Are the Democrats Going Nuts? An Inquiry
FERGUSON, ANDREW
Are The Democrats Going Nuts? An Inquiry By Andrew Ferguson Not since Mary Matalin's famous fax from Bush campaign headquarters in 1992- "Sniveling, Hypocritical Democrats," was the demure Miss...
...The activists were outraged at the GOP's plan to increase Medicare spending $1,900 per recipient over seven years...
...To Republicans who opposed the nomination of Henry Foster, Pat Schroeder advised: "Slow down...
...De Mille...
...One congressman said he had been attending a Lamaze class with his wife...
...And Schumer himself called Republicans "mealy-mouthed mollifiers of the militias...
...The toy hearing had all the trappings of the real thing...
...Breakdowns tend to strike, the textbooks note, "at times of transition or change, such as adolescence, middle age, entering or graduating from school"-or losing (to extend the list) the chairmanship of a powerful House committee...
...When the Third Reich metaphor seems temporarily exhausted, the Democrats have fallen back on more general imagery...
...Five Democrats (but no Republicans) gathered with him in the cavernous Ways and Means committee room...
...Hours later she issued a statement declaring herself "proud to have helped organize the protests...
...Lines of spectators-congressional staff and lobbyists, mostly-snaked out the door...
...Plus, Capt...
...Tone-deaf and tasteless, it is also a symptom, like the fabled Matalin memo, of something larger and even more entertaining...
...This may be the case with Sam Gibbons, for example, who is today the ranking minority member on Ways and Means, though he seems unaware of the "minority" aspect of his role...
...So in August he called a committee hearing anyway...
...Congressman Sydney Yates said he missed the vote because he was feeling "queasy...
...Congressmen who selected themselves as members of Schumer's nonsubcommittee contributed suitably incendiary statements during Schumer's make-believe hearing...
...An Inquiry By Andrew Ferguson Not since Mary Matalin's famous fax from Bush campaign headquarters in 1992- "Sniveling, Hypocritical Democrats," was the demure Miss Matalin's choice of headline-has a political press release seemed so disproportionate to its subject...
...It is sound today," announced Gibbons, "and we'll keep it fiscally sound...
...Other House Democrats have joined Gibbons in purring "Ready for my closeup, Mr...
...Like the faded silent-film queen Norma Desmond, alone in her mansion on Sunset Boulevard, Gibbons has dealt badly with the fact that he is no longer a star...
...David Broder and other establishmentarians cooed in admiration, but Clinton's fellow Democratic politicians may never forgive him...
...WARNER TO VOTERS: EAT THIS...
...C-SPAN broadcast the proceedings live...
...You all sit down and shut up," he explained, in a famous exchange with Republicans last March...
...Too true...
...They are coming for the sick, the elderly, and the disabled...
...Leon Panetta, discussing the Republican proposal to increase funding for the school lunch program by 4.8 percent, suggested an answer...
...The theme of the hearing heightened the air of unreality...
...They raised their fists...
...But not for long-he quit the hotel altogether rather than battle to be heard...
...It's catching...
...Lewis never responded to the offer, but in the end decided to show up anyway, with a four-bus caravan of union activists in train...
...Only five of nineteen leaders showed up for one recent strategy session...
...Dealing with it, of course, is the problem...
...At some point," Gingrich later said of Lewis, "he needs to realize he's a congressman...
...Pat Schroeder has learned the lesson as well...
...DIRTY ROTTEN STINKING . . . MEAT," wrote the DSCC flacks in bold letters...
...It's a quantum leap backward in social policy, and it will have long-lasting, explosive results," said Congressman Don Payne...
...Its hapless target: John Warner, the brick-jawed, silver-maned Republican senator from Virginia...
...At meetings of the Democratic House leadership, David Grann reported in The Hill, attendance routinely hovers around 25 percent...
...The occasion: Warner's vote against an amendment to the Regulatory Reform Bill regarding meat and poultry regulations...
...He commanded the room with a chairman's gravitas...
