The Democrats' Abuse Excuse
EDITORIAL The Democrats' Abuse Excuse After an electoral loss, sour grapes is a normal response. Few politicians are big enough to man- age a nobler one. A political candidacy puts forward a set...
...Let's just pray—and I mean pray—that it doesn't get to that point...
...That is why politicians so often react to defeat with outright incomprehension...
...Daschle's disingenuousness and hypocrisy are startling...
...Said Fox News's Alan Colmes of his own talk-show work: "I give listeners enough credit to know that it's entertainment...
...This is a list of all of the things that Republicans stopped us from doing," Daschle began...
...If it were spontaneous, this would have happened when the arrival of the so-called threats occurred...
...a political defeat hands power to people who don't share the losing candidate's goals, and may not even understand them...
...That happens to be an accurate diagnosis of what happened on Election Day...
...Unfortunately, Daschle's remarks probably were spontaneous...
...This is not spontaneous today...
...Christopher Caldwell, for the Editors...
...Imagine voters so uppity that they "aren't satisfied just to listen," but actually participate and organize...
...Witness Republican bellyaching in recent years about how Democrats win by "scaring voters" about Medicare—as if the question of whether voters ought to be scared were immaterial...
...The most troubling aspect of Daschle's perfor-mance—and a plausible explanation for his party's recent electoral failures—was his refusal to acknowledge that Limbaugh's listeners' opinions had any possible validity...
...We were just talking with some experts a couple of days ago about how, if we're going to try to break through as Democrats, we have to have the same edge that Republicans do...
...But the charges Daschle flung indicate something more serious: an anti-democratic arrogance that looks increasingly like a bedrock principle of the Democratic party...
...Using in this instance the weasel-word "issues," rather than specifying any threats, enabled Daschle to level grave charges at Limbaugh on unknown evidence and then to assimilate Limbaugh's conduct to that of America's terrorist enemies...
...Al Gore's rampage through the legal system in hopes of overturning the election of 2000—as if his defeat were some kind of bureaucratic misunderstanding—was only a particularly dramatic product of the kind of incomprehension that is common among unlucky politicians of all parties...
...Certain liberal commentators swallowed this criticism whole...
...You know," Daschle mused, "we see it in foreign countries and we think, 'Well, my God, how can this religious fundamentalism become so violent?' Well, it's that same shrill rhetoric, it's that same shrill power that motivates...
...First, Limbaugh ranks rather low on the calumny scale compared with certain of Daschle's fellow Democrats...
...Prescription drug coverage, the education funding, appropriations for homeland defense, funding for election reform, the minimum wage, pension protection, farm disaster assistance, bankruptcy reform, the energy bill...
...Daschle claimed that Limbaugh had, willy-nilly, incited "threats" against him...
...His proof was that Lim-baugh had criticized what he took to be Daschle's partisan obstruction of popular legislation...
...They reflected an instinctual defense of the high and the mighty (whom Daschle referred to throughout as "those of us in public life") from oversight by the voting public, who are cast not just as irrelevant but as a menace to public order...
...And of course Daschle wasn't warning his fellow Democrats against indulging in hate speech...
...We cannot think of a Republican equivalent of Alec Baldwin's urging, at the height of the Lewinsky scandal, that impeachment manager Henry Hyde be stoned to death...
...Let me tell you what's going on here, folks," Limbaugh said...
...And I worry about where over the course of the next decade this is all going to go...
...Imagine the citizens of a democratic republic getting "emotionally invested" in the affairs of their country...
...What happens when Rush Limbaugh attacks those of us in public life," Daschle said, "is that people aren't satisfied just to listen, they want to act because they get emotionally invested...
...The Democrats struggled mightily to bully voters into an idea of what they were supposed to care about, barraging the newspapers and airwaves with polling "evidence" that various new federal benefits were a more fitting object of their attentions than mass murder in Manhattan and a potentially nuclear-armed Saddam Hussein...
...This is not spontaneous...
...A political candidacy puts forward a set of ideas about how a decent society ought to be run...
...But wartime elections like that of 2002 are not amenable to being won with a bag of oratorical and public-relations tricks...
...This is part of a well thought out strategy by the Democrats to counter the influence of this program...
...Such an election was never likely to play to the strengths of the Democratic Senate majority as it developed under the decidedly unlamented leadership of Tom Daschle...
...Gee whiz...
...The best evidence that Daschle was speaking off-the-cuff is that he closed his Limbaugh remarks by deploring the "emotional fervor that is sometimes not contained and therefore then leads to other actions that are outside the control of anybody in the media or anybody in politics...
...While casting Limbaugh's accusation of obstruction as a potentially violence-abetting sin, his own speech had as its leitmotif accusations of Republican obstruction...
...For Daschle, sauce for the goose doesn't belong anywhere near the gander...
...So obviously there was a lot of work left on the table, in large measure because the far right chose not to allow it to be enacted...
...Nor did Limbaugh himself seem to realize the gravity of Daschle's insult to his listeners, taking it as a mere partisan ploy...
...And that's happening in this country...
...What they were was "entertainment," and what made them so entertaining was that they were uttered by maleficent morons: "If entertainment becomes so much a part of politics," Daschle said, "and if that entertainment drives an emotional movement in this country among some people who don't know the difference between entertainment and politics, and who are then so energized to go out and hurt somebody, that troubles me about where politics in America is going...
...Kind of like pro wrestling...
...He led into his tirade about conservative talk radio by expressing his hopes that Democrats could learn to imitate it...
...It would be comforting to view the strange press conference held last Wednesday by outgoing Senate majority leader Tom Daschle—in which he blamed Rush Lim-baugh and other talk-show hosts for inciting hatred—as an instance of garden-variety sore-loserdom...
...When I was accused of being an obstructionist," Daschle said, "there was a corresponding, a very significant, increase in the number of issues that my family and I had to deal with...
...Nor can we recall any Republican commercial with nearly the potential to incite hatred as the Democratic ads run in the 2000 campaign cycle warning that black churches would burn if Republicans were elected...
Vol. 8 • December 2002 • No. 12
