Nosedive:
The Democrats the Day After
by
Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair
Dissident
Voice
November 6, 2002
So, the Democrats have paid the price for a cowardly, half
hearted, inept campaign, and they didn't even see it coming. The party used to
be handy with campaign mechanics: good polling, energetic at the precinct level
in getting out the vote. This time around they had nothing much at the base and
at the top end of the Democratic Nation Committee, chairman Terry McAuliffe,
flush with millions minted from Global Crossing, a prime symbol of the burst
bubble of the Clinton years.
Look at Max Cleland in Georgia, a
triple amputee, Vietnam vet, traditional liberal and a popular guy in the
state. Yet the party let him get ambushed by Saxby Chambliss, a chickenhawk who
managed to get away with impugning Cleland's loyalty to the flag and country
because he voted against the Homeland Security bill on account of its
anti-union provisions. But the Democrats' national political managers had no
idea Cleland was in trouble until it was too late.
There are great slabs of the
country where people have no idea what Democrats stand for, aside from the
interest groups that dump the biggest donations into their campaign treasuries.
It's blowback again from the remake of the Democratic Party after the Mondale
and Dukakis debacles of the late 1980s, when Clinton, Babbitt, Lieberman,
Breaux and the others advertised that the Democratic Leadership Council was
open for business, anti-labor, hawkish and corporate friendly.
Having given up almost everything
else the party was left only with its well worn scarecrow, hauled out of the
barn every two years: judicial appointments. But how many people working their
ballot forms really match up a senatorial candidate with what might happen in
the US Supreme Court a few years down the road?
Social Security? Once it was the most reliable scarecrow in
the cornfield. By now, given what's happened on Wall St, it should have been
fearsome enough to scare off a pterodactyl. But the Democrats were unable to
denounce in unison Republican plots to privatize the heritage of FDR, because
so many of them agree with the Republicans. Go back to one of the first fights
of Bush II's term, on bankruptcies. It was Tom Daschle, the Democrats' leader
in the senate, who leaped to do the bidding of the banks and credit card
companies.
At least when Clinton ran in 1992
he did fashion a populist message on the economy, and also on health care. Of
course he and Mrs C did drastically overdraw on their credibility account,
particularly on health care. But this time the Democrats could even make a
convincing case against Bush's economic management. Could the Democrats have
hoped for more favorable terrain on which to fight a midterm election?
The markets? Down, down, down.
During Bush's term the Dow has gone from 10578.20 on Jan. 22, 2001, to 8397.03
on Oct.31, 2002, a decline of 20.6 percent. Unemployment? Up, up, up. January
2001 to October 2002, non-farm payrolls have fallen by 1.49 million, as the jobless
rate has jumped in Bush's term from 4.2 percent to 5.7
Basic economic indicators?
Teetering between indifferent and terrifying. Gross domestic product, averaged
a 3.1 percent annual growth rate in the first seven quarters under Clinton,
compared with a 1.4 percent average in the same period under Bush.
In the second quarter alone
pension wealth fell by over $469 billion or 5.3 per cent. Housing prices
cushioned the blow a little but still left a net decline in wealth of 3.4 per
cent in one quarter, with its successor shaping up to be just as bad. It look
as though the boom in house prices has topped out. Oil prices are up 40 per
cent since the start of the year. The telecommunication industry is on its ass,
and it will take a very long time to crawl back from over-capacity in the 90
per cent range. The airline industry is on life support.
The official rate of profit on
capital stock in the non-financial corporate sector as a whole is now at its
lowest level of the postwar period (except for 1980 and 1982).
A recession? Most assuredly.
Prospects of long-term economic doldrums? Near certain. You want us to go on?
Okay. So not only do we have an
economy slowly flapping its way to the bottom of the fish tank, we have two men
in the White House who, a scant two months ago, were hiding out in some
subterranean war room in the Appalachians, hoping to dodge subpoenas on account
of their shady business conduct, even as all their buddies at Enron were
striking to make deals with the Justice Department.
