A Democratic Year?

...With the rate of private sector unionization now close to a minuscule 8 percent, we are approaching the point where recoveries take a very long time to increase incomes...

...But on the whole, they have come together on a set of broad principles that differentiate themselves clearly from the Bush Republicans and that position them to win the November election...

...The Democratic 527s registered eighty-six thousand voters in the city's black and Latino communities—this in a city of fewer than 1.5 million voters...

...But the Republicans' efforts to sway larger constituencies have fizzled...

...Weekly...

...But if the mainstream was moving in a more populist direction, it was also embracing fiscal discipline...

...Both primary voters and congressional Democrats decided they wanted their party to resolutely oppose every dubious right-wing brainstorm of a dubious right-wing presidency...

...Conflicted though they be on some basic questions of policy, the Democrats understand that the United States cannot play the belligerent superpower in world affairs, and that the American people cannot be left to fend for themselves in an increasingly rapacious capitalist economy...

...Enough of it will, I believe, to tip the election in the Democrats' favor...

...On the home front, many Americans will also suspend judgment if economic growth is so brisk that the manifest lack of economic fairness pales to insignificance...

...But can John Kerry, whose campaign has not always been a thing of beauty, present himself as a credible alternative to Bush...

...From primary voters and the presidential primary field to congressional Democrats and presumptive nominee Kerry, Democrats have submerged very real differences to rally around a mildly populist economics, a relative fiscal discipline, and a cautious armed multilateralism...

...It is Bush, the onetime unilateralist who now implores the United Nations to take control of much of the transition, who has changed his position...

...In Bush's time, by contrast, Republican legislative leaders have tended to come from the South, bringing with them a bushel of Bible-Belt Babbitry...

...Not surprisingly, the Democratic Leadership Council had nothing 42 n DISSENT / Summer 2004 to offer Lieberman to boost his campaign...

...These were largely unions for whom organizing has become a lost art, breeding an insularity that makes political outreach difficult for them, too...

...40 n DISSENT / Summer 2004 higher education grows less affordable...

...But the crucial indices of growth tilt against Bush...

...his entire administration can be seen as a rejection of the fundamental directions, in foreign and social policy both, of his father...

...The Bush people would pounce on him as a flip-flopping peacenik, but by taking such a position, Kerry would inject a note of realA DEMOCRATIC YEAR...

...Mencken—racist, homophobic, xenophobic, fearing a Southern Protestant God and despising all others...

...Their base, to be sure, is not shattering: it remains foursquare behind George W. Bush...

...Fewer than four in ten Americans now give Bush passing marks on the economy, and his grades for Iraq are skidding to that level as well...

...Where the father showed some concern for mounting deficits and some distance from the Christian right, the son shows neither...

...His spring press conference, his Meet the Press appearance, his State of the Union address—none of these gave him the bounce one would expect a president to get from his major election-year announcements...

...A DEMOCRATIC YEAR...

...For all the hype that has accompanied the growth of the Bush campaign in Ohio, for instance, ACT has registered more new voters there than the Republicans...

...Just as Kerry would do well to find a way to keep his college affordability program afloat despite the pressures on him to reduce the deficit, he would also gain from setting a date certain by which he'd pull U.S...

...All put forth health insurance programs that covered at least 70 percent of the uninsured...

...And the one campaign where the Rosenthal show has been on display during this election cycle was that for embattled incumbent mayor John Street in Philadelphia last November...

...Will that future arrive this year...

...With their memberships in decline, moreover, the number of voters they could mobilize had been shrinking...

...The administration is run by stubborn men, but the facts they confront— many of which they themselves have created— are more stubborn yet...

...and that our Iraqi occupation will squelch terrorism and build a democratic model for the Middle East—that have landed him, and us, in the soup...

...During the primary season, for instance, Kerry proposed a massive increase in college grants and loans—something long overdue as the student bodies of American colleges have come to contain fewer and fewer students from working-class families...

...Indeed, there hasn't been so clear a case of Oedipal conflict shaping an administration since Jerry Brown's small-is-beautiful governorship repudiated Pat Brown's New Deal-Great Society liberalism...

...forces to Iraq...

...House Democrats had been impressed by Pelosi's decision not only to oppose Gephardt on the war but to entrust the drafting of her alternative resolution to South Carolina's John Spratt, a centrist with a long record of supporting the military...

...DISSENT / Summer 2004 • 43 A DEMOCRATIC YEAR...

...He is, in a sense, the tribune for the party's incoherence...

...In a sense, the internal debate that consumed the first months of Bill Clinton's presidency, between those who'd spend on job creation and those who argued that deficit reduction trumped more traditional Democratic programs, has already been played out inside the Kerry campaign months before he even officially becomes the nominee...

