The Life of the Party
CONTINETTI, MATTHEW
The Life of the Party It's not John Kerry. BY MATTHEW CONTINETTI DEMOCRATS ROCK! Can I lyou feel it?" hollers .A.__S Michigan senator Debbie Stabenow. It is sometime after 7:00 p.m. on March 25,...
...But, she said, "They also need good offense...
...on the other hand, those constituencies appear to be shrinking...
...And Jimmy Carter...
...And Joe Biden...
...I think the Democrats are united," says Dick Morris, a former Clinton adviser...
...And the unity dinner alone will rake in more than $11 million in one night—the largest Democratic fundraiser in history...
...It showed that when you ask Democrats whether they will definitely vote for John Kerry this fall, 80 percent say yes...
...Sharpton and Dean's fellow failed Democratic candidates— John Edwards, Joe Lieberman, Gen...
...What's more, McAuliffe told the crowd, the DNC is, for the first time in its history, free of debt...
...For a larger, expanding crowd is spiraling outwards from Clinton...
...The event was hyped for a reason...
...It's no exaggeration to say that the Democratic party now assembled behind John Kerry is more unified than it has been in almost 20 years...
...once the old Pension office, the National Building Museum is a massive, cavernous space that resembles nothing so much as a cross between Notre Dame cathedral and a Boeing air hangar...
...Terry McAuliffe, chairman of the Democratic National Committee and organizer of the event, is here...
...Second, the evening signaled Howard Dean's gradual transition from renegade presidential candidate to Democratic party insider...
...Another thing Kerry's campaign needs, judging from the reaction at the unity dinner, is Bill Clinton...
...certainly it's impressive...
...It's an astonishing sight, and brings home a simple truth...
...A potential problem for Democrats is that, however different the two may be ideologically, both Kucinich and Miller have constituencies...
...Yet, watching from the balcony, one notices that the Massachusetts senator is not the most popular man in the room...
...Sitting high above the crowd, one can identify the type of wine Hillary Clinton is drinking (red), count the number of Sikhs in attendance (one), and watch what Bill Clinton does while Al Gore is speaking (read over the remarks he Matthew Continetti is an editorial assistant at THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...It's almost a crankiness rather than an actual position," he says...
...Al Gore is here...
...Congressman Dennis Kucinich, after all, was purposely not invited to tonight's event, as he has refused to end his presidential campaign until at least the Democratic convention in July...
...They're 100 percent committed to driving their car off the cliff...
...Yet the only foreign leaders who had gone on record with their support were North Koreans and the anti-Semitic former prime minister of Malaysia...
...Kerry was lampooned for having claimed that more foreign leaders supported his presidential campaign than George Bush's...
...Its football-field-length interior and immense Corinthian columns (some of the tallest in the world) are awe-inspiring...
...He's interrupted by applause countless times...
...Clinton speaks the longest, of course...
...So do members of the press...
...But there were several others...
...The crux of his address is that Republicans are masters of manipulation: In order to win elections, he says, "they have to get people to stop thinking...
...Politically, it had not been a good week...
...So, on Thursday morning, Dean endorsed Kerry at an event at George Washington University...
...The third function of the unity dinner was to relaunch John Kerry's presidential campaign...
...There has been talk from the Kerry campaign of limiting McAuliffe's role in the coming months to fundraising, and naming someone else "general chairman" to act as Kerry's surrogate...
...On Thursday night, Kerry sits still most of the time, watching the various speeches attentively...
...And Nancy Pelosi...
...Again...
...It is how quickly the idea has traveled from opinion leaders to rank and file Democrats...
...The following day, David Yepsen, the Des Moines Register's veteran political reporter, announced that John Kerry's ascendancy during the primaries had "resulted in a unified Democratic party...
...Such early support hasn't always been the case...
...Democratic doyennes get on their feet and clap their hands...
...They are all here to celebrate "Democrats United 2004," the centerpiece of McAuliffe's "Democratic Unity Day," a series of events meant to showcase the party's determination to defeat George W. Bush in November...
...Kerry's other misstep was to point out that he "actually did vote for the $87 billion" appropriation for reconstruction in Afghanistan and Iraq last fall "before I voted against it...
...Terry McAuliffe's stewardship of the Democratic party...
...Isn't this just wonderful to see everyone coming together...
...It is over 100 years old...
...It's a tough speech, meant to fill what has been seen as a hole in the Kerry campaign...
...First, the dinner helped glorify The evening signaled Howard Dean's gradual transition from renegade presidential candidate to Democratic party insider...
...Polling evidence confirms this...
...When his turn comes, he is gracious to his former opponents and vociferous in his criticism of Bush, who has, he says, spoiled the American economy and made Americans less safe than they were in the 1990s...
...There are over 1,500 people in all...
...The day began early Thursday afternoon, when McAuliffe and Daschle led reporters around the party's newly refurbished headquarters on Capitol Hill...
...It will be his inability to capture the undecided...
...It's not hard to see this because of what happens after the speeches have concluded...