...Lewis's demonstrators marched onto the stage...
...But House Democrats in extremis have refused to settle for words alone...
...They're worse than Hitler...
...I will be as petulant as I want to be...
...They have shown themselves capable of action as well...
...It was an attack fax, launched in mid-July, from the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee...
...And then they left...
...Several events this summer, considered cumulatively and examined with the cold eye of the diagnostician, suggest that the Democratic party, the world's oldest and most honorable political institution, the party of Jefferson and . . . well, Jefferson, is cracking up-breaking down, wigging out, caving in, off to see the Wizard, bound for the nuthouse...
...When asked by Grann to comment on the performance of the Democratic leadership, Charlie Rangel replied, "Democratic what...
...A local radio host accused Schroeder of helping to organize the protest-a charge the congresswoman dismissed as "the silliest thing I've ever heard...
...In the cloakroom Democrats snap at one another...
...Four days after Lewis demonstrated in Atlanta, Gingrich held a book signing at Denver's Tattered Cover bookstore...
...Because what is lurking beneath the cellophane wrapped cut of meat or chicken could literally kill you and your children...
...Dethroned prematurely by the Republican Terror, Gibbons has been given to outbursts on the House floor...
...Vic Fazio...
...Alas, despite the protests, Gingrich's book signing proceeded undisturbed...
...Their signs, more inventive than those from Lewis's demonstrators, ranged from "Go Back to Hiding Under a Rock, Ya Lizard," to "Newt, What's Next...
...As a member of the minority, for example, he has lost the authority to call committee hearings, with which he could command the attention and obedience of junior colleagues, his staff, and the press...
...I don't want to deal with it," said Rep...
...All that was missing were the little men in white coats, for Schumer, like Gibbons, seemed unaware that he was no longer chairman of anything...
...The difference between House Democrats and Captain O'Grady," this House Democrat told the New York Times, "is that Captain O'Grady had allies...
...As an example of overcooked rhetoric, this is fine-Matalinesque, even...
...Or, in Pat Schroeder's alternative: "The first thing being thrown off the ship are women and children...
...Lewis does realize this, of course, but as his party collapses, the definition of what a congressman does, and can do, is being endlessly expanded, even to include the task of corralling mobs to shout down a colleague...
...This Republican proposal"-a welfare reform bill-"certainly is not the Holocaust," John Lewis reassured the House in March...
...All this bill does," said California's Pete Stark, referring to welfare reform, "is push poor people off a cliff...
...Gibbons called the hearing to order, administered the oath to panels of witnesses, and placed before him the official little blue light that glows whenever a witness jabbers overtime...
...John Lewis, for example, was asked by the Congressional Institute in early August to appear with Newt Gingrich and other Georgia congressmen at a Medicare forum in suburban Atlanta...
...The release went on to slam "E-Coli Republicans" for a vote that "literally threatens Americans lives...
...Indeed, her staffers had faxed announcements of Gingrich's appearance and even arranged "phone trees" to alert networks of activists...
...Next time you go to your local supermarket and stand at the meat counter, beware," the fax concluded...
...We don't believe in lynchings...
...Rep...
...Several more had left town...
...The Nazi trope has proved irresistible...
...The Medicare trust fund, Gibbons intended to prove, isn't going broke after all, and any intimations to the contrary-including those by the fund's Democratic trustees, who warn of bankruptcy in seven years-are scare tactics...
...Capitol Hill is no stranger to bizarre behavior, of course...
...The Matalin memo revealed a campaign without purpose or intellectual weight...
...Lewis and his friends popped up at the Stouffer Waverly Hotel in Cobb County just as the forum was getting underway...
...I think it sucks," said Congressman Fortney "Pete" Stark...
...Congressman Miller described the militias as "the Republican constituency...
...Nobody knew what was happening to the Jews," said Charlie Rangel, also of New York, "and today when you see what is happening-education being knocked first on the list, health care for the poor as being knocked, welfare checks taken away-it just seems to me that there is a similarity...
