Into the Bush Years:
Harrington, Michael & Howe, Irving & Chapin, Jim & Judis, John & Scheuer, Jeffrey & Siegel, Fred
Here are a few comments by Dissent editors and contributors on the current political situation. More will follow in later issues. —EDS. omething of major importance happened in the recent...
...It is clear that there will be a renewed push on the deficit—Wall Street and the international money markets are already insistent—and there will be a drive to cut entitlements, including an attack on the universality of Social Security...
...All four candidates were millionaires for the first time in American history...
...It also poses two obvious dangers: a decisive tilt to the right on the Supreme Court and the ghastly spectre of J. Danforth Quayle a handgun away from the presidency...
...That's the difference between us...
...That's why Dukakis won the nomination in the first place...
...I don't see 1988 as proving the voguish notion that the GOP has an "electoral lock" on the presidency...
...Like the Democrats today, the twenties Democrats were steadily building the foundations of a new majority even while being defeated...
...the Democratic party, the left has historically sought to create a majority coalition committed to economic democracy, but the different parts of the current left have carried out this mission very poorly...
...When the election campaign of 1988 began nearly two years ago, most political analysts felt that it might be of great significance...
...But Dukakis faced two obstacles in executing this strategy...
...The Democrats cannot hope to build a majority without these working- and middle-class voters...
...For instance, according to CBS surveys, only 22 percent of Democratic convention delegates favor school prayer compared to 67 percent of Democratic voters...
...The potential power of a broader sort of liberalism can be seen in the often overlooked positive side of the Bush campaign, which focused on a Democratic rather than a Reaganite issues agenda: peace, jobs, education, and environment...
...Jackson has done nothing to dispel the impression that he is already running for president in 1992...
...In 1932, his slogan was "Bread, not booze...
...James Baker is declared a genius because he taught President-elect Bush the art of the low blow...
...It could replicate the split within the British Labour party—a split that has ensured two decades of Tory rule...
...It would be as if John Nance Garner, and not Roosevelt, had won in 1932 — leaving the way open to a "progressive" Alf Landon and a resurgent Republicanism in 1936...
...About that, if nothing else, Bush was right...
...While the national Democrats assume a kind of cultural universality—their values are everybody's values—the upper-class Republicans understand that they are different from the common run of Americans, and they cynically construct campaigns designed to appeal to them...
...This year's election was no exception...
...The only Democrats in this century to win an absolute majority of the popular vote were Roosevelt and Johnson...
...Fifty-seven percent of the delegates favor federal funding for welfare abortions compared to 32 percent of Democratic voters...
...But only some one hundred to one hundred and twenty-five are utterly out of a Democrat's reach...
...In an interview last spring, Peter Hart, who did polling for Walter Mondale in 1984, insisted that race was not a factor in Mondale's abysmal showing in the South...
...This is what the Bush campaign did successfully in 1988...
...The Nation extolled Jackson's candidacy for "expanding and recapturing the party's base...
...Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America rom April to August 1988, Michael Dukakis seemed all but elected president...
...The media, for its increasingly poor coverage...
...in interviewing Dukakis, the Voice was most concerned about why, is assigning foster children to homes, he was giving heterosexual families priority over homosexual couples...
...Concretely, the Jackson proposal at the Democratic convention makes great sense...
...Now is the time for the democratic left to reassert its commitment to labor...
...The American right was never this obtuse...
...In 1928, Smith finally got the nomination only to be slaughtered by Herbert Hoover in the general election...
...Each congressional district now has its own one-party system...
...Jackson has contributed to this impression by eschewing election to lower office and by prolonging his presidential campaigns well past the point at which victory was conceivable...
...Finally, if an economic crisis does break out, it could be extremely nasty because of the shaky structure of national, corporate, private, and international debt...
...The Republicans have not won presidential elections...
...Dukakis's campaign staff and Dukakis himself understood that Jackson could cost them votes among white Democrats, but they initially refused to recognize that Willie Horton, the Pledge of Allegiance controversy, and the American Civil Liberties Union could damage his candidacy...
...The Democrats could then be finished as a majority party...
...I share just about all the suggestions for improvement that my colleagues make in the following comments, or those that other thoughtful people are making these days...
...The campaign ended, of course, with both activists and electorate disappointed...
...And the last sitting vice-president to succeed his president by election was Martin Van Buren, hit by the Depression of 1837, and then smashed for reelection by a Whig party that finally learned from the Democrats how to use the then-new techniques of campaign advertising: newspapers, handbills, and stump speeches...
...Like Smith, Jackson represents a social movement and not simply a political constituency...
