Not as lame as you think: Democrats learn the art of opposition

Washington Monthly, May, 2006 by Amy Sullivan

The first week of March should have been a bright spot for Democrats in an otherwise bleak five years. With the president's approval numbers reaching Nixon-esque lows, and Democrats outpolling Republicans by 15 points--the party's largest lead in a midterm election since 1982--it was beginning to look like the long-suffering Democrats had rediscovered their mojo.

But you wouldn't know it if you picked up a newspaper that week. "For Democrats, Many Verses, but No Chorus," declared the headline on The New York Times' front page on Monday. Reporting that "Democratic candidates for Congress are reading from a stack of different scripts these days," political writer Adam Nagourney described targeted local campaign strategies as "scattershot messages" that "reflect splits within the party." The next day, The Washington Post featured a story that declared, "Democrats Struggle to Seize Opportunity," and questioned whether congressional Democrats could regain power without "the hard-charging, charismatic figurehead that Gingrich represented for the House GOP in 1994." Picking up that theme on Wednesday, Slate's Jacob Weisberg lambasted Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), Harry Reid (D-Nev.), and Howard Dean, calling them "The Three Stooges" and indicting them as "useless and disastrous." And as if on cue, the Republican National Committee released a web video on Friday titled "Find the Democratic Leader."

Democrats are lame, feckless, timid, and hopelessly divided, with no ideas, no vision, no message, and no future: You'll never fall flat at a Washington party by repeating this bit of conventional wisdom because everyone "knows" it to be true. Jon Stewart compares congressional Democrats to the fuzzy-but-not-fearsome Ewoks. The Onion gets an easy laugh from a parody headlined "Democrats Vow Not to Give Up Hopelessness."

Of course, we chuckle because the jokes contain an element of truth. On some of the defining issues of the day, Democrats are indeed conflicted and divided. Most Americans and virtually the entire Democratic base wants universal health care, and yet congressional Democrats compete to offer marginal changes to the system. On a key economic issue like bankruptcy, too many Democrats sell out to lobbying interests, making it hard for the party as a whole to attack Republicans over it. Iraq has dominated the political scene for nearly four years, but Democrats couldn't agree whether to get into it, and now they can't agree on how to get out.

It's understandable that pundits take one look at congressional Democrats today and declare them to be a far cry from the mighty mighty Gingrich revolutionaries of 1994. The implosion of the Bush administration and congressional Republicans has led to speculation not about whether Democrats could regain power but about how they will muff up the opportunity. Turn on a television these days, and you won't have to count to 10 before you hear, "Where is the Democrats' Newt?" or "Why don't Democrats have a Contract with America?"

But the truth is that Newt Gingrich and his Contract loom so large--and today's DC Democrats seem so small--largely because of the magic of hindsight. Back in 1994, Republicans were at least as divided as Democrats are now, if not more so. Traditional statesmen like Robert Michel, Howard Baker, and Robert Dole were constantly at loggerheads with the conservative bomb-throwers like Gingrich, Bob Walker, and Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Texas). As for unity of message, the now=revered Contract with America didn't make its debut until just six weeks before the election; Democratic pollster Mark Mellman recently pointed out that one week before Election Day, 71 percent of Americans said they hadn't heard anything about it. And while political journalists rushed to hail Gingrich's genius after the election, before November they were more likely to describe Republicans in terms we associate with Democrats today. "Republicans have taken to personal attacks on President Clinton because they have no ideas of their own to run on," wrote Charles Krauthammer in the summer of 1994, while a George F. Will column in the fall ran under the headline, "Timid GOP Not Ready for Prime Time."

What the GOP did so brilliantly in 1994 was exploit Clinton's weaknesses (his 1993 tax increase, his wife's failed health-care initiative), as well as the sense among voters that reigning congressional Democrats had become complacent and corrupt (reviving the Keating Five and House banking scandals). Well, guess what? This is precisely what congressional Democrats have been getting better at doing over the past 18 months. And just as most observers missed the coming Republican revolution in 1994, so they're missing a similar insurgency today.

Rolling grenades

On virtually all of the major slips this White House has made in the past year, there have been unnoticed Democrats putting down the banana peels. One of the best examples--and certainly the issue that sent Bush's poll numbers southward--was the Dubai port deal. The little-noticed administration decision to contract with a United Arab Emirate-owned company to run terminals at six ports around the United States mushroomed into a public relations disaster for which the Bush administration was uncharacteristically unprepared. Within a week of the story breaking, congressional Republicans had vowed to pass legislation undoing the deal, Bush angrily declared he would veto such legislation, and polls showed that three-quarters of Americans were concerned the deal would jeopardize American security. Even more damaging, the issue shifted public opinion about who can best protect the country from future acts of terrorism. For the first time since 9/11, Democrats pulled even with Republicans on this question.