Editorials/You Must Remember Hiss/Democrats to the Rescue
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
DEMOCRATS TO THE RESCUE It appears that my campaign predic- tion of last month was fla fla. I pronounced that President Bush was "headed for a terrible mid-term defeat." Ever the good sport, he had...
...Yesteryear's Democratic leader promisedjobs...
...Ever the good sport, he had abjured his promise of no new taxes so that the Democrats would play ball with him in cutting the federal deficit...
...Now in the Washington Post Stuart E. Eizenstat comes forward and notes that President Bush suffered no defeat at all...
...The Democratic leadership viewed him with new hope...
...He smacked us all with a tax increase, and the unsportsmanlike Democrats slyly stiffed him with budget cuts (meager and mostly illusory), increased federal spending in the neighborhood of $100 billion (an increase twice the anticipated rate of inflation), and a federal deficit that is going to swell faster and larger than before the President's sporting gesture...
...Weird issues have to be adopted...
...Against divided opponents, one of whom was a professional clown, he could corral only 53 percent of the vote—and that in the Democratic bastion of New York...
...And he bids his fellow Democrats to reflect again on their fragmented and radicalized condition, a condition that puts them out of sympathy with "middle class Americans who work hard, pay their taxes, worry about crime and drugs, want a decent home, send their sons to fight our wars, struggle to educate their children and wonder how they will care for their parents in old age...
...Despite "a looming recession, sagging consumer confidence, an open breach between congressional Republicans and their president . . . and more THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1991 Senate Republican than Democratic seats at risk," Eizenstat reminds us that the Democrats' modest gains were "far short of the average post-World War II gain in non-presidential elections by the party not in the White House...
...Its leaders remain in thrall to the kind of fanatics that New Dealers avoided and that Liberals booted from the party in the late 1940s...
...I suppose when I made my prediction President Bush was indeed headed for a fall...
...That is the polite way of saying the Democratic party has taken aboard too many zanies...
...Ever since the McGovernites took over the national Democratic party, reforming it into a facsimile of Greenwich Village, the Democrats' presidential nomination process has been an ignominious experience for the normal American pol...
...all that saved him were the Democrats who learned nothing from the 1980s and those Republicans who did...
...Anyone familiar with previous budget debaucheries knew that an increase in taxes would free the Democratic libido for spending...
...Governor Mario Cuomo promises a sense of well-being, of "empowerment," of equality...
...The electorate came close to retiring him...
...No, President Bush did not suffer "a terrible mid-term defeat...
...Now the party ministers to feelings, to the insecure feelings of feminists, racial and ethnic militants, homosexuals—almost anyone with a gripe...
...Issues popular with the American mainstream have to be shunned...
...These are the rebels who stood by their vow to keep taxes down—the only Republican governorships lost were lost by Republicans who let taxes rise...
...All the nutcases have to be mollified...
...The New Deal dealt in palpable things: jobs, income security, a planned economy, a planned society, urban planning...
...Nor were the Republicans at a historically low base for a minority party in the House but were right at the post-World War II average...
...The interest-group politics of its past have been replaced by mass acts of psychotherapy to make the grumpy feel good about themselves...
...Equally portentous,by breaking his pledge of "no new taxes" President Bush denied himself and his party their most appealing virtue, namely, serving as the taxpayers' stalwart defense against government's spendthrifts...
...Positioning himself in the recent elections for an eventual run at the Democratic nomination, New Jersey's Senator Bill Bradley shunned his role as a pro-growth, anti-tax Democrat...
...My prediction was based on an elementary error...
...I overlooked his Democratic opponents...
...Not surprisingly this angry man is a frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination, along with Jesse Jackson and Congressman Richard Gephardt, who himself just squeaked through his mid-term trial despite all the leverage of incumbency...
Vol. 24 • January 1991 • No. 1