...After using a populist message to win Iowa, Gephardt was predictably unable to raise funds from Wall Street or radical chic Democrats to compete in Super Tuesday, and his friends in the labor movement were powerless to help him...
...Americans have always been ideological conservatives and operational liberals...
...It's unlikely that any activist Democrat can win the presidency, barring a Republican catastrophe, without first coming to grips with the problem before which both black and white Democratic mayors have been helpless—the problem of the underclass...
...Today, money talks and talks—consider a congressional race in Westchester County, New York, where each candidate spent $2,000,000...
...Jackson's strategy is based on two absurdities...
...In the end the election of 1988, like that of 1984, changed very little...
...Bush and his closest associates are closet moderates and, even though beholden to Republican Neanderthals, might be willing to make at least some compromises with the enhanced Democratic majorities on Capitol Hill...
...First, it assumes that Jackson himself could win the presidency...
...ensured his own defeat by allowing Bush to define the election as a replay of the 1972, 1980, and 1984 presidential elections...
...Since 1932, the Democrats' political appeal has been based on standing for the average person against the banker, the corporate executive, and the idle rich...
...The Democrats, for providing another in their series of presidential debacles...
...But beyond that national consensus, it mut also fight against Star Wars and some of the other destabilizing and wasteful military outlays like the Rapid Deployment Force and the six-hundred-ship navy...
...For one thing the creation of a unified West European market with tariff barriers on American products will put the Republicans' free-market dogmatism to the test...
...The procedures of democracy remain intact, perhaps even improved, but the substance of democracy (popular participation, serious discussion, structured publics) is visibly shrinking...
...Second, Dukakis himself was initially unwilling to raise the economic issue in terms that appealed to populist or class-based Democratic sentiments...
...How could an ordinary person, let alone someone with unorthodox views, compete...
...Television has reduced the public meeting to mere background for a few seconds on the evening news...
...In some sophisticated circles it's become the fashion to dismiss as a cliche the view that television has become the dominant political mechanism...
...Our problem with southern whites was not racial, it was taxes and defense," Hart said...
...The Dukakis campaign did focus some attention on the thirty-seven million Americans without health insurance (to which one should add another twenty million or so with inadequate care...
...When Dukakis finally began to draw economic class lines at the end of the election, he surged and almost caught Bush in the industrial Midwest...
...Reagan did, he won, and he accomplished almost everything that Goldwater would have wanted to do...
...omething of major importance happened in the recent presidential election, though it has its roots, of course, farther back in time...
...This is certainly true of the Hollywood left—an important source of campaign funds—and of publications like Rolling Stone and the Village Voice...
...At a workshop on the fall elections at the Democratic convention last July, former Mondale campaign manager Bob Beckel—inexplicably elevated to guru status by the television networks— insisted that an association with Jesse Jackson could not take votes away from the Democratic nominee...
...What is most troubling about these developments is that they don't stem merely from the all-too-familiar effectiveness of demagogy or from the programmed gullibility of many voters...
...WINTER • 1989 • 5 Comments and Opinions I don't want to indulge in Spengleresque jeremiads...
...Jackson supporter Linda Williams said after the election, "The Reagan Democrats have become Republicans, and it's time the party faces up to that fact...
...q 10 • DISSENT Comments and Opinions Michael Dukakis's electoral college defeat was of landslide proportions, but in its contours one could still see the outline of future Democratic victories...
...Neoliberalism has failed, but it is by no means clear that the alternative served up by the Reverend Jackson can be more successful...
...Gramm-Rudman is, after all, not simply a bad law but also a recognition of the success of David Stockman's attempt to curtail progressive innovation by mortgaging the welfare state...
...Second, assuming that there is no economic crisis in 1989, there is a serious, achievable left agenda...
...Dukakis's posture toward working- and middleclass Democrats was further reinforced by Democratic policy makers and professionals...
...Still, this is not the horrible morning after of 1984, when sheer empty-mindedness achieved a landslide...
...The secret ballot was designed to prevent the rich from buying the votes of the masses...
...Three days after the vote, about eight hundred people jammed into a Democratic Socialists of America National Board meeting in Los Angeles to cheer a call to action...
...Robb and Nunn, the main DLC leaders, both represent prosperous states that are extremely dependent upon defense spending...
...In further hindsight, Dukakis's retreat from liberalism to the sorry banner of "competence" was a strategic as well as a moral and intellectual blunder...
...It begins, of course, with a drive for gains in both strategic and conventional arms reduction, where all the appropriate bows can be made to the very real accomplishment of Reagan's INF treaty...
...We are living through the degradation of democratic politics...