...The Democrats' electoral record on his watch hasn't helped...
...Last fall, Dean labeled Washington politicians, Democrats included, "cockroaches...
...Now he finds himself cast as Kafka's Gregor Samsa, transformed into a cockroach overnight...
...Ruy Teixeira, a fellow at the liberal Center for American Progress and the coauthor, with John Judis, of The Emerging Democratic Majority, says that possibly the most significant division within the party is between Dean supporters and the establishment: "There's this sense in the party that you want Dean to help mobilize those people he energized in the primaries and keep them in the party and, of course, outflank Ralph Nader...
...Also, Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry is here...
...And when Time magazine and the Yankelovich polling firm asked a similar question in the spring of 1988, 76 percent of registered Democrats said they would definitely vote for Michael Dukakis...
...He's come back tanned and relaxed...
...The party is courting him and his supporters, afraid they will abandon Kerry in November...
...The man Gore endorsed for the presidency in December, Howard Dean, is here...
...The candidate needed a break...
...Stabenow takes a deep breath...
...But it is still Bill Clinton's party...
...on March 25, and Stabenow is onstage at the National Building Museum in downtown Washington, D.C., addressing countless tables of Democratic donors and politicians, who are half-listening to her as they drink wine, sip iced tea, and eat catered barbecue...
...Fleetwood Mac's "Don't Stop" blares from the speakers...
...Last fall, Dean labeled Washington politicians, Democrats included, "cockroaches...
...And Zell Miller, Georgia's conservative Democratic senator, is also conspicuously absent, having announced on Wednesday his leadership of "Democrats for Bush...
...Members of Kerry's staff were dispatched to distance their candidate from these endorsements...
...Spotlighting party unity was one purpose of the "Democrats United" dinner...
...Consider the week of March 6. on that day, Wall Street Journal columnist Al Hunt said this is "the most unified Democratic party since 1964...
...himself is about to deliver...
...But the bird's-eye view has its advantages...
...When the former president is introduced, the scene turns into a rock concert...
...He is being mobbed, almost clawed at, by people asking for photographs and signatures and hugs...
...Morris's concern is that Democrats are unified not so much by a strong leader or a powerful message as by a visceral hatred of George W. Bush...
...In mid-March, a CBS/New York Times poll gauged support for each party's presidential candidate among registered Republicans and Democrats...
...It's not hard to see that the people assembled in the National Building Museum would give anything to have the man run for president...
...And three days later, when the Los Angeles Times interviewed Barb Marsh for a "man on the street" interview, Marsh said, "Democrats are closer and more unified than we've been in a long time...
...These include the new, "high tech" headquarters, a small-donor base of 2 million people, and a voter file with 160 million names...
...When they are not applauding Clinton, the crowd sits in rapt attention, mesmerized...
...And it will end sometime Friday morning, when "Something New Part II," the after-party, concludes, and the last young Democrat stumbles out of Dream nightclub in Northeast D.C., having consumed one "Donketini" too many...
...In late March 1992, CBS and the Times asked registered Democrats whether they would definitely vote for Bill Clinton, the likely nominee, that November...
...If Morris is right, Kerry's problem won't be dissension from within his own party...
...Since the Clintons installed him as party chair in 2001, McAuliffe has come under criticism from people inside and outside the DNC...
...But there wasn't any such talk at the unity dinner...
...And Bush hatred, Morris argues, won't appeal to swing voters in a presidential election...
...As Dee Dee Myers, President Clinton's former press secretary, told me, Kerry's camp has proven he can play good defense...
...A gaggle of donors surrounds John Kerry...
...From the print media's perch on the museum's balcony, some 50 feet above and at least 100 feet away from the stage, it is hard to make out the details of Stabenow's face...
...As is Al Sharpton, who must have assumed (incorrectly) that the event was black tie, because he is dressed like the waiters...
...Kerry had spent the previous week in Ketchum, Idaho, snowboarding and reading Gabriel Garria Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, oprah's current book club selection...
...It's a question worth asking...
...Only 66 percent said yes...
...Yet how unified are the Democrats...
...What is most interesting about the idea of Democratic "unity" isn't that it exists...
...McAuliffe had the dubious honor of chairing the party through the disastrous 2002 midterm elections, as well as the 2003 California recall vote...
...McAuliffe has taken the party from $18 million in the red to $25 million in the black...
...Instead, there was a lot of praise for McAuliffe's accomplishments...
...And they're real good at that...
...Wesley Clark, Dick Gephardt, and Bob Graham—are here too...
...More important, the museum is vast enough to hold all the egos gathered here tonight...
...And Ted Kennedy...
...Screams and catcalls sound from the rafters...
...John Kerry may be the Democratic nominee...
...As is Tom Daschle...
...While true (Kerry voted for a resolution he cosponsored with Joe Biden that would have paid for the appropriation by rolling back a portion of the Bush tax cuts), the utterance only helped the Bush campaign's effort to label Kerry a political opportunist...
Vol. 9 • April 2004 • No. 29
