Tell Me a Story Democrats have become powerless to challenge the dominant myth of the Republican Party
Barone, Michael
Me a Story Without a new narrative Democrats have become the equivalent of Eisenhower Republicans, powerless to challenge the dominant myth of the opposing party. BY MICHAEL BARONE T ELL ME A...
...Younger scholars are starting to take Reagan seriously, and I look forward to the publication of my friend Paul )sevelt Lettow's book that demonstrates that Reagan's determination to f active weapons goes back to 1946...
...I remember an interview with one of the key Clinton regulators, an elite law school graduate, who explained how she reached policy decisions...
...Arguably on a carefully crafted platform that promised not so much smaller government, but government that gave citizens more choice and required of them more accountability...
...FEBRUARY 2004 AMERICAN SPECTATOR 21 ple versus the powerful...
...But they have had difficulty relating their position to a coherent narrative...
...My own 1990 book Our Country, which presented something of a Reagan narrative, was mostly ignored...
...So is Wesley Clark, despite his embarrassingly recent praise of the Bush foreign policy team...
...In the runup to the 1992 election Arthur Schlesinger had hailed Clinton as another left-m o v i n g leader in line with the Roosevelt narrative...
...Abroad, in a world threatened with domination by evil dictators, you needed an active America to promote freedom and democracy...
...Even as Bill Clinton was reelected in 1996, Republicans held the House (by a 49-48.5 percent popular vote mar- gin), and then and in subsequent years Republicans were increasing their strength in state governments...
...they pro- duced stagflation instead...
...Balancing tests, immersion in data, intelligent understanding of the economic and (she didn't say) political clout of the various interests involved: put all those together and you get competent government...
...He signed it though as Daniel Patrick tive: free trade Moynihan noted, if he had faced it 14 weeks after the election agreements instead of 14 weeks before he would probably have vetoed it once again...
...promot( Against Democrats and those in the media who developed a t eedon Vietnam narrative, Reagan insisted, as Roosevelt had, that America democn should actively promote freedom Reagan was not as crafty and as and democracy in the world...
...Bill Clinton won with 43 percent of the vote in 1992 and 49 percent in 1996...
...HE OTHER DEMOCRATS don't have convincing T narratives either...
...In a post-industri- al society, he argued, government Dower t( had grown too big and was more the problem than the solution...
...The Roosevelt narrative was largely conceived and written by Franklin Roosevelt himself...
...But Bill Clinton left the Democrats, as Dwight Eisenhower left the Republicans, with no compelling narrative, while George W. Bush, through happy accident and shrewd choice, has a narrative that he may make as compelling as the Democrats' Roosevelt narrative was so many years ago...
...Gephardt played a key role in securing the Iraq war resolution in October 2002, and did so without regard to the political damage it might do him because he believed the nation was in danger and that as a responsible public official, then the Democratic leader in the House, he should do what he could to protect his fellow citizens...
...John Edwards is campaigning on the trial lawyers' nartrue—and elite law school graduates are good at argument...
...develop a defense against nuclear But from 1988 to 2000 the mericarl...
...George McGovern, after all, lost (and John Kerry that year was one of three Democratic House candidates who lost in a district McGovern carried...
...His successor George H.W...
...Gephardt, Edwards, and Lieberman are running at a time when Democrats have won popular vote pluralities in the last three presidential elections...
...The confusion was the greater when Al Gore, at the 2000 Democratic National Convention, ran as the champion of "the peo22 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 2004 MICHAEL BARONE rative, as a man who made his fortune by litigating against callous corporations...
...They can choose between candidates with competing narratives...
...Old Media promoted the Vietnam narrative and mostly acy was ignored Reagan's triumphs...
...Bush, who reached maturity when the Roosevelt narrative still had power, prom- ised a "kinder, gentler" govern1 arid ment...
...FDR delighted in citing Abraham Lincoln as his own political ancestor (though his father was a friend of General McClellan...
...ET THOSE PLURALITIES were not so impressive...
...Bush, unlike his father, reached maturity when the power of the Roosevelt narrative was spent and when the power of the Reagan narrative was apparent to those not enchanted by the leftward movement of the university elites he had seen at Yale and Harvard in the 1960s and 1970s...
...Religious conservatives' vision of a Republican Party that would actively promote traditionally Christian values was not actually vanquished, but shoved aside...
...In the 2004 Democratic nomination process it is almost as if the Clinton administration had never existed...
...Bush's avowal of religious faith, his steadfast opposition to abortion, his promotion of faith-based social services, his opposition to gay marriage were all out in the open...
...but he has also refused to demonize those with different views and to spend large amounts of political capital on these issues...
...After September 11, he forgot his promise for a more of George W "humble" foreign policy and his aversion to "nation-building," and used American power Roosevelt- Bush, and Reagan-style to promote freedom and democracy in the world...
...So is John Kerry, who evidently has been planning to run on this narrative, since 1971...