...And as for admitting doubt, why, that would be political suicide, if not un-American...
...Some organizations and publications that identify with the left really are battalions in the cultural civil war...
...Writing in In These Times, three prominent left-wing activists, John Atlas, Peter Dreier, and Tom Gallagher, presented a strategy for the left that amounts to building a permanent organized political faction for Jackson in the Democratic party: "The Jackson campaign laid the foundation for an effective, ongoing progressive coalition that could survive the November election and become an important force within the country's politics...
...As for the promise of nonvoters, it is highly exaggerated...
...Whatever his merits, Jackson remains and will remain anathema to many middle-class whites...
...Freed by procedural purists from the malign influence of party, members of Congress proceeded to build individualized and unassailable electoral machines of their own...
...Like the current Democrats, they did much better in state and local elections, where candidates could adjust their messages to the prevailing assumptions of their constituents...
...In the wake of the election, some of these leftists are now lining up with Jackson's faction, like soldiers in Cromwell's army of the Lord...
...Television dissolves coherent publics into isolated spectators or, worse still, into "experts" who judge which candidate "won" a debate or which has better posture...
...Liberal laws and programs from the Progressive Era to the New Deal to the Great Society represented an extraordinary promise to the American people: broad opportunity to join an ever-expanding middle class...
...But a glance at the poll suggests otherwise...
...One theory holds that the entire responsibility for the Democratic failure rests on Michael Dukakis, the man who led the polls at one point by 17 percent and yet found himself behind by 17 percent just eleven weeks later...
...But the Reagan Democrats are the working-class voters who elect Democratic House members and Senators...
...Here I see a dilemma, and I'm not sure how to handle it...
...That silver lining comes, however, with a cloud: that those compromises might be located on the sophisticated right of center and give the dangerous impression that something really is being done about issues like day care and parental leave (more on this ambiguity in a moment...
...In the words of Hunter S. Thompson, all Bush had to do was "hang tough and deny everything...
...The upshot is public cynicism, a disdain for politics that encourages the further privatization of American life...
...The tendency for young voters to be more Republican than the rest of the population ended...
...If politics is just another form of spectator sports, the idea of a positive national agenda for government itself becomes questionable...
...On social and environmental issues, there are possibilities for gains...
...Many Americans have a strong aversion to the intellectual side of liberalism—its abstractness and complexity...
...Neoliberalism scored some of its greatest triumphs in reforming Congress, and there too the results are, albeit in a different way, disastrous...
...We must be prepared to mount a serious campaign for a political solution of a conflict neither side can win, as against "anticommunist" support to the oligarchy and its death squads...
...The victory of unionism at Harvard—and the militant "Justice for Janitors" campaign of the Service Employees' International Union—are signs that there is life in the labor movement and the possibility of moving in both the old and the new service sectors...
...The corpse of New Deal democracy has been dug up and reburied ever since 1948, but in fact it barely survived the death of Franklin Roosevelt (remember the election of 1946...
...First, the political conjuncture in Washington holds out the possibility of some immediate, if modest, gains...
...People who pronounced themselves "ready for a change" were frightened by rising fears of crime, embodied for many in the relatively unthreatening figure of the aggressive panhandler...
...When Hart asked what their social goal for the next president was, a plurality of 46 percent said "stop people from abusing the welfare system" —a goal clearly freighted with racial connotations...
...Why Michael Dukakis allowed Bush to slander as "unilateralist" the Nuclear Freeze, which was for a bilateral, verifiable, negotiated freeze on the model of the Reagan treaty, is one of the puzzles in the recent campaign...
...If anything, the Electoral College offers a slight potential advantage to Democrats: It would have been far easier for Dukakis than for Bush to win the electoral vote without a popular majority, by winning narrow victories in the twenty-plus competitive states while losing overwhelmingly in the South, the Great Plains, and the Rockies...
...Seemingly neutered by his party's past defeats, and attempting to assemble an impossibly broad coalition, Dukakis abandoned his patrimony until the last desperate days...
...They stand resolutely on one side of the cultural "civil war...
...They wanted to know whether, beyond opposing American intervention, he also positively backed the Ortega regime...
...When the Democrats were able to frame the issue in these terms—for instance, in 1982, when they ran against a Republican recession and an administration plan to cut Social Security—they won...
...Labor would clearly be better off going back to its laissez-faire days...
...That the left has to push the liberal Democrats to be sure that any deals contain substantial gains...
...The one thing we can say for sure is that on the basis first of Jimmy Carter and now of Mike Dukakis, the principled bloodlessness of neoliberalism is an electoral disaster...
...One of our most important tasks in the next period is to think through an answer to that question...