...Each was oddly content-free: it's clear the president has no one in his policy shop who's coming up with new ideas...

...Health coverage is being cut back almost everywhere...

...Faced with the Bush deficits, Kerry has opted to short-circuit some of his best programs...

...By the historic standard of Democrats, of course, the conservative dissenters are a decorous bunch...

...mental regulations, and his preference for fundamentalist religion over scientific models aren't his alone...

...At the same time, though, the voters also rejected the candidacy of Howard Dean, who'd been the first candidate to detect and then articulate the passionate opposition of hard-core Democrats to the war—opting instead for the candidate who most nearly fit the model of a fighting dove...

...THE PROBLEM for Bush is that most Americans don't want to be governed by the Rotary Club of Fort Worth, or the big boys over at Enron and Exxon whose water the Rotarians always carry...

...ism into a debate over Iraqi policy that, at the level of the presidential contenders, seems increasingly remote from the Iraq we see and read about in news accounts...

...More surprisingly (but it shouldn't have been), the old industrial unions (including the Teamsters) that campaigned for Gephardt were able to deliver just a smattering of votes...

...But Bush has made such a hash of Iraq that his polling even on combating terrorism has fallen precipitously...

...they typify the entire Republican deep-South leadership...

...all favored labor law reform that would enable workers to join unions without fear of firing...

...Demographics are on the Democrats' side...

...Confronted with the aftermath of Bush's idiosyncratically idiotic war, Kerry, and many within the party's foreign policy establishment, veer between recommendations for more troops and votes to cut off funding to the occupation...

...The quadrennial tug-of-war between the party's populist instincts and its more financially centrist impulses hasn't risen this year to the level of class war—which makes this year a departure from a thirty-five-year-old norm...

...It could hardly be otherwise: Bush's mind-boggling tax cuts threaten domestic programs now and social insurance tomorrow, at least if taxes aren't raised to keep social insurance solvent...

...For their part, primary voters flatly rejected the candidacies of Dick Gephardt and Joseph Lieberman—the presidential candidates who'd identified themselves with Bush and his war...

...Such is the magnitude of Bush's fiscal indifference, and such is the power of the financial industries, that Kerry has already announced he will opt for Bob-Rubinesque belt-tightening over some of his own most important and most electorally appealing programs...

...That's a discussion that Bush cannot possibly relish For now, both of Bush's mega-policy failures— his boundless tax cuts and his disastrous Iraq occupation—have confounded Democrats in general and Kerry in particular...

...By the same token, the reversion of at least half of Iraq to an Islamic-influenced domain where women must give up the gains they'd experienced under secularism is not a prospect that any Democrats welcome, either...

...Congressional Democrats chose as their new leader San Francisco's Nancy Pelosi, who led the fight for a substitute motion to Bush and Gephardt's resolution authorizing war at the president's discretion, a motion that did not give Bush a blank check to go to war...

...Even if the parallel is a bit strained, it does point up that the new 527s are doing the kind of work that political parties are supposed to do—and in most states, where party machinery has decayed virtually to naught, they are doing it better...

...Marc Gersh of the National Committee for an Effective Congress, for instance, estimates that Hispanic voting age population has increased by 31 percent in Florida since the 2000 vote—an increase that consists chiefly of non-Cuban Latinos from Mexico, Puerto Rico, and Central America...

...Pelosi would let Democrats be Democrats, but she would not let them marginalize themselves...

...HIS SON'S been made of sterner stuff...

...regressive state and local taxes are rising because the federal government has refused to help out states and localities...

...The candidates who most clearly represented the opposing sides in the party's civil war on trade—Gephardt and Lieberman—dropped from the pack early...

...When Ronald Reagan was in the White House, House Republicans were led by Illinois moderate Bob Michael, and their Senate counterparts first by moderate Howard Baker of Tennessee, then by paleo-con Bob Dole of Kansas...

...Contradiction and Consensus The Democrats, meanwhile, find themselves in a period of relative harmony—a development as bewildering for them as dissonance is for the Republicans...

...All warned against the specter of Wal-Mart...

...DISSENT / Summer 2004 n 4I A DEMOCRATIC YEAR...

...By election day, U.S...

...By crafting an affordabledrug bill designed chiefly to enrich drug companies, Bush has forfeited his chance to win a greater share of the senior vote...

...But if Kerry neither flips nor flops, his prudent, armed multilateralism is a complex position that mirrors the complexity of much of the party base, and that reflects the party's desire to win swing voters, too...

