The Pelosi Democrats
BROOKS, DAVID
The Pelosi Democrats Are they going to become the stupid party? BY DAVID BROOKS ARE THE DEMOCRATS about to go insane? Are they about to decide that the reason they lost the 2002 election is that...
...They didn't oppose regime change in Iraq...
...They thought it was time to crush the centrists and utter the truth, damn the consequences...
...Wasn't his crushing defeat the prelude to victories...
...Times will be hard, he warned...
...Finally, remember that over the next two years, the congressional Democrats are going to be overshadowed by the Democratic presidential aspirants...
...Are they about to decide that the reason they lost the 2002 election is that they didn't say what they really believe...
...So long as voters don't trust Democrats to be tough on terrorism, it doesn't matter what the party says on anything else...
...There was self-pity: The Republicans just have so much money, they bought the election...
...Those guys should be glad the Left is no longer in its guillotine phase...
...This is so patently obvious that surely some Democrats will come up with an ostentatiously hawkish homeland security agenda over the next few months...
...It's also quite possible there will be a fight over a Supreme Court nomination, which is sure to bring out the lefties in all their glory...
...Which is not to say the Democrats will always be able to control their message...
...The odds are that the Democrats will not jump off a cliff from here...
...Instead, the first thing the party has to do is get some credibility on national defense...
...None of them save Gore is foolish enough to challenge the Bush tax cuts...
...Black and Hispanic voters would have turned out en masse and compensated for the Republican advantage in the outer suburbs...
...But the truth is that while Democrats are stupid, they are not that stupid...
...But someday the middle classes will emerge from their false consciousness and vote for the one true church and its guiding angel, Al Gore...
...But the headline Democrats will be John Edwards, Joe Lieberman, Dick Gephardt, Al Gore, John Kerry, and the rest of the presi-dentials...
...The Democratic triangula-tors lost because they had no alternatives to Republican policies...
...Pit tax cut against tax cut, just as Republicans pit one prescription drug plan against another...
...other liberals were less interested in a political strategy...
...children will be denied porridge in their orphanages...
...Paul Krug-man, who helpfully headlined his column "Into the Wilderness," announced that the Democrats must declare class war on the plutocracy...
...If you listen to intelligent members of the Democratic political class, you learn that the party hasn't totally lost its head...
...If they had done so, they would have mobilized their base...
...The Democrats, Harold Meyerson declared in the American Prospect online, "had no message...
...emerging...
...They were an opposition party that drew no lines of opposition...
...Moreover, just as a matter of body mass, there are not that many Democratic centrists left to counter liberal urges when the fever strikes...
...If you troll through the liberal commentariat and among the liberal political class, you find a pretty coherent story line David Brooks is a senior editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...They had nothing to say...
...Are they about to go off on a jag that will ensure them permanent minority status in every state from North carolina to Arizona...
...At this point many Democrats eagerly mention Barry Goldwater...
...They didn't oppose the Bush tax cut...
...Much as conservatives, and liberal purists, might want them to...
...If you look at the Democrats' reaction to their debacle last Tuesday you can be forgiven for thinking so...
...Then, the smarter Democrats say, you can't fight the tax cut...
...If you look at their early presidential campaign speeches, you find a lot of bold energy plans, some outflanking of Bush on the right when it comes to nation-building in the Middle East, and a lot of cultural conservativesounding talk about individual responsibility...
...Ted Kennedy can go popping off as hysterically as he wants and there will be no real way to stop him...
...populist intra-party fights...
...Well, Republicans can only hope...
...The better strategy is to counter the Bush tax cut with an equally large Democratic tax cut, which might lean more heavily on payroll taxes...
...This is not loony stuff...
...This is an attempt to be Tony Blair, Yankee style...
...Are they about to go into Paul Krug-man-land, lambasting tax cuts, savaging Bush as a tool of the corporate bosses...
...A party in opposition is an unrestrained party...
...The corporate criminals in the White House will rape and pillage...
...The smarter liberals say the last thing the party needs is another one of those DLC vs...
...The Democrats went through all the stages of grief simultaneously...
...And on Tuesday, their base responded by staying home in droves...
...All of them save Gore supported Bush on the war...
...Nancy Pelosi, the presumptive House minority leader, may be the most caricaturable politician since Newt Gingrich—it will be easy to paint her as a San Francisco Democrat, especially if she makes a gaffe or two...
...Then there was resolve...
...Still, this is a party that, even in defeat—even after a period of months in which Democrats revealed themselves to be fundamentally unserious on the great issue of the day—wins 47 percent of the vote...
...There was rage...
...Boy was there rage...
...There was denial: If only a few thousand votes had changed in a few key precincts, we would have kept the senate...
...And this time it was directed at the Democrats themselves, a furious barrage of hatred aimed at Daschle, Gephardt, McAuliffe, et al...
Vol. 8 • November 2002 • No. 10