...A great many things will be different for the 1992 election...
...Its endorsement of Mondale in 1984 alienated other candidates and made Mondale appear to be a pawn of the AFL-CIO bureaucracy...
...Technique replaces opinion, and savvy, commitment...
...Hence arises the strange confusion that we are compelled to witness...
...As things stand, Republicans do have about two hundred electoral votes leaning strongly their way, compared with only a hundred or so for Democrats...
...Freed of party discipline, the congressional entrepreneurs are now subject to the "discipline" Give Some Thought To Your Friends...
...The revival of full-blooded liberalism presaged by the 1986 election was aborted by growing fears of the lumpenproletariat...
...If the Democrats carry their feud over the next four years, the results could be even worse than electoral defeat...
...But the Democrats could have a hard time producing a candidate and a platform capable of unifying its highly divided electorate...
...Politics has become largely a function of advertising, advertising an accomplice or branch of television, and television a power that tilts politics more and more into the hands of the rich...
...The effect, in part, is not only that 99 percent of the incumbents were reelected, 82 percent of all winners won by garnering at least 60 percent of the vote...
...The presidential debacle of 1988 was anticipated more than a dozen years ago in an exchange between an aggressive Mike Dukakis, then riding high in his first term as governor of Massachusetts, and the last man with a common touch to win the Democratic nomination, Hubert Humphrey...
...They appeared to believe that America was Cambridge writ large...
...Bush to have that...
...It is not a liberalism encrusted in the past, or reinvented with Republican inner workings, or a specious "neoliberal" retrenchment...
...On the other hand, one should not hasten to absolve Dukakis of his failings...
...Of perhaps greater importance is that the political process is now bourgeois in an ultimate sense: Politics conceived of only as an expression of selling has gone further than anyone could have imagined...
...Since mid-October, when Dukakis's 12 • DISSENT Comments and Opinions defeat had seemed certain, DLC leaders had been thinking about whom to run in 1992...
...He has never been a populist, and his financial base has been among high-tech entrepreneurs and Wall Street financiers, neither of whom favor campaigns against corporate greed or unfair trade practices...
...Given that that assumption was partly false, it should be realized that it was not just Dukakis who lost this election but also Bush who won it...
...In the Democratic primaries, Jackson drew most of his white votes from college towns and upper-middle-class communities...
...Party alignments are almost exactly the reverse of what they were early in the century, and that holds promise for the Democrats...
...But his 46 percent of the national vote was the second highest percentage for his party since 1964...
...Bush, like Reagan, has been underestimated throughout his political career...
...This notion that Jesse Jackson is going to scare away Democrats is silly," Beckel said...
...Back in the days when political electioneering depended at least partly on lung-power, there could be a rough sort of equality of opportunity among competing candidates of unequal wealth—at least sometimes...
...But since 1968, the Republicans have taken advantage of the divisions in the Democratic electorate that followed upon the civil rights movement, the Vietnam war, the women's movement, and other sixties movements...
...Liberalism defined as economic liberalism did reasonably well (although it is not a majority creed...
...As for the end result, in retrospect it seems overdetermined, given peace abroad, a sufficiency of middle-class prosperity at home, and, most of all, the obvious failings of Dukakis's candidacy—his stubbornness, insularity from both the national and local parties, and the ineptitude of his television ads compared with the brilliantly squalid propaganda of his opponent...
...In the wake of Dukakis's defeat, the main party factions, which had slumbered since the Atlanta convention, began to battle over the party's future...
...Inanities of television "experts" soon circulate as folk wisdom in bars and kitchens...
...Today's Democrats must also transcend their differences...
...Check all your figures, dates, names, etc...
...If one of the DLC moderates gets the nomination, he might just possibly win, but he will not be able to build a new majority...
...Second, the Jackson strategy assumes that the Democrats can write off the "Reagan Democrats" and win by mobilizing nonvoters...
...3)Type your ms double-spaced, with wide margins...
...His spectacular nosedive in the month following the Republican convention is the singular fact to be explained about the brutal and vacuous 1988 campaign...
...In 1924, Smith and McAdoo battled to a standstill after 103 convention ballots...
...The Republicans have already been talking of a "voucher" approach, of providing totally inadequate assistance to individuals who will then buy care in a "free" —and sometimes dangerously unregulated—market...
...As the leaky lifeboats of middle-class opportunity fill up, those on board pull up the ladders and shift their gaze to Republican yachts...
...Television corrupts absolutely...
...They have no need to deal with the seemingly insoluble problems of our dependent and sometimes criminal populations...
...The DLC strategy is equally open to question...
...Here there is no ambiguity—and winning is difficult...
