Lovable liberals

National Review, May 25, 1992 by John Kurzweil

AT ONE POINT during her 1990 gubernatorial campaign, Dianne Feinstein disturbed the somnolence of a California Democratic Party convention by declaring that she supported the death penalty. Gasps, groans, catcalls greeted her declaration while TV cameras rolled-- all according to her plan. The former San Francisco mayor, now a candidate to replace John Seymour in the U.S. Senate, was not playing to the assembled party activists, most of whom rank capital punishment with Dark Age horrors. Rather, she was reaching over their heads to the TV news audience, 70 per cent of whom believed (and still believe) that first-degree murderers should be executed. Earlier this year, Congressman Mel Levine pulled a similar, if somewhat less show-stopping trick, by defending his support for Desert Storm. Representative Levine wants to replace retiring Senator Alan Cranston.

Besides offering a chance to play to popular sentiment, these were ploys to establish a distance from the party's more flamboyant radicals. But these deviations from the party line are noteworthy mainly as aberrations. This year's six Democratic candidates for California's two U.S. Senate seats spend most of their campaign time straining to outdo one another in proving lock-step fidelity to liberal orthodoxy. Mrs. Feinstein's rival for Seymour's seat, State Controller Gray Davis, is even attempting to prove himself "the best feminist in the race." This competition over which candidate is the "best" liberal can waft listeners to snoozeland, as everyone's rhetoric oozes warm-fuzzy commitment to big-spending social programs.

Some political handicappers--columnist Joe Scott, for one--believe the candidates' cordial agreement at April's state convention was orchestrated by party strategists anxious to enter the general-election campaign with a unified front.

Intellectual Vacuum

PERHAPS, but it's still hard to imagine Dianne Feinstein, Gray Davis, and Joseph Alioto (the third Democratic contender for Seymour's seat), or Mel Levine, Lieutenant Governor Leo McCarthy, and Representative Barbara Boxer (all candidates for the Cranston seat) calmly forfeiting an opportunity to beat up on their rivals--if they held any true disagreement about how the country ought to be governed.

The fact is, there is an intellectual inertia gripping the national and state Democratic parties. Fuming recently about the prospect of Bill Clinton as the Democratic presidential nominee, maverick political guru Pat Caddell told the Wall Street Journal that the Democrats "are a party of insiders. They are going the way of the Whigs. They stand for nothing."

Well, they don't quite stand for nothing. They stand mainly for an embattled political establishment that depends for its survival on maintaining the status quo; big government with perks to pass around to entrenched special interests. There is a " disconnect," Caddell says, between the "elite reality" and the "true reality" of the American people.

This "disconnect" is more than just a matter of officeholders forgetting their roots. There is a huge divide between the big-government, careerist liberalism of Democratic officholders and the political ideas and objectives of the voters. Ken Khachigian, manager of Republican Bruce Herschensohn's Senate campaign, says defeating Democrats in statewide general elections "depends on the extent to which you can corner [them]... Their trick is to vote left and talk right."

In the general election, that is. Playing before their home crowd during the primary campaign, the trick is to talk left, then shift gears for the general election--if possible. The difficulty of doing this is evident in the current conventional wisdom about Barbara Boxer. She is well placed, it is said, to win the primary against McCarthy and Levine, but she is the weakest potential candidate in the fall. She has the advantage of being a woman in a party with 750,000 more women than men. Also, unlike her male opponents, she has a talent for sharp invective and for firing up party regulars with her exuberance and self-confident partisanship. "I think our issues will be embraced by Orange County," she said recently, "if we are unapologetic about being Democrats, real Democrats."

That is precisely why Republicans like Khachigian want to run against her. "She's not only a certified lefting the status quo: big government with perks to pass around to entrenched special interests. There is a "disconnect," Caddell says, between the "elite reality" and the "true reality" of the American people.

This "disconnect" is more than just a matter of officeholders forgetting their roots. There is a huge divide between the big-government, careerist liberalism of Democratic officeholders and the political ideas and objectives winger," he said, "but a zealot about it. She loves to defend her weird positions .... She was in lock-step with [Representative Ron] Dellums to eliminate the entire structure of SDI .... [She's] not going to back off from leftwing positions, whereas McCarthy and Levine will move toward the middle as fast as they can."