Democratic vistas
Dionne, E. J. Jr.
National affairs DEMOCRATIC VISTAS THE MIRROR IMAGE OF 1980 THE main issue of the 1982 election was decided before a single ballot was counted. The question was: what did the American people...
...So it was elsewhere...
...Most Republican office holders ran more as incumbents who had delivered for their districts than as political leaders who had brought the nation salvation through tax and budget cuts...
...It refers to the fact that women are now far more likely than men to vote Democratic...
...When the 10,1 percent national unemployment figure was announced on October 8, it looked in most places as if the Republican party were about to be obliterated...
...BUT what programs...
...Lehrman proposed the old Republican cure-massive tax cuts-but at the same time went out of his way to differentiate his program from the president's...
...And cutting defense spending became more popular now than at any time since the immediate post-Vietnam period...
...Add to this the Democrat's winning of seven more governorships and big gains in state legislatures...
...It's unfortunate that it took the disasters of 1980 to bring the Democrats back to the fact that if they are not the party of work-of jobs-they are not likely to go anywhere...
...Here, there is something of a consensus developing among Democrats...
...It has a nice ring...
...Democrats and Republicans alike will be looking to take some money from the Pentagon to pare down the deficit, and to provide more money for other programs...
...It's Republican...
...Lane Kirkland is not likely to let the Democrats forget this, or to forget it himself in 1984...
...It wasn't...
...Human capital" is a popular word these days among the neoliberal "Atari Democrats," but that doesn't make it a bad thing...
...The trade-union voters tended to follow their leaders and returned home to the Democrats in large numbers...
...The Democratic compromise is to cap it at $700, which would take benefits away from everyone earning more than $50,000...
...Moderate-to-liberal Republicans such as Senators John Chafee of Rhode Island...
...From there, the only place the G.O.P...
...it was a mandate against the results of Jimmy Carter's economic policies: high inflation, rising unemployment, unprecedented interest rates...
...And in doing so, they returned to the party that always promised an end to joblessness...
...writes regularly on politics for Commonweal...
...The party's national theme-"it's not fair...
...They also want the government to spend more money on job training...
...Even Congressman John Le Boutillier, who believed that personal insults were the highest form of politics and became a hero of the political right, ran radio commercials telling voters how he had saved his Long Island district from some of David Stockman's budget cuts and how he had battled to save student loan programs...
...The question was: what did the American people think of President Reagan's economic policies...
...Nobody's man but yours...
...In 1982, the voters-were demanding an end to unemployment...
...marked the Democrats' return to their historic role as the party of the little person...
...Joe Moakley gave them an education...
...But it is also another form of investment...
...and also show that "capital investment" can be the province of the public as well as the private sector...
...For the Democrats, there were also disappointments in the governors' contests, the most notable being Tom Bradley's defeat in California...
...It will be interesting to watch what the two parties do about it over the next two years...
...could go was up...
...E.J...
...In Massachusetts, Congressman Joseph Moakley's campaign proclaimed: "When the Republicans tried to cut student loans...
...John Le Boutillier was one of the losers...
...Five days before the election, Lehrman publicly disavowed the "Stay the Course" theme and said the president had an obligation to show how be would end the massive unemployment that had hit the country...
...some Democrats want to take it all back...
...It was a message that rang out from polling booths all over the country: full employment-black and white together...
...On the basis of a really remarkable 56 percent of the popular vote, the Democrats picket up twenty-six seats in the House, and won some important victories in the process...
...In 1983, these two weakened institutions will have to learn to compromise, even as the Democrats try to shape a broader vision for 1984...
...What is clear from the 1982 elections is that "Stay the Course" lost and the Democrats won...
...Republicans seemed to be veering as far off the course as possible...
...The third year of the Reagan tax cut...
...That's not a bad slogan for 1984...
...One of the many fortunate results of this year's elections is that they will put an end to all the loose talk that the 1980 election was a mandate for conservatism...
...A New Federalism-different from "The New Federalism"-may be in the offing...
...His opponent, Lew Lehrman, made political capital out of Cuomo's opposition to the death penalty by relentlessly harping on voters' anger about crime...
...Barney Frank, one of the nation's most able progressives, defeated Republican Margaret Heckler, who had run a particularly vicious campaign...
...They want the federal government to spend money on jobs programs, with an emphasis on "hard" investment in roads, bridges, and water systems...
...Perhaps because dissatisfaction with the president's program was so palpable, the results of the election were a bit of a disappointment to some Democrats...
...That leaves a lot of questions unanswered...
...And the trend at the end seemed to be with the Republicans in most states...