...After the 1980 election, the labor movement WINTER • 1989 • 13 Comments and Opinions decided to increase its influence in the party by endorsing a single presidential candidate...
...After all, it was the first election since 1960 in which the presidential nomination of both parties was to be up for grabs...
...Most polls show that nonvoters vote substantially the same as voters...
...q For further comment on the media and politics, see Jeremey Lamer's "Culture Notes," page 109...
...This is particularly true as regards racial politics...
...Contra aid is probably dead and should be buried...
...The Democrats are not so fortunate: The path to power may well lie across the issue they are politically and intellectually frightened to face...
...As Mary McGrory pointed out, even in Mississippi right-wing GOP Congressman Trent Lott won his election as senator by campaigning like a member of the Democratic Study Group...
...Unfortunately 8 • DISSENT for the Democratic party, it is today more a party of cultural than of economic liberals...
...He is not seen as a conventional politician but as a militant protest leader who will foment racial conflict...
...But more subtle forms of vote buying thrive, as with the fifty-eight congressmen running unopposed who nonetheless have received more than fourteen million dollars in PAC contributions...
...Hart also claimed that the extensive poll of eighteen-to-forty-four-year-olds that he did for Rolling Stone this spring demonstrated that among this group "race relations tend to be very progressive...
...Money and advertising are now the near totality of the election process...
...Who deserves the blame...
...The Dukakis (and Ted Kennedy) proposals to mandate health insurance for all jobs and buy public care for those who fall out of this net are a response to the issue and, after fifteen years of failure on national health itself, possibly a winnable response...
...6 • DISSENT In the heat of the struggle each partisan is hurried beyond the natural limits of his opinions by the doctrines and the excesses of his opponents, until he loses sight of the end of his exertions, and holds forth in a way which does not correspond to his real sentiments or secret instincts...
...Putting a Democrat in the White House remains a difficult proposition, but not a hopeless one...
...No political candidate feels obliged to make, nor seems capable of making, a coherent half-hour speech advancing an idea...
...But there is also a wide natural constituency for its promise, including anyone without a life membership in the middle class...
...Like Hart and Beckel, Dukakis's staff displayed a kind of detachment from ordinary, middle-class America...
...Their doubts about economic liberalism now concern not its goals but its competence...
...The Republicans have portrayed themselves as defenders of the white middle class against a Democratic alliance between ghetto blacks and the "new class" of countercultural bureaucrats, braburning feminists, and Sandinista supporters...
...The depression focused voters' attention on jobs rather than alcohol and immigration, and the Democrats nominated a candidate, Franklin Roosevelt, who could not be fitted into either of the old factions...
...They transcended them...
...But Dukakis WASHINGTON, D.C...
...The ideological hoopla was increased because real differences on major policies were so small...
...Yet precisely because the left promises so much to so many, it will always have both limits and possibilities...
...That's the real lesson, isn't it...
...But as reporters who covered the campaign can testify, many whites who identify themselves as Democrats were turned off by Dukakis because they believed he made some kind of secret deal with Jackson...
...Paris being worth a Mass, the presidency might well be worth a bad conscience, if one even supposes Mr...
...In the spring, however, there may well be a right-wing victory in the Salvadoran elections and the Duarte excuse for military aid will no longer exist...
...Television has made a farce out of debate, with airhead questioners feeding candidates cues either pointless or hopelessly beyond answer in two minutes...
...His top economic adviser, Harvard professor Lawrence Summers, was a protege of Martin Feldstein, the former chairman of Reagan's Council of Economic Advisors...
...6)Please bear with us—we have accumulated quite a backlog of material, and you may have to wait for a few issues before you see your article In print...
...That theory is at best misleading in its arithmetic emphasis...
...In the Midwest, for instance, CBS polls found that voters with family incomes of $25,000 to $35,000 went 57 to 43 percent for Bush and 51 to 45 percent for Democratic congressional candidates...
...Other publications like In These Times and Mother Jones made no formal endorsements but were clearly more sympathetic to his candidacy than to that of other Democrats...
...But with a crisis or without, there is plenty for the left to do...
...As for the past election, the differences between the candidates were less important than their similarities...
...not "electoral lock," but "class lock...
...And in a perfectly just society, I suppose, so could we all...
...On Bush's side was considerable experience in national government, Ronald Reagan's popularity, a falling unemployment rate, and the steady reduction of cold war hostilities with the Soviet Union...
...No candidate would dream of admitting there is anything about which he is not ready to express a packaged line...
...2)Please don't write to ask whether we're interested in such and such an article—it makes for useless correspondence...
