Advantage on the Right

...Typical was the attitude of Representative Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri, who said in 1977: "You know, there is nothing the leadership can offer me, really nothing...

...It will be able to spend the Federally prescribed limit on Ronald Reagan's campaign and have enough left over for research, polling, voter registration, get-out-the-vote drives, TV ads for the party, and anything else that its well-paid political operatives can think of...

...The working class and the poor do not have identical interests...

...Reaganomics can be expected to yield to discussions on how to control credit and funnel investment into areas where it is really needed...

...In coming years they may help to shape the party's positions on social issues—women's rights, gay rights, abortion, school prayer—and perhaps on foreign policy...

...Whereas unions outspent their pac rivals $8.5 million to $8 million in 1972, a decade later the business and trade groups were more than doubling labor's outlays, $84.9 million to $35 million...

...Instead, the Democrats need a program that deals directly with the overall troubles of the American economy, which is why the ongoing debates about industrial policy within the party remain so important...

...At the same time, he declares, the party is not prepared to do so, in large part because of the middle-class reformers' continuing influence...

...But surely this gives the group more ideological coherence than it actually has...

...Contributing to these woes are economic shifts that have spawned unorganized, often fiercely antiunion companies in the South and West...

...By 1982, the GOP enjoyed a 5:l financial advantage...

...The second misconception is that direct contributions to congressional candidates (rather than to parties) more or less balance out, and therefore make little actual difference during elections...

...Millions of customers received antiwithholding propaganda with their monthly statements, and by the time the campaign was over, Washington was digging itself out of a mountain of angry letters from misinformed constituents...

...The Republican National Committee, meanwhile, had a bank account of$10.4 million and was continuing to collect over $4 million a month...

...This will not be accomplished by preaching "compassion," as was done by many speakers at last month's Democratic convention, most notably New York's Governor Mario Cuomo, for compassion will be understood simply as a giveaway extracted from the hides of average workers...

...Underlying his argument is a key fact: Over the past few decades, the class divisions between the two parties have grown, with the Democrats coming increasingly to represent lower-income groups...

...Their allegiance was to the suburbs, not to the working class...

...The New Politics of Inequality should not, however, be taken as a prediction of the future...

...What, after all, do the Yuppies really want...

...Labor law violations went up...

...Writers & Writing ADVANTAGE ON THE RIGHT by barry gewen Thomas Byrne Edsall, a journalist with the Washington Post, has written a small volume that shines a large light on the political history of the last 10-15 years...

...The wise pac hedges its bets...

...Contacts to the larger public are maintained through advertising and direct mail...

...As business was revving up in the '70s, labor seemed to be winding down...

...Atlantic Richfield, for example, runs a political program for 15,000 of its workers...

...Union busters were bustin' out all over...

...In The New Politics of Inequality (Norton, 287 pp., $ 15.95), he traces the circumstances that enabled the nation's well-heeled 61ite to rise from Watergate's ashes to a position of policy.-making dominance in Washington, much to its own plushy advantage and to the misfortune of the rest of us...

...outmanned, outfinanced and, until recently, outsmarted, it has a lot of ground to make up...

...Edsall points up the "two-tiered structure of social programs," the first tier composed of New Deal legislation like Social Security, intended to reach a broad base of Americans, the second of Great Society reforms like food stamps, directed toward a narrower, more marginal segment...

...simultaneously, traditional manufacturing jobs went to low-wage countries overseas...

...A much greater problem for the Democrats, one that Edsall repeatedly touches on without really addressing, derives from the division within the core constituency...

...Here he discovers a decidedly GOP tilt...

...Only 3.8 per cent of all Americans donate to a party, and the overwhelming majority of them come from the highest income brackets...

...Edsall does not mention it, but the banking industry's recent successful drive to persuade Congress to repeal the withholding tax on interest and dividends is a perfect instance of the new business activism...

...The '70s witnessed an explosion of corporate and trade association political action committees (pacs), from 407 in 1974 to 2,095 in 1982...

...Money isn't everything, even in politics, and in complementary chapters Edsall traces two other major components of the conservative wave, the resurgence of the corporate community and the decline of labor...

