The Unknown Candidate: Edsall's Tired Old Tirade

Friday, November 24, 2006

Edsall's Tired Old Tirade

According to Thomas Edsall in today's Times op ed, the only way "the Democratic Party can secure its 2006 gains" is by "abandoning a decades-long willingness to indulge pressure groups on the left."

Edsall parrots an old, hackneyed argument most often propagated by those on right. It is a view many in the Democratic leadership have come to erroneously believe.

I couldn't disagree more.

I would challenge Mr. Edsall to go see Emilio Estevez's "Bobby" this weekend. Perhaps it will help him recall what once made the Democratic party so appealing to so many -- and why many who once embraced the Democratic message of peace and hope and social reform now lack passion for the current 'Republican-lite' Democratic flock. Where are the messages of inspiration? Where are the messages of hope? Where are the ideas that bridge the divides rather than seek to create ever bigger canyons of division?

The way for the Democratic Party to succeed, is to stand strong for the kind of positive vision Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King offered.

The way for the Democratic Party to sustain itself is to set the record straight: War does not beget peace. Class divides will not be mended by trickle down tax breaks for the rich. Corruption and waste can be weeded out of government.

We need meaningful reforms -- the kind that Bobby Kennedy exemplified by his establishment of the Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation, during his years as a senator, "to improve living conditions and employment opportunities in depressed areas of Brooklyn". To this day, "the program remains a model for communities all across the nation."

We need leaders who seek to bridge the gaps between corporate America and the dispossessed, as RFK did when he encouraged private industry to locate in poverty stricken areas in order to create jobs for the jobless, empowering them to pull themselves out of poverty.

We need leaders that lead us to a better place, that urge us to be our best. What we don't need is more divisiveness, more catering to the lowest common denominator. What we don't need is more phony promises, more hypocrisy, more deceit.

Mr. Edsall's column is all too typical of the political poppycock offered by journalists today who continually harp about political parties and political strategies and bastardized political labels that only serve to obscure the real issues that Americans want to see addressed: affordable health care for all, quality education for all, an end to poverty, environmental reforms, alternative energy development, affordable quality childcare, election reform, responsible government, a peaceful world, and on and on.

Americans spoke in the last election -- and they would have spoken louder, it now seems, without the latest voting shenanigans. It's just that Mr. Edsall chooses not to look at the voting statistics which practically scream for a new, dare I say more liberal direction and real visionary leadership. That new direction is anything but the "centrist" AKA right-of-center mentality that Republicans and Democrats alike have been harping on for far too many years.

It's difficult enough these days to distinguish between the two parties. They both skew to the right. It seems Mr. Edsall and the political "establishment" would like to keep it that way.

The American people are way ahead of them.

Anyone out there considering a successful run for President in 2008 had best listen hard to what the people -- not the political operatives -- want.

Photo credit: Robert F. Kennedy Memorial (www.rfkmemorial.org)

The Struggle Within
By Thomas B. Edsall
The New York Times

Can the Democratic Party become fully competitive? Is American liberalism dead, the 2006 election a last twitch of life before rigor mortis sets in? The answer to both questions is yes. (More on this next week.)

For the Democratic Party to revive, major tenets of American liberalism, economic and sociocultural, will have to be discarded. The party can join Studebaker and the Glass Bottle Blowers union, it can trudge along as No. 2, or it can undergo a painful transformation — without guarantee of success.

To stay in the fight, Democratic leaders will have to acknowledge political realities affirmed by the electorate in 1994 and 2006. Many Democratic constituencies — organized labor, minority advocacy organizations, reproductive- and sexual-rights proponents — are reliving battles of a decade or more ago, not the more subtle disputes of today. Public sector unions, for example, at a time of wide distrust of government, are consistently pressing to enlarge the state. For these players, adapting to a re-emergent center will be costly.

Democrats won on Nov. 7 by carrying a 59 percent majority of independent, moderate voters angered by the Iraq war and Republican corruption. These voters demonstrated 12 years ago that they can easily turn against Democrats.

An example of the reality that Democrats refused to face the last time they had a shot at consolidating power materialized during the fight to pass Clinton’s 1994 Omnibus Crime Bill, legislation that sought to burnish the party’s justice credentials by increasing the number of felonies subject to the death penalty. Instead, amendments added to win support from the left — most visibly, $40 million for midnight basketball leagues — caught fire on conservative talk radio, spread to the establishment media, and soon became a liability.

When Democrats bend to the will of liberal interest groups, even in pursuit of laudable goals, the damage to the party’s credibility can be devastating. President Clinton succumbed to such pressure, and Democrats in the House and Senate paid the price. Democrats now have a chance to regain public trust, but even a minor miscalculation can push the party off the tightrope. Its House majority is tenuous: 17 of the new Democrats represent districts that voted for Bush in 2004 by at least 54 percent, according to the political scientist Gary Jacobson.

The public will desert Democrats placing a disputed cultural or spending agenda above the broader public interest. This is especially true at a time of extreme uncertainty: lethal struggle in the Mideast, nuclear proliferation, mounting skepticism toward free trade, and a rising non-marital birthrate — now at 37 percent — that concerns moderate voters.

The potential for an incendiary controversy to engulf the Democratic left has sharply escalated with Web access to each committee and floor vote under new Congressional transparency rules, and the development of aggressively partisan outlets in the blogosphere. An army of conservative media is determined to recreate the political climate so advantageous to the G.O.P. in 1994. At the same time, very liberal senior House Democrats now have vastly enhanced power to add inflammatory provisions to bills moving through their committees (think Rangel and the draft).

Nancy Pelosi and her closest advisers in the House are more likely to support such radioactive amendments than to serve as guard dogs protecting a slender Democratic majority. The first test of Pelosi’s ability to distinguish between broad-based and special interests will be when she decides whether to appoint Alcee Hastings, the once-impeached federal judge, to head the House Intelligence Committee.

Only two members of the House leadership are intuitively attuned to such problems: Rahm Emanuel, chairman of the Democratic caucus, and Steny Hoyer, the majority leader. But Emanuel has limited influence, and relations between Pelosi and Hoyer are distant at best.

Still, the vigilance of Hoyer and Emanuel will be crucial to a party whose renewal could easily be stillborn. Congressional leaders are not all-powerful, but they can set the stage for a successful presidential candidate, or lay waste to the center-left, dooming the nominee.

The Democratic Party can secure its 2006 gains, but to do so will require abandoning a decades-long willingness to indulge pressure groups on the left that no longer command broad popular allegiance.

Thomas B. Edsall holds the Pulitzer-Moore Chair at Columbia University. He is a guest columnist this month.

Photo Credit: Thomas Edsall. (Mt. Holyoke College/College Street Journal)