...That's not to say that the Democrats can't blow it...
...But they are open to serious criticism because of the employment disincentives and the tendency to view care as a cost rather than a good...
...A rural Protestant and a dry, Roosevelt had nonetheless backed Smith in 1924 and 1928...
...Moreover, Dukakis and leading Democratic activists and donors largely fit the profile that Republicans drew of them...
...of the vote-buying market...
...Unpalatable as it may be for some party activists, victory lies with the 60 percent of the white population who found a couple of country club fops preferable to the pride of Harvard Yard...
...The Democrats cannot abandon them without abandoning their working-class base and any hope of a majority...
...But getting there is the problem...
...Here the left must speak in the name of real national security, for unilateral initiatives but not for unilateralism...
...Well, perhaps it is a cliché, but clichés often harbor bits of truth...
...Bush, for winning the only way he could...
...THE EDITORS 14 • DISSENT Comments and Opinions clear of Goldwater and of the more provocative right-wing stands...
...Over the last eight years, Democratic policy makers have devised programs that seemed to be directed primarily at the very poor and the very rich, but not at the middle class...
...Leftwing publications like the Nation endorsed Jackson during the primaries...
...Dukakis lost narrowly in seven states with one hundred and twenty-five electoral votes, and got at least 45 percent of the vote in states with 313...
...It is said there was a public reaction against the mindlessness and vulgarity of the presidential campaign, though not enough to convince the sharper "handlers" that mindlessness and vulgarity don't pay off...
...Even the liberal Democratic demand for full employment has come to be seen through the prism of racial conflict as a demand that the white middle class pay for "black freeloaders...
...They exacerbate differences within the party rather than seeking to resolve and transcend them...
...In Michigan, Bush won over 40 percent of the vote among union households...
...See Special Subscription Offer on Inside Back Cover of This Issue...
...The problem is not electoral votes, but voters...
...Or take a chance and send us your article...
...Since the times themselves seem to demand such an agenda, the prospects of George Bush's being able to govern seem limited...
...Robb's smashing victory in Virginia has stirred rumors of his own candidacy...
...Dan Quayle, whom fate might yet elevate to the presidency, was apparently guarded more closely than a prisoner in the Gulag...
...Had Dukakis gotten 1 percent more of the vote he would have exceeded two hundred electoral votes...
...But the Dukakis campaign and much of the Democratic policy elite displayed an astonishing indifference toward their concerns...
...of course we have always had hoopla, demagoguery, ignorance, deceit...
...Let us simply restore tax rates to their 1977 levels, i.e., take back the bonanza to the rich...
...Is a flawed victory better than a principled defeat...
...However, neither strategy has much to recommend it...
...The so-called Republican "electoral lock" proved meaningless...
...If there's a delay, it's because a few editors are reading your article...
...Like Truman in 1948, he won his election by appealing to issues of the past...
...After Barry Goldwater was routed in 1964, conservatives continued to revere Barry Goldwater, but they recognized that he was not a viable national leader...
...But me, I don't care if the pipeline is cracked and rusty and shiny so long as the right results come out the other end...
...The party has consistently nominated candidates who have driven large numbers of working-class Democrats into Republican hands...
...What is disturbing is that the debasement of political life seems to be an offshoot of technological innovations that it would be hopeless to try to block but foolish to simply acquiesce in...
...The question to be faced is whether politics, like so many other areas of social life, has become prey to all-butuncontrollable forces that drain human dignity and strip democracy of its value and meaning...
...As a congressional party, the Democrats' strength lies in their political, social, and regional diversity...
...They also told Reagan to stay To Our Contributors: A few suggestions: (1)Be sure to keep a copy of your ms—the mails aren't always reliable...
...The Supreme Court nomination fights of the next years will, to assert the obvious, be critical and difficult and the first line of the defense of reproductive rights...
...To defeat Bush, Dukakis would have had to focus the campaign away from the cultural civil war and back toward traditional Democratic economic issues...
...Jesse Jackson and his supporters told reporters that Democrats should not focus on winning "Reagan Democrats" but rather on creating a "coalition of havenots...
...I remain a democrat in opinion and desire...
...Others tried to convince themselves that Jackson's increased vote among whites represented an ongoing evolution that would result eventually in a majority vote...
...And please remember that we can't return articles unless they're accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed envelope...
...The Democrats of the twenties did not finally resolve their differences...
...But this aside, the Republicans have a great advantage...
...I don't know yet where I stand...
...As we're not an academic journal, we prefer that they, wherever possible, be dropped altogether or worked into the text...
...Dukakis would have had a difficult time winning no matter what kind of campaign he ran...