...Big government, big business, and big unions were plainly unable to create perFEBRUARY 2004 AMERICAN SPECTATOR 19 manent low-inflation economic growth...
...For a time the Reagan narrative was Led by promoted most effectively by New Media—notably radio talk PartY...
...The Roosevelt policy of active use of American power to promote freedom and democracy was repudiated by his own party...
...No one except Joe Lieberman is calling for Clinton-style government...
...In the industrial era, he argued, with the concentration of 18 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 2004 MICHAEL BARONE economic power in a few hands, you needed a strong and active federal government and also large unions as a counterweight and to provide economic support in times of market failure...
...But , repucha i tive as Roosevelt had been...
...This was not the act have cost which direction history is going of a president with a sense of American jobs, and a determination to take it there...
...America, come home," as George McGovern said...
...Patrick Buchanan's vision of an iso- found its great lationist, protectionist, nativist Republican Party—the dominant champion...
...A similarly motivated group largely staffed the Clinton administration...
...Michael Barone is a senior writer at U.S...
...You need really smart people, she said, who understood the facts and figures and economic forces and weighed the pros and cons and then came up with a smart decision...
...Joseph Lieberman, a vocal supporter of the Gulf war resolution in 1991 as well as the Iraq war resolution in 2002, has endorsed the Roosevelt-Reagan narrative of America's place in the world as much as any member of the Democratic Party, and at some risk to his own presidential prospects...
...Theireffort in the 1920s to hold up George Washington and Alexander Hamilton as exemplars failed utterly in the 1930s...
...Steven Hayward's first Age of Reagan kr volume h a s attracted more attention, and Martin and Annelise Anderson's and Kiron Skinner's volumes reprinting Reagan's radio scripts and letters have shown Reagan to be not just a sentient adult but a closet intellectual with a wide range of knowledge and distinctive views which he to a great extent turned into public policy...
...Ideas consistent with the Reagan narrative—welfare reform, aggressive crime fighting—produced the two greatest public policy successes of the 1990s...
...Republican Party when he was born in 1939—was utterly repudiated when he got 0.4 percent of the vote in November 2000...
...Bush had the wit to appeal to the Reagan narrative which had been not entirely accented by his father, who was defeated in 1992...
...markets outperform bureaucracy...
...As the incumbent party in times of apparent peace and apparent prosperity in 1996 and 2000, Democrats could win only 49 and 48 percent of the vote...
...These are positions worthy of respect but they have left the three candidates at some disadvantage in a Democratic nomination process in which the Bush haters are ardent and easily rallied to one side and voters with ambivalent feelings toward Bush and who supported military action against Iraq are hard to corral...
...For years Reaganites waited for Edmund Morris to be Reagan's Arthur Schlesinger...
...his own energetic in promoting his narraHe never took the trouble to enchant the working press and media elites and wrote a perfunctory memoir which was not widely read...
...It has been given fair and bal- anced treatment on Fox News Channel, in vivid contrast to ABC, CBS, CNN, and NBC...
...FEBRUARY 2004 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 23...
...Bill Clinton campaigned in 1992 to "end welfare as we know it...
...He is telling people how we have got where we are in history and where we should be headed and where he will lead us...
...Gore was attempting to appeal to the Roosevelt narrative that had been the mainstay of the career of his father, who had been defeated in 1970...
...AREPUBLICAN was COUNTER-NARRATIVE Ronald Reagan, who had The Roc provided by happily voted four times for policy 0: Franklin Roosevelt and always continued to regard him as a great use of A wartime leader...
...In the somewhat unlikely figure of George W. Bush, the Reagan narrative has found its great champion and has scored great successes that seemed far from certain just four years ago...
...It was promoted with some success by Newt Gingrich and his Contract with America House Republicans and by Grover Norquist's "leave us alone" coalition...
...That is what a child asks at bedtime, and what voters ask at election time...
...The other candidates are promoting not very persuasive narratives...
...narrative had it right, and that to along as Dwight Eisenhower had believed 40 years before—although Eisenhower never allowed himself to be put in such embarrassing political positions as Clinton did...
...This is a repudiation of Bill Clinton and Robert Rubin's staunch support of NAFTA and is not likely to avail Gephardt much in a general election when, it seems, the American economy will be undergoing (as has been usual the last 20 years) bounteous economic growth...
...the Reagan Bush has extinguished all the alternative narratives that attract- narrative has ed some in his party in the 1990s...
...In House elections since 1994, when the vote for House and for president has converged, Democrats won only 45, 48.5, 48, 48, and 46 percent of the vote...
...The power of a story, a narrative, is compelling in politics...
...Al Gore lost with 48 percent of the vote in 2000...
...The fact that events in Iraq don't seem to be following the Vietnam narrative has not helped their general election prospects...
...Politically the Roosevelt narrative lost its power in the 1970s...