...While the Republican party was running a nationwide television advertising campaign urging voters to "Stay the Course...
...Lee Webb of the Conference on Alternative State and Local Public Policies, a left-of-center think tank, has argued for some time that most of the best New-Deal ideas were tried out in the states from the turn of the century to the 1920s...
...In view of the Republicans' dominance in the Senate and the president's own wishes, it is unlikely that a lot of the cuts will be restored, especially in the programs for the very poorest...
...Here again, there is a link between the party's welfare goals and the country's economic needs: job training is good for the needy, especially older workers in ailing industries, and the young unemployed...
...many freshmen Republicans elected on the Reagan tide in 1980 were driven from office by this year's Democratic tide...
...Republicans will resist rescinding it...
...This new fact of life is one mat only a few Republicans coped with effectively this year...
...It was also striking that in 1982, Ronald Reagan, that ex-Democrat, helped make Democrats behave like Democrats...
...DIONNE (E.J...
...In a sense, the 1980 and 1982 elections taken together might be viewed as a vote of no confidence in both parties...
...Given how strong an issue Social Security was for the Democrats this year, any broad changes are unlikely...
...Jim Wright, the Democratic House Majority Leader, described the new consensus this way: "Government doesn't owe everybody a living, but it does owe everybody the opportunity to earn a living...
...Remember the 1930's slogan "If you want to live like a Republican, vote Democratic...
...The latest cliche in our politics is "the gender gap...
...Then there is labor...
...For blacks, as for less well-off whites, the issue in 1982 was jobs...
...Feminine Democracy is the product of many factors: women are more peace-minded than men...
...The most definitive answer was provided by Republican candidates themselves...
...Still, the Democrats failed to make major gains in the Senate, and lost some very talented candidates, including Toby Moffett in Connecticut, Jim Guest in Vermont, Harriet Woods in Missouri, and Julie Michaelson in Rhode Island...
...In addition to talking about crime, Lehrman also talked a great deal about the evils of unemployment...
...Jesse Helms's slate of New Right candidates all went down to defeat in North Carolina...
...Dionne, Jr...
...Social Security...
...Lehrman said he would also balance the budget and stabilize the dollar through the gold standard...
...Representative Jim Shannon of Massachusetts has been telling his fellow Democrats that any one of them who would cut social security benefits ought to have his or her head examined...
...In New York, Mario Cuomo-one of the country's most outspoken defenders of assistance to the poor-triumphed, but by a much smaller margin than he had hoped for...
...Finally, three groups deserve special mention...
...Really, the message of these elections is virtually identical with the message of 198ft- voters want some party-they don't really care which-to set the economy right...
...That, MORE THAN anything else, is why the voters went Democratic in 1982...
...elderly women vastly outnumber elderly men, and tend to be poorer and more worried about transfer programs such as Social Security...
...In some places, particularly in Chicago, it came out in larger-than-usual numbers, though Tom Bradley in California seemed to suffer from a surprisingly low black turnout...
...In New York, members of the campaign staff of Lew Lehrman, the Republican candidate for governor, referred to their national party' s slogan as" Stay the Curse...
...The exit polls showed that Reagan is still relatively popular, and that a large share of the electorate still blames the Democrats for the economic mess...
...But there was another piece of the Lehrman campaign that provides a broader clue to what happened in the 1982 elections...
...better educated women who would usually vote Republican are instead voting feminist interests...
...And before Democrats cut Social Security, they should bear in mind what James K. Galbraith of the Joint Economic Committee has been arguing: that indexing Social Security benefits has been the single most successful anti-poverty program of recent years, the one place where poverty has gone down substantially is among the elderly...
...It is less clear where that leaves Ronald Reagan or the Democratic party...
...The unions delivered for a lot of Democrats this year...
...The latter seems an odd idea in the middle of a recession, especially since the third year of the reduction is the time when it begins to be of real benefit to low- and middle-income people...
...What happens to all the social programs cut last year...
...All over the country, Democrats assailed cuts in a variety of programs, notably those that benefited the middle class...
...declared Weicker's billboards...
...Robert Stafford of Vermont, and Lowell Weicker of Connecticut all made their independence from the president a major campaign theme...
...The black vote was, once again, critical for the Democrats...
...The best laboratories for the new ideas may turn out to be the state governments, where the Democrats now have new responsibilities...
...That, perhaps, was inevitable...
...This is a good sign, a realization by the Democrats that if they want to defend the public sector, they have to make sure it does some of the things it does best...
Vol. 109 • November 1982 • No. 20
