Homogenized Democrats
MARGOLIS, RICHARD J.
States of the Union HOMOGENIZED DEMOCRATS BY RICHARD J. MARGOLIS When John Anderson was still deciding whether or not to make a third-party run at the Presidency in 1980, he telephoned his father...
...So there we have it-the Democrats playing Seven Dwarfs to Reagan's Snow White (or, if Reagan fails to run, to George Bush's Prince Charming...
...they will not be expunged by free-market rhetoric or tax breaks for the rich...
...In the mid-'70s, when George Latimer first ran for mayor of St...
...Now, as we approach the abyss of yet another Presidential campaign, the Democrats seem no closer to self-discovery...
...George," he said, "start running to the right and never stop...
...Paul...
...For a party that had so obviously lost its way, the Democrats continued to enjoy a surprisingly large and faithful following...
...It also shed doubt on various commentators' claims that the two major political parties had declined to a point where they could no longer command mass loyalties...
...My advice to Mondale, therefore, is as follows: Walter, start running to the left and never stop...
...He was not referring to Edward M. Kennedy but to Theodore Roosevelt and his ill-fated Bull Moose apostasy...
...It is true that Reagan remains a slippery opponent and that few of his original ideas have survived long enough to serve as convenient targets...
...The personality he projects is as cold as a computer's, and his thinking processes appear equally binary...
...Indeed, in economic matters Reagan has become a President without a policy, which, considering his earlier initiatives, is probably just as well...
...If elected, he said, he would treat Israel "the same as other countries in the Mideast if I became convinced that Israel was blocking reasonable negotiations of a settlement...
...Only a return to humane politics can deliver us from evil...
...They still have ample time to forswear their neoliberal fantasies and substitute a scenario that makes sense to their natural constituency: the disillusioned, the disappointed and the disenfranchised...
...Bald and aging, he lacks Ronald Reagan's Hollywood buoyancy or Dwight D. Eisenhower's bumbling fatherliness...
...If Ronald Reagan is re-elected, a dismaying but not unlikely event, it will be largely because his poverty-stricken victims have failed to obtain a voice in either of the major parties and, for the most part, do not possess su fficient faith in the efficacy of politics to come out and vote...
...Mondale gave the progressive-minded candidate some characteristic advice...
...Thus it has come to pass that Ronald Reagan's neoconserv-atism is oddly paralleled by Walter Mondale's neoliberalism, and that George Bush's views on welfare and justice can be found to the left of those held by several of the Democratic candidates...
...Pundits have been lamenting the "Balkanization" of American politics...
...Each is reasonably bright and articulate...
...Racism, hunger, poverty, and joblessness have all made comebacks under Reagan's smiling tutelage...
...The Democrats, to be sure, are not licked yet...
...none, in my view, possesses the passion and eloquence to fire our hopes or inspire our trust...
...Voodoo economics, moreover, has become a bipartisan practice, as have voodoo ecology and voodoo defense...
...this means that many of the Great Society's reforms must once again be thought through and fought through...
...The 35.5 million votes cast for Jimmy Carter may have been far fewer than he needed, yet they were surely more than he merited...
...Now it is Ronald Reagan who can't balance the Federal budget, while Democrats like Hart and Hollings call loudly for fiscal prudence...
...Remember what happened to Teddy...
...The fear may be father to the thought...
...Don't do it," the elder Anderson cautioned...
...The Democrats will have to run on their record in 1984, but what, one wonders will they run against...
...Let me take them individually: John Glenn of Ohio is a Taft Democrat who has circled many a political issue as well as our planet...
...Gary Hart of Colorado, an Atari Democrat, seems bent on committing hari-kari...
...Reubin Askew of Florida and Ernest Hollings of South Carolina suffer from Carter's failures...
...He is the perfect metaphor for our high-tech era: a pioneer without imagination, a hero without panache...
...Among the sadder points to note about this fairy tale is that distinctions between the two casts, Republican and Democratic, grow murkier each day...
...In announcing his candidacy, he instantly lost the pro-Israel vote by calling for an "even-handed policy" in the Middle East...
...Democrats in Congress have been looking on with hardly a murmur as Interior Secretary James G. Watt forfeits our land and our resources...
...Alan Cranston of California is a decent liberal who, alas, seems incapable of catching the popular fancy...
...After all, Bush was one of only five Southern Congressmen who in 1968 voted for the Open Housing Bill...
...Anderson's poor showing-he collected just 7 per cent of the total vote, compared to Theodore Roosevelt's 27 per cent in 1912-fully confirmed his father's warning...
...Alan Cranston may be on the left and John Glenn may be on the right, but the ideological spectrum between them is exceedingly narrow and uninteresting, with Gary Hart and Walter Mondale occupying one end and Reubin Askew and Ernest Hollings the other...
...After starting his career on the peaks of Rocky Mountain populism, Hart has betrayed his legacy for the depths of Silicon Valley...
...You will probably be the Democratic standard-bearer in 1984, but you won't win unless voters get a chance to see you as you once were-a caring, bleeding-heart liberal generous in your formulations and brave in your acts...
...It is not that the seven Democratic candidates differ so sharply from one another...
...Equally moribund, it appears, are the Reagan-backed Constitutional amendment to prohibit Federal deficits and his dietetic promise to overhaul the Federal bureaucracy...
...Supply-side economics, a form of madness that only two years ago had everyone in Washington drawing Laffer curves, is today as dead as the gold standard...
...now it is the Democrats who demand reprisals against Russia for shooting down a Korean airliner, while Reagan and Bush risk charges of being soft on the Soviets...
...Unlike the wars in Central America, Reagan is winning his domestic war against the poor...
...Among the 48 per cent of eligible voters who did not register for the 1980 election, a majority were young or poor, or both...
...and they have gone along with Reagan's Pentagon spending binge, including a green light for the MX missile...
...Mondale has spent the subsequent decade heeding his own advice...
...McGovern is still saying "Come home, America," only now he means the Marines in Lebanon...
...At bottom, the Carter ballots seemed less an endorsement of his record than an expression of fealty to Democratic traditions...
...On the contrary, with the exception of George McGovern-who was never in step with party leaders, even when he headed the ticket-all the hopefuls appear to hold remarkably similar views...
...by that they apparently mean a prismatic shattering of the parties into dozens of single-issue components...
...The public has had enough, for a while, of Confederate leadership...
...Still, I would say he's probably the best of the bunch...
...What little substantively remains of Reagan's original notions is closely related to war-war on insurgents abroad who are thought to enjoy Soviet or Cuban support, and on poor people at home who are thought to enjoy no support whatsoever...
...Walter Mondale of Minnesota, the front-runner, has emerged as the candidate of the moderate Left, otherwise known as the AFL-CIO...
...George McGovern has taken up in 1983 where he left off in 1972-as the most inept Presidential campaigner in American history...
...Mondale's ideological timidity is based on his perception of America as growing ever more conservative...
...In any case, what we are actually getting is something worse, namely the homoge-nization of American politics, where policy differences tend to disappear and personality differences-I.e., media images-loom increasingly large...
...States of the Union HOMOGENIZED DEMOCRATS BY RICHARD J. MARGOLIS When John Anderson was still deciding whether or not to make a third-party run at the Presidency in 1980, he telephoned his father for advice...
Vol. 66 • October 1983 • No. 18