...Bush goes into the 2004 election as a protagonist of the Reagan narrative as much as Harry Truman and John Kennedy went into the 1948 and 1960 elections as protagonists of the Roosevelt narrative...
...But it is also government without narrative...
...Richard Gephardt has bought into the unions' narrative: free trade agreements have cost American manufacturing jobs, and we should rebuild trade barriers to keep them in...
...Then in July 1996 the bought into the Republicans voted another welfare bill, very similar to the two unions' narraClinton vetoed...
...Bush's election was a close-run thing, but it has given the Reagan narrative a vitality it surely would not have had if Al Gore had won...
...This was never compelling except when Democratic presidents got mired in wars they could not win (1952, 1968...
...The Republicans of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s had no effective counter-narrative...
...Liberal Republicans in the 1960s (including the young George Gilder) formed the Ripon Society because they thought that Republicans would be called on to form an administration sooner or later and that conservatives were hopelessly incompetent to staff a government...
...generously, they offered to do so...
...The Democratic Party with its Roosevelt narrative dominated American politics from the 1930s to the 1970s...
...They have no clear and persuasive narrative and are arguing among themselves...
...These Republicans implicitly conceded that history was moving left, to bigger government, bigger corporations, and bigger unions, and argued that it should just move a little more slowly...
...Twice in 1996 Gephardt has he vetoed Republican welfare bills...
...Or, perhaps, a president barriers to who believed that the Reagan preserve his job he needed to go keep them in...
...While Republican prospects this year seem good, the party needs to make its narrative more vivid and compelling if it is to become the majority party Karl Rove envisions...
...News & World Report and co-author of The Almanac of American Politics...
...Reagan narrative was propagated only fitfully...
...BY MICHAEL BARONE T ELL ME A STORY...
...No protectionist has been elected president since 1928 and protectionism was never part of the Roosevelt narrative: his secretary of state, Cordell Hull, was a passionate proponent of free trade, and the bill lowering trade barriers was John Kennedy's number one domestic legislative priority in his first two years in office...
...These are numbers that suggest that the Reagan narrative, even though not transmitted over the traditional media, still has considerable power, and that the Democratic Party, without a compelling narrative, has a ceiling that is at the very best (if you allocate minor party vote by second choice) in the very low 50s...
...A political party which has a convincing and compelling narrative has a great advantage over the competition...
...There is some echo of the Roosevelt narrative here, but how many Americans think they are ground under the heel of big corporations...
...Since the 1980s the Republican Party with its Reagan narrative has made some headway toward becoming a majority party...
...He won by the smallest of margins in 2000 and then proceeded to put in place public policies that, however imperfectly, provided more choice and accountability—tax cuts that let individuals In the spend more of their own earnings, federal education aid that required somewhat more testing and consequences, a Medicare plan that allowed more unlikely figure competition...
...It is a coherent position and one which has the enthusiastic support of virtually every voter who supports the Republican Party and some considerable percentage of those who insist they are Independents...
...Howard Dean has run on what might be called the Vietnam narrative...
...But Morris wrote quite a different (though mostly admiring) biography that did little to place Reagan in the long flow of American history...
...The Roosevelt narrative was propagated by much of the working press (though most big press lords were hostile in the 1930s) and by historians like Arthur Schlesinger, William Leuchtenberg, and James McGregor Burns in their beautifully written and best-selling Roosevelt biographies...
...Bill Clinton, running in 1992 as the candidate of the Democratic Leadership Council, had the advantage of running at a time when Democrats had lost the last three presidential elections by a wide margin...
...It was the act of a president and we should who was a creature of focus groups and polls with a determi- rebuild trade nation to bend to the appropriate winds...
...Bush, through happy accident and shrewd choices, has a narrative that he may make as compelling as the Roosevelt narrative was so many years ago...
...Edwards voted for the resolution and on occasion has defended his vote manfully...
...Dwight Eisenhower, if one is entitled to rely on his letters to his brother Edgar, was an opponent of many New Deal policies, but believed it would be politically suicidal to roll them back...
...Robert Rubin, a believer in progressive taxation but not (as a former bond trader) an opponent of market capitalism, would run a generally successful economic policy (more successful, it needs stating, after the Republicans won majorities in Congress than before...
...But the Reagan narrative has not taken hold as strongly as the Roosevelt narrative did in its time...
...Voters want to know how we got where we are, and where we are heading in the future: narrative supplies answers, makes sense of the messiness of everyday life and events...
...The Democrats' presidential pluralities are less compelling than they may seem in partisan eyes, but then Democratic primary voters are by definition partisans...
...But he probably never contemplated that he would face a Republican Congress who, in the wake of state governors' success in doing that, would vote to do that nationally...
...show hosts, especially Rush Limbaugh, and later by weblog writers like Andrew Sullivan...
...Bush ran 20 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 2004 HE DEMOCRATS, on the other hand, are in T much the same position as the Republicans in the 1950s and 1960s...
Vol. 37 • February 2004 • No. 1