...and their conservative economics, oriented toward balancing budgets, will be of little use to Democratic presidential candidates...
...to use it effectively is to shame and abuse democratic values...
...He also forgot to fight...
...children of the New Deal have become Republicans...
...Domestically, the election of George Bush signifies opportunities forgone—for binding the nation and keeping the lifeboats open...
...5)We're usually quick in giving editorial decisions...
...But the partial fulfillment of that promise created a barrier to its completion...
...He doesn't care if shit comes out the other end...
...Television proves that visual demagogy has by now surpassed the verbal kind—and you can buy it on Madison Avenue...
...Yet, it's important to note, these Democratic activists display less rather than more animosity toward corporations than do the average Democrats...
...The clash between Jackson and the DLC recalls the Democratic party battles of the twenties when Al Smith, the champion of the urban immigrant "wets," faced off against William Gibbs McAdoo, the representative of the rural Protestant supporters of Prohibition and the Ku Klux Klan...
...Democratic professionals have consistently refused to take the Republicans' cultural appeal seriously...
...The Republicans don't make this kind of mistake...
...But those who insist that all Democrats must adhere to their own cultural agenda or those who insist that only Jackson can represent their politics risk destroying Democrats' chance of ever creating a national majority...
...What action...
...For instance, the Voice, when it interviewed Jackson, was most interested in his position on Nicaragua...
...A last, nonlegislative item...
...Dukakis, if nothing else, convinced most of those who knew him that he would have made a more rigid, detail-oriented, and maze-dull president than Jimmy Carter...
...Finally, it must be remarked that the combination of peace and prosperity, a popular president, and a Republican party that at the presidential level has been a majority party for nearly twenty years hardly made an auspicious combination for any Democratic candidate...
...Some of these organizations and publications appeared indifferent to the fact that Jackson's candidacy split the Democrats and the left's own natural constituency...
...In a lesser sense, much of the news for the Democrats is encouraging...
...A recession could shatter the Reagan-Thatcher pipe dream that they have found a new road to permanent, crisis-free prosperity, and the left will then able to say triumphantly, We told you so...
...But what do we then do...
...Indeed, during the 1988 campaign, the DLC's main issue was a VISTA-style "citizens corps" that young people could enter in order to fund their education— an interesting idea but one that could hardly sway majorities...
...But it also means that countermeasures will be subjected to the constraints of that debt...
...If Jackson finally succeeds in winning the nomination, he will lose everything except the District of Columbia, even against a weak opponent...
...Look at our last few issues to see if your idea fits in...
...It is a robust, populist liberalism tied to genuine family values— child care, health care, education, jobs, housing— WINTER • 1989 • 7 Comments and Ophdons and appealing both to the shaky middle class and to those in the waters below...
...Worse still, a split involving Jackson would have a nasty racial edge that cuts deeper than any differences between left and center...
...But I don't see how any honest or sensible person, of whatever opinions, can fail to recognize that American democracy as a political system is in pretty sad shape...
...In 1988 the labor movement, divided among different candidates, endorsed no one, which meant that individual unions could not endorse...
...Even if one assumed the highly unlikely— a 20 percent increase in black turnout, all going to the Democrats, coupled with no change in white turnout—Jackson would have increased his own total by only one and a half percent...
...The political moral...
...The widely shared summer assumption of a victory for Dukakis rested only on the assurance of Bush's incompetence...
...Once he did, he made real progress...
...The Democrats and the left stand on a very similar threshold...
...Like him, he also remains tied in voters' imagination to his roots...
...While Democrats failed to break the southern part of the new Republican coalition, they finally reversed their Kennedy-Carter collapse in the West...
...To look with dismay at the recent election is not at all to sentimentalize the American past...
...The mass public is caught between elites that appear to be essentially meretricious, but the Democratic party elites in academia, the social services, and the legal profession seem to most of the country more dispensable than the elites of businessmen, doctors, and the military for whom the Republican party speaks...
...just conceive of a ticket of (a Donna Riceless) Gary Hart and John Glenn, which might easily have won three hundred-plus electoral votes...
...Told that Dukakis the neoliberal had declared him obsolete, an angry Humphrey replied: "You know," he said, "there are two kinds of liberals...
...No dot matrix submissions, please...
...They have developed a sociocultural populism that has enabled them to draw away white, middle-class Democrats...
...the Democrats have lost them...
...Those people who would not vote for Dukakis because of Jackson are Republican voters...
...How about some Perestroika here at home...
...they're the author's responsibility...
...Millions of working-class voters in states like Michigan, Ohio, and New Jersey voted for liberal Democratic congressional candidates, but against Dukakis...
