Democratic Decline

D Is for Descendancy
The Democrats are no longer the majority party.
Is this the year they'll finally admit it?
BY BRENDAN MINITER
Wednesday, September 15, 2004 12:01 a.m. EDT

The Democratic Party is in descendancy. It's not just that John Kerry's campaign is sinking like a stone, or that George W. Bush is turning out to be a resilient politician. The Democratic leadership is in electoral denial, failing to grasp a profound shift among American voters and therefore on the cusp not of winning back control of one of the branches of government, but of handing control over to Republicans for a generation or more.
This denial has been fed by moderate electoral victories, most notably Bill Clinton's eight year control of the White House, Al Gore's popular-vote plurality in 2000, and what turned out to be transient congressional gains in 1996, 1998 and 2000. Democrats still seem to believe they can win back the White House without making any significant modification to their party's policies--that they are the natural majority party just waiting to be given back control.
A broader look, however, reveals a much different electoral landscape. Somewhere during the Carter presidency Americans lost confidence in the ideas of the Democratic Party. Bill Clinton ran and won as a "third way" Democrat in 1992, when it seemed safe not to worry about foreign threats. When he took office, he tried to move the country to the left, raising taxes and rolling out a plan to socialize medicine.
The flaw in Mr. Clinton's belief that the country was ready to swing left again was revealed in the congressional elections two years into his presidency. For the first time since Dwight Eisenhower was president, Republicans controlled both houses of Congress. Two years later Mr. Clinton signed the most comprehensive welfare reform legislation since the New Deal. Al Gore might have walked away with the presidency in 2000 if he'd learned the same lesson from 1994 that Mr. Clinton apparently did--that liberal ideas are a loser at the ballot box.
Republicans have been in the White House for 16 of the past 24 years, held a Senate majority for 14 of those years and controlled the House for the past 10 years. GOP candidates aren't winning elections by luck. The Democrats had their "Great Society" and stayed in power by handing out welfare checks. It took a long time, but Republicans discovered something more valuable to hand out, a form of personal liberty that allows individuals to create real wealth. On self-interested grounds alone, health savings accounts and private Social Security accounts are an electoral inevitability.
After 9/11, a vigorous national defense that included a string of liberation wars was inevitable too. In the sweep of history, liberty trumps command and control. And despite the pounding President Bush took in the polls before the Democratic Convention, there's little evidence that Americans are growing disillusioned with the ideas on the right.
That's not to say this year's election isn't important or itself a historical watershed. It's the first presidential election after two wars of liberation and the first after the 9/11 attacks, and is therefore a referendum on national-security policy. But it's important for another reason too. Today it is Democrats and liberals who are, in William F. Buckley's phrase, standing athwart history yelling "stop." How successful they are in delaying the spread of personal liberty at home and abroad depends on the outcome of this election.
With that much riding on this election, we can expect a few surprises and even a dirty trick or two somewhere in the seven weeks left before Nov. 2. Many expect Mr. Kerry to surprise us with a strong performance in the presidential debates--and he may do that. But there are a few other cards left for him to play, albeit not very good ones. One is to speculate who wouldn't be in a second-term Bush cabinet. Democrats would love for Donald Rumsfeld to be thrown over the side in a repudiation of Mr. Bush's military achievements. But an even bigger dream come true for Democrats would be Colin Powell's retirement. He's a man of great stature who has softened the president's image.
Democrats could also surprise voters with a few personnel and policy announcements of their own. If Mr. Kerry continues to trail in the polls on national security, look for him to name a known hawk as his pick for secretary of defense. Mr. Kerry could also find a religious conservative he could "work" with in his cabinet. Mr. Kerry might also look for a way to come out of the box swinging on a high-profile issue. The problem here is that his flip-flops on the war and many other issues make it nearly impossible for him to make a bold stand now.
Don't discount Mr. Bush either. There are plenty of surprises left up his sleeve. Some come from just making the everyday decisions that presidents have to make. Fallujah and a handful of other Iraqi cities remain terrorist havens. Allowing a large scale military operation to go forward before Nov. 2 would show Mr. Bush to be willing to risk his own electoral prospects for the sake of the right policy in Iraq. Ironically, it would probably also boost Republican turnout. Mr. Bush also could veto one of the many spending bills Congress is now busy cobbling together. Vetoing just about anything would likely give hesitant Bush supporters a reason to turn out for the president.
Whatever surprises are in store, the broader sweep is clear. In a time of economic prosperity the electorate was nearly deadlocked over two candidates four years ago, but for more than two decades it has proved decidedly in favor of the ideas emanating from the right. After the election Democrats may blame Mr. Kerry for running an inept campaign, as they did Michael Dukakis and Al Gore. But to do so would be to fail to grasp why for the duration of the campaign the party was counting on the economy to stumble, the war to go badly or for a terrorists attack to turn public opinion against the president. Or why with less than two months from Election Day, the party's only remaining hope for victory was for Mr. Bush to stumble.