on the left and Warner on the right, giving her the strategic latitude to steer a winning course by driving right up through the center of the Democratic field. On balance, Greenberg told us very little that we did not already know. The purpose of his visit to London became perfectly clear. The Labour Party led by Tony Blair is suffering in the polls. Taking a nosedive in popularity, Tony Blair is a conscientious supporter of Bush’s neoconservativism. While Greenberg made no mention of his discussions with the Blair government, there can be little doubt that he is now being assailed as one of the primary architects of the decline and fall of the Blair government. A quote from Noam Chomsky is placed at the top of this column. He believes, as do I, that the Democrats are to blame for the predicament in which America finds itself today. They have vanishingly little credibility as a political alternative to the stridency of neoconservative Republicanism. Democrats are not believable as legitimate agents of change. Their credibility died on a pyre of polls that produced rich and powerful advisors like Greenberg and Shrum who said that we should design strategies that will win elections only by appealing to the rapidly shriveling center of the political spectrum. Their plans will produce nothing but marginal victories for that is what they are designed to do – at best adding one or two red states to our slender bundle of blues. For all of his faults and limitations, Governor Howard Dean rejected the Shrum-Greenberg strategic paradigm out of hand. Dean said that we should be attempting to turn the entire map blue - and much more. We need to do what Noam Chomsky outlined above. We need to alter our position on nearly every issue to bring us back to the New Deal, the New Frontier and the progressive policies of the Carter and Clinton administrations. We often read that much is at stake: our rights, our liberties, our sacred honor, our right to privacy, our American ideals and our way of life. While that is all true, there are other issues at stake as well. If the Democratic Party does not succeed in reinventing itself and identifying itself with the issues that resonate with the people of America, we will have: global warming, climatic disturbances, mass extinctions of species, global pollution, poisonous atmosphere, toxic water supplies, disease, pandemic and mass starvation. Worse. World war, torture, police brutality, incessant surveillance of each and every one of our mundane and quotidian lives until hell freezes over will encompass us, wash over us and transform us into the civilizations prophesied by Huxley and Orwell. We will be enslaved to invisible and unassailable institutions controlled by the state and its authorized corporations. Our roles will be reduced to those of ordered and robotic automatons chained to the rhythm of bureaucracy, incarceration and outright tyranny. In 2006, those who oppose a strident message for political change are collaborating with the neoconservative politicians and corporations who seized power in America in late 2000. The oligarchs have absolutely no intention whatsoever of relinquishing their power. We must wrest power from them and demand our rights as Americans. What is at stake in the redefinition of the Democratic Party is nothing less than our freedom. We have nothing left to lose and everything to gain by standing up straight and tall to oppose the tyranny of the radical extremists now plotting the expansion of hostilities in the middle east by bombing Iran later this year to throw the hot lava of robust political support behind a badly ailing president. At the same time, we must repudiate absolutely those highly paid consultants who have led us into the crevasses of desolation and defeat in order to assuage the insatiable yearning of neoconservative ambitions for global domination. America must lead the world, not dominate it, and we must lead America away from the wilderness of fear. Sources
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NYT __________________ Since 1968, Michael Carmichael has been a professional political consultant. Beginning as a Student Coordinator for Robert F. Kennedy, he has worked in five US presidential campaigns as well as over 100 major American political campaigns for federal and state offices. In 1985, he founded The Oxford Centre for Public Affairs in the United Kingdom. In 2003, he founded The Planetary Movement Limited, a global public affairs organization based in the United Kingdom. He has appeared as a public affairs expert on the BBC, European Business News, NPR and many European television broadcasts examining American politics and culture. In addition to his column for The Political Junkies, he is a regular contributor to the Moving Planet weblog. See: www.planetarymovement.org and http://planetmove.blogspot.com/
Last Update: 03/23/2006 |
