The Party of Obstruction
BARNES, FRED
The Party of Obstruction Can the Democrats do to Bush in 2002 what the GOP did to Clinton in 1994? BY FRED BARNES JOHN BOLTON, President Bush's choice for undersecretary of state for arms control...
...Bush hasn't offered a Medicare reform plan yet, but he's indicated he favors free-market reform...
...His conservative views match Bush's own...
...Senator Joe Biden promised not to block Bolton, then flip-flopped and voted no...
...executive director of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee...
...In criticizing Bush on everything but the election, Democrats are almost as strident as McAuliffe...
...Democrats recognize they can't generate toward Bush the intense dislike that Republicans had for President Clinton...
...Last week, he said the Bush-backed budget that passed the Senate is "a nuclear bomb for fiscal discipline in this country...
...Democrats are vehemently against this, too...
...Bush tried to assuage Democrats by dropping 3 conservatives from his initial batch of 11 nominees and including 2 black Democrats, a Hispanic, and 3 women...
...In the past, Republican nominees were opposed only if they had scandal problems or could be characterized as extremists...
...Democrats concede they'd lost this issue after years of accusing Republicans of trying to cut benefits...
...He was confirmed without incident three times to second-echelon posts in the Reagan and Bush senior administrations...
...To go along with Bush's education bill, Democrats insisted on more spending and fewer reforms...
...President Bush tells us to get over it...
...Listen to Senator John Kerry on Meet the Press on May 6: "It would be dangerous for the world, dangerous for America, make us less secure, to unilaterally abrogate that treaty and simply move on to put out some uninterpretable defense system...
...It was designed to maintain a peaceful standoff between the large nuclear arsenals of the United States and the Soviet Union...
...One was John Breaux, who's met privately with Bush several times...
...When the pressure eased, he announced he'd remain a Democrat...
...We're better off fighting a guerrilla war and having no territory to defend...
...On Bush's proposed reform of Social Security, Daschle said a 35-year-old would be "guaranteed to lose 20 percent of your Social Security benefits by the time you retire...
...Crucial to the success of the Democratic strategy is lockstep unity...
...Congressional Democrats are not making the argument that Bush stole the 2000 election, but their national chairman, Terry McAuliffe, is...
...Lieberman, though friendly to Bush's faith-based initiative, has not returned to the moderate fold...
...And the goal is to capture the House and Senate in 2002, just as Republicans won Congress in 1994...
...Earlier, all seven voted against John Ashcroft for attorney general...
...Their scare tactics lacked credibility...
...He says this despite Bush's pledge not to cut any benefits...
...We need to learn the lessons of the Republicans," says Jim Jordan, the Fred Barnes is executive editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...BY FRED BARNES JOHN BOLTON, President Bush's choice for undersecretary of state for arms control and international security affairs, is hardly a political lightning rod...
...Now, the Soviet Union is defunct and other nations—including terrorist states that might not be deterred by the threat of retaliation— are seeking to develop nuclear weapons...
...Now comes the real test...
...Daschle labeled Bush's missile defense plan "the single dumbest thing I've heard so far from this administration...
...In short, if all goes well for Democrats, Social Security will play the role that the Clinton health care plan did in 1994...
...Will Democrats accept the entire diverse group, including the conservatives...
...Daschle, normally mild-mannered, has become a shrill attack dog...
...But at a minimum they want to prevent Bush from "changing the tone" in Washington in a way the public finds soothing...
...I think we're going to beat Bush to death with it...
...The Democratic strategy has five parts: relentlessly oppose Bush initiatives, put Bush on defense, offer a clear Democratic message, keep congressional Democrats united, and offer no Democratic alternatives to Bush programs...
...Still, the ABM treaty, which sharply limits deployment of antimissile systems, must be preserved, Democrats say...
...Thus, Democrats are under strong pressure not to defect...
...If even a few Democrats are peeled away to support Bush—as five were on last week's Senate budget vote—the strategy is doomed...
...Democrats have begun to sound like reactionary liberals, noisily opposed to virtually any change in existing programs...
...Miller and four other Democrats voted for the Bush budget...
...Being on the wrong side of the reform versus reaction fight could backfire politically, but Democrats are unconcerned...
...Senator Byron Dorgan said he'd never met Bolton but was passionately opposed nonetheless...
...Where unity appears most secure is among the seven Senate Democrats regarded as potential presidential contenders in 2004: Daschle, Kerry, Evan Bayh, Hillary Clinton, Chris Dodd, John Edwards, and Joe Lieber-man...
...Instead, Democrats want to create fierce conflict over big issues, especially over the biggest issue of all, Social Security...
...The pressure was so great on Zell Miller, the most pro-Bush Democrat in the Senate, that he threatened to switch parties...
...It was approved, he added, only through a "major degradation of the rule of law...
...When he outlined his economic views in a speech in March at George Washington University, he sounded like Teddy Kennedy...
...But Senate Democrats reacted differently to his nomination this time...
...only 50 Democrats in Congress showed up on April 30 for a first-100-days luncheon at the White House...
...The DNC has also broadcast a TV ad attacking Bush in which one child asks for more arsenic in her water and another requests salmonella on his cheeseburger...
...The aim is to replicate what Republicans did to the Clinton administration in 1993 and 1994 (or at least what Democrats think the GOP did...
...On education, it's the same...
...Senator Paul Wellstone said Bolton's presence "in the inner circle of the State Department" might "undercut" Secretary of State Colin Powell...
...But with Bush's plan to partially privatize Social Security, "the scare is back," a Democratic strategist says...
...Lieberman did vote to confirm John Bolton, however, as did Bayh...
...Republican senators say Breaux has been aggressively leaned on by Democratic leaders to cut his ties to Bush...
...Minority leader Tom Daschle was one of the first to vote against him on May 8, signaling the Democratic leadership's strong opposition...
...The political strategy they're pursuing suggests the answer is no...
...Senate Democrats have adopted a new standard for considering judicial selections...
...In the end, Bolton was confirmed, but 43 of the 50 Senate Democrats voted against him...
...Well, we're not going to get over it...
...It's worked for us all these years...
...It's guaranteed to work in the future...
...At a Democratic National Committee "hearing" in Riviera Beach, Florida, last week, McAuliffe declared: "We won that election, and they stole that election...
...He insists Bush was "selected, not elected...
...Their solution is simply to add more funding...
...Daschle's alternative: "Don't mess with Social Security, don't destroy it...
...But Democrats are so determined to prevent Bush from stocking the federal judiciary with conservatives that they now intend to oppose at least some Bush picks solely on ideological grounds...
...Bolton was the first target of the new Democratic strategy of near-total war against Bush, his policies, and his nominees...
...Democratic opposition to missile defense is based on adherence to the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty of 1972, though its architect, Henry Kissinger, has declared it obsolete...
...Bush's Social Security commission is the equivalent of appointing oil company executives to a commission on opening up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to energy exploration...
...They have stuck closely to the liberal, anti-Bush orthodoxy that is attractive to Democratic interest groups...
Vol. 6 • May 2001 • No. 34