...forces may have burrowed into their compounds in Iraq and stopped going out at all, but in that case, Iraq's reconstruction will surely have ceased and its sectarian strife worsened...

...That the populism and the fiscal discipline at times negate each other suggests that this is not an entirely stable set of solutions, but Democrats plainly have no appetite to fight their longtime internecine battles so long as Bush is busy undoing the work of every single Democratic tendency...

...Tom DeLay, Trent Lott and Dick Armey are creatures out of H.L...

...From the columns of George Will to the comments of Senate Foreign Relations Committee chair Richard Lugar of Indiana, the discreet clamor of the paleo-cons, arguing that the administration has all but preordained our failure in Iraq, grows steadily louder...

...Worse yet, Bush's belligerent provincialism, hatred of unions and workplace and environDISSENT / Summer 2004 e 39 A DEMOCRATIC YEAR...

...A major terrorist attack in the United States would be a wild card, of course...

...Where Bush the father—a former U.S...

...And where the economic models for predicting presidential elections, calculated during the New Deal order in which prosperity was broadly shared, look increasingly obsolete...

...By crafting an immigration proposal designed chiefly to please America's low-wage employers, Bush has forfeited his chance to pull down a larger share of the fastest-growing slice of the American electorate, Latinos...

...Although it is true that the Bush campaign has deployed its ground campaign well in advance of Kerry's, it's also true that the Bush folks are still playing catch-up with the notwidelypublicized efforts of Rosenthal's legions...

...Shortly after she was elected leader, Pelosi appointed Spratt to the newly created position of alternative leader, and when voicing her increasingly fierce criticism of Bush's war and occupation, she characteristically appears alongside such longtime Democratic hawks as Pennsylvania's John Murtha, whose disdain for Bush complements hers...

...THE CANDIDATES Who fared best in the primary season, by contrast, both learned to talk populist—John Edwards far better than John Kerry, to be sure—while advertising life stories that won them broader appeal...

...Among them is the galloping growth of the Latino population in such key swing states as Florida, Arizona, Colorado, and Nevada...

...These are hardly stunning revelations, but they will likely return the Democrats to power...

...his consolation is that they're even bigger problems for Bush...

...The growth of social tolerance among young people—the only age group to support gay marriage is that of twenty-nine or younger—is a time bomb for the Old Testament Party that the GOP has become under its Southern leadership...

...In her campaign for Democratic leader, Pelosi also pledged that the Democrats would never again go into battle concealing their identities...

...Now, under pressure to demonstrate that he'll close the deficit, he has announced that this program will be deferred until the deficit is substantially reduced, which means, years after he would take office...

...Worse yet, Bush continues to reaffirm the two cock-eyed ideas—that tax cuts for the rich will kick-start the economy...

...HAROLD MEYERSON is editor at large of the American Prospect, a columnist for the Washington Post, and political editor of the L.A...

...Bush's failures, and those of the Republicanled Congress, to enact any legislation that addresses the nation's needs are the proximate cause for what I believe will be the coming Democratic victory, but there are more longrange reasons as well...

...It's hard to see how Bush will turn this around...

...An incumbent Republican president may be able to politically manage unfairly shared growth, but growth for the few and stagnation for the many is a record that would tax better pols than Bush and Rove...

...These are both real, if solvable, problems for Kerry...

...forces out of Iraq...

...And in her year-and-a-half as leader, Pelosi has toughened caucus discipline and produced the highest level of party unity on recorded votes since the 1960 session...

...Rosenthal's walkers return repeatedly to the same voters in the same households, talking issues and candidates—a kind of dialog that Rosenthal equates to the ongoing discussions that voters had with ward heelers in the heyday of the Democratic machines (minus the patronage...

...John Kerry was chosen precisely because he symbolized this double message...

...Longtime free traders, Kerry included, took care to note that they would support only those trade accords that established enforceable environmental standards and labor rights in the core agreements...

...With Bush's toughness no longer the virtue that offsets all flaws, disenthralled moderates are now free to contemplate and be sickened by the Republicans' lurch to the right...

...And the turn rightward is the essence of Bush's presidency, following as it does from the administration's central strategic premise: that Bush's father lost his second term because he estranged the Republican right, and that no one or nothing will ever be permitted to come between the younger Bush and the conservative movements...

...Even the most politically adept and burgeoning unions, however—the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME)—came up short when they campaigned for Howard Dean...

...The mobilization of the current wave of immigrant voters is transforming entire states, from California to Florida, just as the mobilization of immigrant voters transformed Pennsylvania from a Republican bastion to a Democratic stronghold during the 1930s...

...You betcha...