...Dukakis is a process liberal, and I'm not...
...Georgia Senator Sam Nunn, Virginia Senatorelect Chuck Robb, and other leaders of the moderate Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) took Dukakis's defeat as further proof that the party "should move to the middle" on such issues as defense and the economy...
...To be sure, this attitude could be used to rationalize political nonsense, i.e., the claim that a genuinely populist campaign would have easily triumphed despite the fact that "peace and prosperity" issues favored the Republicans and a refusal to recognize that Bush's attack on the liberal social engineers was both populist and very effective, and so on...
...Alexis de Tocqueville, meet Roger Ailes...
...All he cares about is that the pipeline is neat and shiny and clean...
...Each issue has become a battle in what historian Christopher Lasch has called the "cultural civil war...
...4)Notes and footnotes should also be typed double-spaced, on a separate sheet...
...That is a palliative in the worst sense of the word...
...According to a Washington Post poll, 67 percent of Democratic delegates (including the Jackson as well as Dukakis delegates) thought corporations had too much power compared to 79 percent of all Democrats and 73 percent of all voters...
...Their promilitary message has worked during a time of SovietAmerican tension, but may become anachronistic in the Gorbachev years...
...Over the last three elections the Democrats have steadily increased their vote in the Northeast, the farm-industrial Midwest, and the far West...
...they have redefined what are properly economic and foreign policy issues, from the tax revolt to the strategically insignificant invasion of Grenada...
...This policy probably doomed the candidacy of Representative Richard Gephardt, the candidate closest to many of the unions and one who might have beaten Bush...
...For instance, the Bradley-Gephardt tax reform plan—the most heralded Democratic program of the mid-eighties—would have benefited primarily the poor and the wealthy, and the current Democratic favorite, the ABC Child Care bill, would have required that working-class Catholics use secular, credentialed facilities rather than church-run centers in order to receive benefits...
...A winning Democrat will not be found in either the Democratic Leadership Council or the Rainbow Coalition...
...When Ronald Reagan ran for governor of California in 1966, the conservatives who recruited him insisted that he hire Stuart Spencer, who had run Nelson Rockefeller's primary campaign against Goldwater in 1964...
...Truman, despite his exaltation in historical memory, was the least popular president in the history of American polling and was knocked out of the reelection process in 1952...
...The argument that Democrats must carry the South misses the pattern of the old Republican majorities of 1880-1928, when the Republicans won nine of thirteen elections while cracking the South only in two...
...A majority beckons, and a politics has already begun to cohere—partly through the efforts and the eloquence of Jackson...
...And what a difference it's been...
...but now there really is something new and ominous...
...But as a presidential party, this strength has been its weakness...
...Important choices would have to be made, both by the parties and the electorate...
...but defined as cultural liberalism (ACLU, the flag, and Willie Horton), it was a disaster...
...their internal party debate over the next four years will be between partisans of Sam Nunn and Jesse Jackson, two men who couldn't get their party's nomination and couldn't win the election if they did...
...They have also maintained a strong local base throughout the South...
...The Democrats of the twenties, like the Democrats of the eighties, were divided primarily by cultural rather than economic issues...
...With 50 percent of the popular vote he would have gotten exactly half the electoral votes...
...Similarly, the push for a serious law in support of parenting could be diverted into a minimal, and even hurtful, compromise...
...The GOP thrives on the misery and fear spread by the underclass...
...And therein lies a problem...
...It was possible for a Democrat to win...
...This reflected Dukakis's own political inclination...
...q Michael Harrington The democratic left does not feel defeated in the aftermath of the 1988 elections, primarily because Dukakis did not raise populist Democratic issues until the last three weeks of the campaign...
...Candidates are supposed to be potential leaders of the nation, yet their every word is managed by "handlers...
...The question of day care has become so imperative that not only Bush but even WINTER • 1989 • 9 Comments and Opinions Orrin Hatch wants to do something...
...Our principle is the one brilliantly enunciated by Jeff Faux: Let those who attended the debt-financed "party" of the last eight years pay the bills...
...With a suitably ecumenical candidate and a less than buoyant economy, they could easily capture something resembling the old progressive Republican majority, stretching from New England to the Pacific Rim...
...The Republicans have not relied merely on social issues like crime and abortion...
...First, as Natalie Davis, a Democratic pollster in Birmingham, Alabama, discovered, even voters who believed that Dukakis and not Bush was "on their side" economically tended still to vote for Bush WINTER • 1989 • 11 Comments and Opinions because they were more concerned with flag and crime than with bread-and-butter economics...
Vol. 36 • January 1989 • No. 1
