Dr. Frank's What's-it

Gephardt Patriots

William Kristol cheers on the Gephardt liberals, vs. the "Dominique de Villepin left":

The Gephardt liberals are patriots. They supported the president in the run-up to this war, and strongly support the war now that it has begun. It would be misleading to call this group the Joe Lieberman liberals, because he was already too much of a hawk to be representative, but the group certainly includes Lieberman. It also includes Hillary Rodham Clinton, probably a majority of Senate Democrats, less than half of the House Democrats, Democratic foreign policy experts at places like the Brookings Institution and the Council on Foreign Relations, and a smaller number of liberal commentators and opinion leaders--most notably the Washington Post editorial page.

The other group includes the Teddy Kennedy wing of the Senate Democrats, the Nancy Pelosi faction of the House Democrats, a large majority of Democratic grass-roots activists, the bulk of liberal columnists, the New York Times editorial page, and Hollywood. These liberals--better, leftists--hate George W. Bush so much they can barely bring themselves to hope America wins the war to which, in their view, the president has illegitimately committed the nation. They hate Don Rumsfeld so much they can't bear to see his military strategy vindicated. They hate John Ashcroft so much they relish the thought of his Justice Department flubbing the war on terrorism. They hate conservatives with a passion that seems to burn brighter than their love of America, and so, like M. de Villepin, they can barely bring themselves to call for an American victory.

It would be bad for America if this wing of American liberalism were to prevail. Parts of the Republican party, and of the conservative movement, fell into a similar trap in the late 1990s, hating Bill Clinton more than Slobodan Milosevic. But this wing of the GOP and conservatism lost in an intra-party and intra-movement struggle, and has now been marginalized--Pat Buchanan is no longer a Republican, and his magazine these days makes common cause with Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal. The fight over the future of liberalism is not one conservatives can really join. But we can wholeheartedly cheer from the sidelines for the Gephardt liberals against their anti-American leftist rivals, hoping that they succeed in saving the (mostly) good name of liberalism.

This exaggerates the size and strength of anti-American "leftism" within the mainstream Democratic Party. But this description of how personal animosity has been substituted for reason in partisan politics (indeed the equivalent of the Republicans' self-defeating blind rage against Clinton) is accurate, and I believe many Democratic partisans haven't grasped just how alienating this is to their own, less intemperate, rank and file. At this point, I don't think it's enough for Nancy Pelosi or Tom Daschle simply to choose their words carefully, trying to avoid anything that will sound too bad when quoted. Kristol's characterization of the inanity of the "de Villepin wing" may not reflect their own views with complete, or even any, accuracy; nevertheless, he is describing a very real feature of the political landscape. At any rate, it is a characterization that will ring true (and with a tone unappealing) to a great many voters, and most mainstream Democrats are doing next to nothing to repudiate it. Fair or not, if the Democrats allow themselves to be cast as a party of inane unpatriotic haters bearing a personal grudge and ambivalent about American victory (as they seem poised to do) they risk their doom, or at least they risk the very real possibility of helping to create a substantial block of "Bush Democrats," something that, war or no war, seemed barely conceivable just a short time ago.

Despite the famous ineptitude of the Gore campaign, Bush the candidate was a hard sell in the 2000 election, as the divided results indicate. Yet there's little doubt that, had Karl Rove allowed the campaign to dwell too prominently on the still-smoldering over-the-top hatred of Clinton obsessively cultivated by many in the GOP, it would have tipped the scales against him, Florida or no. It's extremely difficult to make a wholly negative case in a likable, electable way. Bitterness doesn't sell. The Democrats have often benefited from Republican blunders in this regard. But the GOP appears to have learned from their mistakes, while many Democrats have not.

Posted by Dr. Frank at March 29, 2003 11:04 AM | TrackBack