...There are certainly sub-groups and regions where the Republicans can run better this year than they did four years ago...

...In particular, the renewal of job creation has come too late in his term to boost wages before the November election...

...The greatest concentration of new Latino voters in Florida is in the Orlando area, where a massive voter registration, education, and mobilization campaign is being waged by America Coming Together (ACT), the so-called "527" independently funded and run campaign organization headed by former AFL-CIO political mastermind Steve Rosenthal...

...No wing of the labor movement excelled at candidate selection this year...

...All this, however, has made the Kerry campaign the occasional marvel of self-negation...

...In both instances, the polling makes clear that the public does not believe that Bush has a plan to make things right—an impression that only deepens every time Bush endeavors to explain himself...

...But by election day, Bush will still likely have presided over a net loss of jobs and a distinct period of economic anxiety for most Americans...

...The primary season also saw every Democratic presidential candidate but Lieberman campaigning as a recognizable Democrat...

...they may run stronger in the new exurbs, where suburban conservatism and rural conservatism reinforce each other...

...But their opposition to and criticism of the policy with which the president is most closely identified, this close to a general election, has scant precedent in Republican history...

...Democratic Demographics As spring turns to summer, this is looking more and more like a Democratic year...

...They are divided over what to do about Iraq, of course—with millions of Democrats conflicted in themselves over which of the miserable options that Bush has created is the least terrible...

...During the three-and-a-half years of the Bush presidency, wages have risen by 1.5 percent a year—the most meager increase since the end of World War II—while profits have surged by an annual 30 percent...

...This distaste is not decisive in itself...

...No one is calling for Bush to stand down or pull out as such, and Lugar, unlike J. William Fulbright, his Democratic predecessor as Foreign Relations chair during Vietnam, is unwilling to challenge a president from his party head-on...

...Thinking like Pelosi when she surrounds herself with Murtha and Spratt, primary voters chose a critic of Bush's war who nonetheless had unimpeachable military credentials...

...This, of course, misreads Poppy Bush's travails: it was the economy, not the right, that did him in...

...Trailing in early polling, Street benefited from this surge in voter registration and went on to win by a 59 percent to 41 percent margin...

...Many Americans will overlook it if they believe that the president is protecting their nation from terrorist threats...

...Republican attacks to the contrary, Kerry is no flip-flopper: His position on Iraq is the same as when he voted with caveats for the war resolution in the fall of 2002...

...In an election that will fundamentally be a referendum on Bush, the facts on the ground—our ground and Iraq's—are not likely to help him...

...But the same cannot be said of their superstructure...

...The erosion of support from Republican moderates, and some traditional conservatives, is one reason why a series of polls from midMay showed Bush's approval ratings down in the mid-40 percentiles—the lowest of his presidency, and a level that historically has spelled doom to an incumbent president's bid for a second term...

...They may boost their share of the Jewish vote as a consequence of Bush's obsequious embrace of Ariel Sharon...

...At this point, I expect John Kerry to be elected president and the Democrats to retake the Senate, with a shot even at recapturing the House...

...He proposed a voluntary national service program that would enable participating recent graduates to have their loans forgiven...

...Within the Republican Congress and commentariat a civil war has broken out between the neoconservative champions of the war in Iraq and a growing number of antineoconconservatives who are appalled at the administration's bungling of the occupation or who never believed in our capacity to remake the Middle East into a Westernized democracy— or both...

...So muddled were the class politics in this year's campaign that Kerry repeatedly beat Edwards among the downscale blue-collar voters at whom Edwards' message was aimed, while Edwards defeated Kerry among upscale independent voters and rural voters, too...

...IN THE WAKE of the Democratic debacle of the 2002 midterm elections—in which House Democratic leader Richard Gephardt and Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle declined to draw clear lines between their party and the president's—two distinct strata of Democrats shared a common revulsion...

...This was not the case during the presidency of our last rightwing president...

...Kerry's balance of differing and at times conflicting economic perspectives only sets the stage for his somewhat contradictory positions on Iraq...

...With American credibility in Iraq all but nonexistent, tens of millions of Democrats, we can infer from the polling, want the United States to leave...

...ambassador to both China and the United Nations—believed in diplomacy and multilateralism, Bush the son believes in force and unilateralism...

...But Karl Rove and the younger Bush see it differently: by agreeing to raise taxes and appoint the occasional social moderate to public office (David Souter, for instance), Poppy called down upon himself the twin catastrophes of Pat Buchanan's primary challenge and the GOP right's November indifference to his reelection...

...What's more, Kerry would compel Bush to state whether he favors an open-ended commitment of U.S...

...44 n DISSENT / Summer 2004...