...In his most revealing chapter Edsall details the forces that he believes have crippled the nation's majority party...

...As a description of our immediate past, all of this is persuasive...

...One might begin with the money...

...Decertification elections went up...

...In addition, Watergate brought to Washington a group of young congressmen suspicious of the party's elders and of their traditional concerns...

...The virtue of Edsall's book is that it brings together many scattered bits and pieces of information, forming a coherent and ultimately convincing picture of the American Right's electoral coup d'etat...

...During the mid-'70s, business took a surprisingly "populist" turn, reaching out for grassroots constituencies to support its legislative goals...

...As recently as June of this year, the Wall Street Journal reports, the Democratic National Committee was in the red, with less than $500,000 on hand, not enough to cover two weeks' expenses...

...Edsall believes, rightly I would say, that the Democrats must refocus their appeal to their core constituents, workers and the poor, if they are to reassert their strength...

...Part of its problem was an antiunion assert-iveness that had not been seen for a generation, spurred on by the reactionary Sunbelt industries, but joined—and this caught the AFL-CIO completely off guard—by the older organized sectors...

...Although it is true that Democrats and Republicans alike raised an average of approximately $335,000 for their 1982 campaigns, Edsall shows that much of the Democratic support seems to have been "insurance," going to entrenched incumbents to grease the hinges of their office doors for those occasions when a lobbyist needs a friendly ear...

...Edsall skillfully dispatches two common myths about this cash flood...

...Edsall shows, though, that individuals who contribute—in whatever amount—constitute a highly select and affluent group...

...Today, the Republicans, the party of the rich, are very rich, and the Democrats, the party of the poor, are church mice...

...The McGovern Commission recommendations, intended to widen party participation through an expansion of primary elections, had the perverse effect of giving greater weight to the middle-class reformers who were statistically more likely to turn out for primaries...

...Among the first to be mobilized for letter-writing and lobbying efforts were stockholders and employees...

...The history of the Democratic Party during this period, Edsall contends, was the history of stalemate, enabling an energized, unified, militant, and monied Republican Party to seize control...

...This munificence has produced one of the major warps in our governmental process...

...In the '80s, labor began to react to business' offensive...

...If not this year, then next, the country should be ready to acknowledge that enriching the rich is not the way to achieve general prosperity...

...I don't think even Gary Hart knows for sure...

...In reality, the politics of the last 10 years awarded disproportionate power to a white upper-middle-class elite whose "good government" agenda had little in common with the desires of the Democrats' natural constituency...

...Soon radicals may not be the only ones insisting that the use of money is too important to be left to the whims of the marketplace or the schemes of bankers—and at that point the Democrats could genuinely emerge as the party of new ideas...

...In a time of economic insecurity, the beneficiaries of the first are less willing, indeed unwilling, to support the second, and it must be the job of the Democrats to unite the fretting employed with the despairing unemployed around a common agenda...

...In theory, this should have enabled the Democrats to expand their base...

...A fairer test of the money's impact, he suggests, is the funding of political challengers, who, lacking the office holders' leverage, have a more programmatic or ideological appeal...

...Republicans like to broadcast the fact that the average contribution to their party is $25, conveying the impression that the GOP is being kept afloat by those little old ladies in tennis shoes...

...Ample war chests make it easier for Republican newcomers to take on Democratic incumbents, especially in marginal districts...

...Insofar as money talks, it is the wealthy who are doing the conversing...

...A political turning point of sorts was reached in 1978, when the labor movement failed to win passage of a keenly desired labor law reform bill to combat employers' quasi-legal manipulations...

...Portions of this sad tale of Reaganomics triumphant are as familiar as crabgrass...

...This imbalance does not have an immediate result— during the depths of the 1982 recession, the Democratic challengers, despite their lesser resources, gained 26 seats—but, like Chinese water torture, is certain to produce an effect over time...

...On the economic issues that will make or break the Democrats in the future, they are, and are likely to remain, a blur...

...Whatever hesitations the investing classes may have had about employing their capital to resuscitate our anemic economy, they showed no such reluctance to pour millions into the political system so that they might be rewarded for failing to put their wealth to genuinely productive use...

...The first concerns the people who give...