It's true. Bush's Harken antics
make the Clintons' involvement in Whitewater look like the pitiful little
failed real estate deal that it was. Here we have a rich mine of corruption and
insider dealing featuring such highlights as the Harvard endowment bailing out
Junior at the behest of a Texas oilman. We have officials of in the
administration of Bush Sr. tearing up SEC rules to save the ass of the
president's son. We have, well you know the story.
And Cheney? As bad if not worse,
in terms of self-enrichment at the expense of the public investors in
Halliburton.
This was the economic and
scandal-stained backdrop to the midterm campaign only two short months ago.
So what happened? The public
said, "Sure, the economy doesn't look good, but we're not stupid. The
economy's sagging, but you can't blame the whole of the 90s on George Bush.
Gives us till 2004, and we'll tell you what we think then."
The problem is, the Democrats
have no credibility, because they haven't earned any. No one believes they have
an economic strategy and as we hunker down amid the rubble of the bubble, we
can ask, what were the Democrats doing as that same 90s bubble swelled. Led by
Senator Joe Lieberman they destroyed the regulatory apparatus put in place in
the 30s, after the 20s bubble, and burst into ecstatic applause every time the
federal watchdog of the markets, Alan Greenspan, ambled along to the Hill to
tell everyone what a fine job he'd been doing.
On top of all that we've had the
war whoop against Saddam Hussein. It's not been popular. A majority of
Americans appear to believe that it's not a particularly good idea to trash
Iraq, even though it would be fun to see Saddam Hussein swinging from a lamp
post. Aside from Tony Blair the world is against it. Closer to home, the Joint
Chiefs are against it.
All the same, the whooping
worked. It changed the subject from the economy and Harken and Halliburton. It
got the Democrats rearing and plunging till Gephardt panicked, and rushed to
the White House to enlist in the great Crusade.
The Democrats are a party of
ghosts and revenants, not the most convincing battalion to put against the
party of property and oil, of fundamentalist Christians now in coalition with
warmongering neocons ranging from Wolfowitz to Hitchens. The most articulate
voice against the war fever has been an octogenarian, Bobby Byrd.
Final verdict? We agree entirely
with this assessment by Mark Donham, an Illinois environmentalist who sent it
along to us the morning after:
"If the democrats do not see
this as a serious repudiation of their strategy of trying to 'out republican'
the Republicans, then I think we will continue to see the Democrats become more
and more irrelevant. Only if the Democrats embrace a new vision based upon real
change, change that will mean taking on the status quo in real ways, not just
pandering to the status quo, will they return to power.
"An interesting article ran
in yesterday's USA Today regarding the lack of voting by people
in the age group of 18-24. In non-presidential elections, the percentage of
this age group that are voting is only about 25%. That is because no one is
providing them with a vision that makes sense, and the smaller parties that
might be providing that vision, like the Green Party, don't have the resources
to reach them in adequate numbers.
"Therein lies the untapped
political resource to revitalize the Democratic Party, but they will not be
fooled or interested by milktoast ideas. It's time for Daschle and Gephardt to
step down, admit that their strategy failed, and let some new, progressive
leadership re-excite the party. If the party leadership looks at this and
concludes that the they weren't conservative enough and tries to push their
positions even more to the right, then I see the Democrats disintegrating into
near irrelevancy."
So, can the Democrats reinvent
themselves out of the cement overcoat of its DLC years? We doubt it, and
furthermore we reckon that for the people who control the Democratic Party,
it's far more important to beat off radical ideas and drive the McKinneys out
of the Party than to win elections or to lose elections on matters of principle
like civil rights and economic justice.
One last thought: the Democrats
don't have Nader to blame for this one. Ralph even went out and campaigned for
some of them.
Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey
St. Clair are the authors of 5 Days that
Shook the World: Seattle and Beyond (Verso, 2000), and the editors of
Counterpunch, the nation's best muckraking newsletter: www.counterpunch.org