COMMENTS:At the Democratic Convention...
Meyerson, Harold
San Francisco, July 23 61 I t's been a good convention," said Machinist President William Winpisinger, who four years earlier had walked out on the last night of the Democratic National...
...Despite the unity of Solidarity Day, however, it was as distinct groups with differing agendas that labor, women, blacks, and Hispanics had their impact on the party in 1984...
...what mattered were the national constituencies...
...The politics of Hubert Humphrey were premised on an America so dominant in the world economy that a welfare state and a huge corporate sector could both be sustained...
...They've had their party redefined...
...Walter Mondale's speech (and Mario Cuomo's, too) managed to sound communitarian, populist, anticorporate themes without really affirming the virtues of the welfare state...
...In part, then, the party has been redefined more clearly as the terrain of the organized social movements of the past 50 years, some of them only now coming of age—all of them thrown into unprecedented activity by the wrenching dismantling of the welfare state, which they helped to create in the 1930s and '60s, and which in turn empowered them...
...It has never been a neoliberal priority...
...ALL OF THIS YEAR'S historic firsts within the party are the peculiar contributions of one or another of the party's constituencies...
...Indeed, Ferraro has voted for the Congressional Black Caucus budget, the nearest thing to a social democratic prescription for the American economy to have reached the floor of the House...
...The 1984 Democratic Convention marked the reassertion of the forces in the party that had marched on Solidarity Day to a position of coequality with those forces in the party that had acquiesced in Ronald Reagan's dismantling of the welfare state...
...But even should the ticket not prevail, the nomination of Geraldine Ferraro as vice-president means that reality itself is not quite so cold as it was one month ago...
...For the first time in recent memory, the party and its movements seem serious about voter registration...
...I don't want cold reality to get in my way...
...1984 was also a year of intraparty class war, Yuppie against labor...
...Weighing platform against rhetoric, one could say that the neoliberals fought the movements to a draw...
...If Scoop called for national health insurance and Jesse didn't, it isn't a reflection on the radicalism of these individuals but on the narrowing terrain for welfare-state politics in a declining economy...
...The 1984 platform contains no commitment to full employment or national health insurance...
...It is the year of the labor presidential candidacy, of the successful campaign for a woman as vice-presidential nominee, of the black presidential candidacy—even, at the last minute, of a partial roll-call boycott of the least organized of party constituencies, the Hispanics...
...405...
...in 1980, it registered 10,000...
...The Democrats have had their spirit restored...
...The Yuppie phenomenon is in part generational, but it is also a counterrevolution of economically powerful elements in the Democratic party against those social movements that moved this year to retake the party...
...If, as Michael Harrington has argued, labor comprises a hidden social democracy within the Democratic party, seldom has it been larger, or more hidden...
...Clearly, this is something Fritz Mondale cannot afford to ignore...
...Gary Hart's disparagement of both Mondale and NOW for their handling of the vice-presidential selection process typifies the neoliberal distaste for organized group politics...
...That is to say, labor comprised a majority of the elected Mondale delegates—which is no more than a fair reflection of labor's share of the work in the Mondale campaign...
...It is not, of course, that the Yuppies in vacuo are responsible for the Democrats' move away from welfare-state liberalism...
...The regionalism of past conventions was in marked eclipse...
...By and large, unions deliberately confined themselves to working behind the scenes, lobbying against the vice-presidential aspirations of Lloyd Bentsen and the elevation of Bert Lance to DNC chair...
...The more intriguing possibility is that women are coming to comprise a distinct intraparty force with similar social democratic politics (blacks, it is clear, already do...
...Such semipopulist governors as Mario Cuomo of New York and Mark White of Texas have sought to authorize agency-based registration...
...But this is not the whole story...
...If anything would shift the balance of forces within the Democratic party, it is increased voter registration...
...Just as Martin Luther King contended that the liberation of American blacks would liberate American whites as well, so Walter Mondale's selection of Geraldine Ferraro seems to tap reserves of emotion among all manner of those gathered for the convention...
