The Democrats' dilemma - National Review's conference on role of conservatives in Democratic Party

National Review, Dec 17, 1990 by Richard Brookhiser

. Brookhiser's The Way of the WASP is due out this month from Free Press.

NATIONAL REVIEW'S conference on the topic "Do Conservatives Have a Role in the Democratic Party?" took place in the National Press Club in Washington on November 14. Given the timing-a week after the election, a month after the Bush/Darman budget deal-it would have been equally appropriate to ask, as Wick Allison noted in his introductory remarks, whether conservatives have a role in the Republican White House. But the questions are related: since conservatives and Democrats face a common problem of political exclusion these days, it is worth considering whether they might share political solutions. So NR brought together some pollsters, some pundits, and some pols to explore the question along with three of its own-John O'Sullivan, Bill McGurn, and myself-for kibitzing.

History, at least, suggests that the Democrats' options are open, for the party has been many things to its many members over the years. The famous Democratic convention of 1924 was torn between the forces of William Gibbs McAdoo, who was essentially the candidate of the Ku Klux Klan, and the forces of Al Smith, who ten years later became a spokesman for the Liberty League. Its compromise candidate, John W Davis, would find himself, thirty years later, arguing the states'-rights position on Brown v. Board of Education before the Supreme Court. In 1960, John F. Kennedy, running for President as a liberal, attacked his Republican predecessor for being weak on defense; once in office, he cut taxes. In the last decade, although the party itself remained resolutely liberal in the postMcGovern sense of the word, millions of registered Democrats crossed the line to vote for Ronald Reagan.

Any party that has changed so drastically in the past could, in theory, change again. Serious discussion of the possibility would have to focus on three questions: Who are the conservative Democrats? What are the potential conservative Democratic issues? Who are the possible conservative Democratic leaders?

Bill Hamilton, of the consulting firm Hamilton, Frederick and Schneiders, made the most comprehensive effort to pinpoint the Reagan Democrats. This group, he said, consisted of four types of people: fifty- to sixty-year-olds; urban Catholics; young men; and native Southern whites. The Democrats in these categories who had voted for Reagan make up perhaps 10 per cent of the electorate, or half of the national swing vote (the 20 per cent that hangs between each party's solid core of 40). He added, however, that the swing group is larger than these numbers suggest, for there are parallel clusters of voters in Republican ranks who respond to the same sorts of political appeals.

What Can They Say?

WHAT ISSUES appeal to these voters-issues the Democratic Party could advance? Several speakers-John O'Sullivan, Stan Greenberg (of the consulting firm Greenberg and Lake), and former New York mayor Ed Koch--stressed crime. Koch was especially upset about his party's failure to address the issue, and he addressed it with his customary panache. "The death penalty doesn't solve crimes, but it's moral. People are tired of being patsies in their apartments at night. They want the government to do something for them. Not us Democrats!"

William Lind, who came to the Free Congress Foundation from the staff of Gary Hart, where he had worked as a strategist for the military-reform movement, thought the party could make a broad tack to the right on values. He argued that there was a hunger in the nation, as yet unexploited by either party, for a return to traditional values, since the last few decades had demonstrated that untraditional values don't work. He predicted that the leadership of each party would resist such a move, though the country-club elite of the GOP, wedded to getting and spending, might be harder to buck. Lind's specific proposals ranged from a call for a war on bureaucracy in both government and business, to the suggestion that our anti-drug warriors contaminate the drug supply with unpleasant chemicals, such as emetics. Lind should expect some cavalry skirmishes with conservatives before he engages the

Stan Greenberg, whose firm advised Connecticut Senator Joseph Lieberman in his successful campaign to unseat Lowell Weicker, emphasized that Reagan Democrats were "not supply-siders" and "not pro-free-enterprise." They believe "money is real," and shouldn't be spent profligately. But they are anti-rich," anti-corporate," and "populist."

The journalist Charles Krauthammer denied that there was much in common between conservatives and Democrats, populist or not. Krauthammer wrote speeches for Vice President Mondale in the 1980 campaign, but he had left the party by the time Mondale ran for President, and he believes that the obsessions which pushed him away still maintain their grip. The Democrats, he said, were bound to become defeatist about the Gulf (though he acknowledged that isolationism had even deeper roots on the Right). At home, they were willing to "deconstruct the entire idea of American nationhood" by their support of multiculturalism in the schools. Such programs, if enacted, portend the Balkanization of American society.