...We won't...
...These are people who are practicing genocide with a smile," said New York's Major Owens, of his Republican colleagues...
...The reason for the unexpected defeat was that eight Democrats failed to show up for the second roll call...
...In one noteworthy episode, the House Democrats and a rump group of Republican moderates were defeated on a vote they had won just three days before...
...We don't want to see that kind of goose-stepping over women's rights...
...Concentration Camps for the Poor...
...Charles Schumer, in happier times the chairman of a Judiciary subcommittee on crime, held his own pretend hearing in July...
...Then the congressman and his colleagues chanted: "Newt is scared...
...One of them has even compared their lot to that of Scott O'Grady, the American airman downed over Bosnia, who subsisted on bugs and the squeezings from his sweat socks...
...They are coming for the poor...
...Nervous breakdown" is not a medical term, and according to diagnostic textbooks it can denote any number of varied phenomena: delusions of grandeur, unexpected fits of temper and dyspepsia, a generalized disregard for conventional behavior...
...Sherrod Brown had the most succinct counterproposal of all: "Maybe we need to reopen Pennsylvania Avenue...
...Extravagance of speech, along with uncontrollable alliteration, is symptomatic of nervous collapse, and large numbers of Democrats have succumbed on and off the House floor...
...Ka-boom...
...As they stormed the hotel ballroom, they carried signs and shouted: "Where is Newt...
...Professional Democrats in Washington glumly admit to feeling queasy, dispirited, and so very alone...
...There is no way, at this point, for us to deal with it," said Congresswoman Louise Slaughter about Clinton's budget...
...Before long the excuses began floating in...
...But I am concerned...
...We want to show him that Coloradans are just as involved . . . and just as angry...
...O'Grady managed not to go insane...
...But even B-1 Bob might have found cause to cringe when George Miller, Democrat of California, announced after one Republican legislative triumph: "It is a glorious day-if you're a fascist...
...Hundreds of demonstrators gathered outside, shouting "Down with Newt...
...Another was home with a sick baby...
...For years the Florida Democrat labored thanklessly in the shadow of Dan Rostenkowski, whose demise in 1994 left Gibbons briefly at the wheel of Congress's most significant committee...
...One flyer distributed by her office implored Denver's activists to match the successful efforts of their Atlanta brethren: "On Monday, Gingrich was met with such ardent protest in his home state of Georgia that the event he was attending had to be canceled...
...The subject was the paramilitary groups terrorizing the American outback, and Schumer too deployed the trappings expected of a real hearing called by a real chairman: the little blue light, the panels of witnesses, the opening statements, the whirring cameras and obliging newsfolk, and the crowds of spectators...
...It "would really take food out of the mouths of millions of needy schoolchildren, toddlers, infants and mothers...
...1995 marks Robert Dornan's seventeenth year in Congress...
...In nervous breakdowns, there is anger, of course, but the shrinks speak of other symptoms, too: lassitude, a sense of disarray, a feeling of being tugged downward by forces beyond one's control...
...The DCSS memo is evidence of nervous collapse...
...Several newspapers-caught in a classic codependent relationship-solemnly reported the pretend chairman's vow, without pointing out that he is in no position to keep it...
...The loathing showed itself most clearly this June, when the President proposed a plan to balance the budget in ten years...
...He was even allowed to talk...
...Faced with the option of either criticizing Republicans or offering a constructive alternative to their plans, the President went constructive...
...As anger seizes the Democrats and clouds their judgment, as the cracks in the crack-up grow wider and deeper, only one other politician has emerged to rival Gingrich as an object of their loathing and revulsion: their leader, President Clinton...
...As it happened, Newt was in a back room...
...The real losers will be the elderly and the families that support them," said Majority Leader Dick Gephardt...
...He thinks we are like abused children who will come back and ask him to love us again," said George Miller...
...And what will Republicans do when they nab them...
Vol. 1 • September 1995 • No. 1