...I'm beginning to believe it myself," one major union international legislative director said on the last day of the convention...
...the Democrats now are also the party of the neoliberals...
...in these matters, it is the weakest in decades...
...The Democratic party is not yet redefined because it has yet to choose between those paths...
...No one surveying the sea of flag-waving delegates— and no one who witnessed the emotions unleashed by Jesse Jackson's address or Geraldine Ferraro's nomination—could doubt that the Democrats' spirit has been restored...
...Forty years ago, such people would have been Wendell Willkie Republicans...
...They are often at odds with the party's other movements, though, over economic policy, and seem unable to understand the necessity for group action among the less affluent...
...San Francisco, July 23 61 I t's been a good convention," said Machinist President William Winpisinger, who four years earlier had walked out on the last night of the Democratic National Convention rather than support the Carter ticket...
...BEYOND QUESTION, the party's spirit has soared...
...The interesting—indeed, historic—events at this convention were the women's, black, Hispanic, and labor caucuses, not the state delegation meetings...
...and Mondale apparently was very serious about considering Tom Bradley and Henry Cisneros as running mates precisely because of their potential to expand the electorate among minorities...
...Labor accounted for 25 percent of all delegates, rivaling its all-time high of 27 percent at the 1980 convention, when it supported two candidates...
...AFSCME, to take one example, plans to register 100,000 members this year...
...today, with Reaganauts in control of the Republican party, they are Democrats over issues of foreign and social policy...
...It is a remarkable figure, considering that almost all of labor's delegates were on the Mondale slate, and that 14 percent of all delegates—and a higher percentage of Mondale's—were public and party officials present at the convention by virtue of holding office rather than by having won election as delegates...
...Nowhere in Mondale's speech did he even mention his mentor: who would have thought Fritz Mondale's convention would banish the ghost of Hubert Humphrey...
...PLANS ARE AFOOT THAT, even if only partially executed, would give the Democratic party—and the American polity—a more social democratic tinge...
...Indeed, Jerry Brown scorned it, and most of the "Class of '74," who come from suburban districts where registration is high, could well be threatened in statewide or nationwide primaries by a sizable expansion of minority and underclass representation in the electorate...
...There are data suggesting that the gender gap exists not only on issues of war and peace but on those of social spending as well...
...404 But Mondale had been so stigmatized for his ties to labor, and labor was so far from embodying a consensus of positions within the party, that labor deliberately took a quiet role...
...403 For the Democratic party has yet to answer the one question that is fundamental to its identity: after welfare-state liberalism, what...
...less profoundly, there was optimism that the ticket might just win...
...So it is that the largest, most tightly organized bloc of delegates opted for silence...
...The feeling was not only one of liberation...
...To their credit, most of the party activists, certainly most of the delegates, reject the narrow neoliberal vision and responded coolly to Gary Hart's cool speech...
...The major thrust of the AFL–CIO caucus was to promote the one-on-one voter registration program this summer and fall, using shop stewards to register members at the work sites...
...A resolution from the floor of the AFL–CIO delegates' caucus to bind labor delegates to the Mondale platform planks was discouraged from the podium, though labor's floor-whip operation made sure few labor delegates strayed from the Mondale positions...
...Jesse Jackson's campaign put forth the most forthrightly social democratic programs this year—but the American ideological spectrum has shifted so far right in the past decade that in some of its particulars Jesse Jackson's 1984 campaign was less radical than Henry Jackson's in 1976...
...But neither do they yet favor a more decisive tilt toward social democracy—or, at least, they can't figure out a way to afford it...
...However inadvertently, then, the Democratic party may soon be redefined for the better...
...Geraldine Ferraro's acceptance speech balanced cultural conservatism with an explicit defense of social spending...
...But how, or even whether, the party has been redefined remains open to question...
...And yet, labor and such full-employment advocates as California Congressman Augustus Hawkins went through the convention secure in the conviction that Mondale is better on jobs and the welfare state than he can afford to let on...
Vol. 31 • September 1984 • No. 4
