Democrats: Boldly waiting until the time is right
Democrats: Boldly waiting until the time is right
Dick Durbin, who has come a long way from Assumption High School in East St. Louis, was back in town the other day. I asked him a version of the question that every pundit is asking every Democratic politician these days: What ever happened to the Democratic Party?
Iraq, I said. Health insurance. Income gaps, gilded-age plutocrats. Risk-shifting that puts the burden of the social contract on the backs of individuals. Why isn’t anybody out in front raising hell?
In the old days, Durbin, a free swinger, would have jumped on this like Albert Pujols on a batting practice fastball. You don’t grow up in East St. Louis and not play politics like a contact sport. But after 14 years in the House of Representatives and the last eight in the U.S. Senate - and especially now that he’s the assistant minority leader - Durbin has learned to be more cautious.
“I understand the frustration,” he said. “I tell you, it’s hell not to have the pulpit. This man (President George W. Bush) sets the agenda. He moves the agenda. It’s always been that way. And we (Democrats) don’t speak with one voice. You don’t until you have a nominee. The media doesn’t treat us in the same way as they treat the president and the White House.”
Even so, he said, “to say that we’re devoid of a mission or a message, we’re not. What we’re trying to do is what Gingrich did with his contract, which is to wait for the right moment to strike, and for him that was after Labor Day. If you do it too early, people say, `Ah, that was last year. What’s this year’s agenda?’ So I hope our timing is right.”
So this is what leadership looks like now: A Republican president with poll approval numbers in the 30s, the nation bogged down in an endless war, the NSA listening to private telephone calls, widening income gaps, 45 million uninsured Americans and at least that many more straining to meet co-pays, a middle class whose real earning power hasn’t increased in 30 years, pensions at risk, Social Security at risk, etc., etc., etc., and the Democratic Party is waiting for the “right moment to strike.”
The Democratic Party is reading a 12-year-old playbook written by a Republican - Newt Gingrich of Georgia - who rolled out his “Contract with America” after Labor Day in 1994 and took over the House in November.
The Democratic Party sees one of its members, Sen. Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, stick his neck out and call for a vote of censure for the president and everybody treats him like he had bird flu - except for Sens. Tom Harkin of Iowa and Barbara Boxer of California. There’s crazy old Russ, they say, grandstanding for the lefties.
Dick Durbin himself tells Chris Wallace on “Fox News Sunday” that Feingold’s move was “premature.” Well, maybe so. Durbin is a smart politician, and so are Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi and the rest of the Democratic leadership. Maybe they’re right to lie in the weeds and croak “incompetence, incompetence, incompetence.” Maybe you don’t want to shoot at the bear and miss.
Or maybe the president has them cowed, like Joe Pesci’s character, Nicky, in “Casino,” when Robert DeNiro says, “You beat Nicky with fists, he comes back with a bat. You beat him with a knife, he comes back with a gun. And you beat him with a gun, you better kill him, because he’ll keep comin’ back and back until one of you is dead.”
Maybe the electorate is waiting until the fall to make up its collective mind, when the people can watch endless distorted attack ads on television paid for by special interests. Maybe that’s what they crave, followed by a two-year presidential campaign decided by a couple of thousand rich people and a handful of voters in Iowa and New Hampshire.
Right now the best thing President Bush and the Republican Party have going for them is the Democratic Party. God forbid someone should stand up and start connecting the dots, linking the permanent interests of urban America and rural America, pulling together the soccer moms and the NASCAR dads, the Upper East Side and the Lower Ninth Ward. Nobody’s doing it now.
It seemed ironic to hear Durbin talking admiringly about Harry Truman, who, as a junior U.S. senator from Missouri in 1941, had the courage to take on the entire defense establishment on the issue of war profiteering.
In today’s Democratic Party, “Give ‘em Hell” Harry would be “Give ‘em Stern Disapproval on the Sunday talk shows” Harry.
BY KEVIN HORRIGAN
St. Louis Post-Dispatch