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Jewish World Review Oct. 15, 2002 / 9 Mar-Cheshvan, 5763

Martin Sieff

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Dems can't count on demographics


http://www.NewsAndOpinion.com | Are the Republicans going to be swept away in an inevitable national reaction and huge long-term pendulum swing? Many prominent analysts believe that is inevitable. But on the Dems' current track record don't bet on it.

The most serious case mounted in recent years arguing a major Democrat comeback in national politics is in John Judis and Ruy Texeira's new book "The Emerging Democratic Majority." They argue that President Bill Clinton's 1992 presidential election victory reflected long-term trends that have grown more striking since. They argued that a new middle class dynamic of what they called "progressive centrism" powered Clinton's victory and was a rapidly emerging demographic and therefore political force in such crucial states as California, Ohio and Florida.

Other analysts have adduced different arguments to come to the same conclusion. UPI national political columnist Jim Chapin, who died tragically only a few weeks ago, argued that the current Bush administration and Republican majority in the House of Representatives were off at the right wing extreme of American politics and were busy isolating themselves. Jim also argued that on the classic cyclic pattern of U.S. history, the long, more than 30-year era of Republican conservative domination of the national agenda was likely to end dramatically in the next few years.

Massive demographic trends seem to support this view. The much heralded GOP initiative pushed by Bush to supposedly win a significant segment of the Black American vote and a far larger segment of the Hispanic American vote has fallen flat on its face. Black Americans are rallying more to the Democrats than ever precisely because they find almost all current Republican policies inimical to their interests.

And the massive continued Hispanic immigration influx, overwhelmingly Mexican in composition, into the South and Southwest remains overwhelmingly Democrat in its political preferences. These immigrants have tilted California strongly into the Democratic camp -- where its electoral votes have gone in the past three presidential elections, with Florida on the brink and even Bush's home base of Texas possibly following.

The Democrats could make the case that Bush as presided over rising unemployment, a collapsing stock market, a return to massive federal budget deficits and the slashing of federal programs for the poor and middle class at every level in state and city governments. Yet in fact, the Republicans now look poised to regain control of the Senate and hold the House of Representatives in next month's midterm congressional elections. How can that be?

First, as we have often noted in UPI Analysis, whether you love George W. Bush or loathe him, you have to recognize that when it comes to national politics he is one sly old Texas fox. The president has succeeded so far triumphantly in what UPI Editor-at-Large Arnaud De Borchgrave calls his "Wag the Dog" scenario of making war with Iraq and the war against terrorism the centerpiece of his party's fall congressional campaign, and voters have been responding to it.

This national security card has so far trumped all the domestic issues like the stock market collapse, defending social security from privatization, Republican tax cuts for the rich and other bread and butter issues that the Democrats had counted on to win back the House for them.

As Nicholas Confessore noted in an excellent article in the October edition of the liberal "Washington Monthly" the congressional Democrats are playing according to a game book that has been obsolete and unsuccessful for them for the past eight years since they lost control of the House in 1994. "Among Democrats," he writes, "conventional wisdom dictates that elections are won by going local. There's just one problem, it hasn't worked."

Now, contrary to the way they usually behave as a national party, individually most Democrats, like most Republicans, are smart people. But since they have not won a majority in the House for a decade, why are they still persisting with their old "go-local" and "stick to national bread and butter" strategies when the Republicans are once again creaming them on national security and the war against terror?

First, as we noted Thursday in UPI Analysis, the Democrats have been pounded into a pulp for so many decades by Republicans on national security issues, they take it as a natural and unchangeable course of events themselves. But second, their greatest political success of the past generation was also the source of their greatest failure.

That success was their congressional comeback to retain an ironclad grip on the House of Representatives for a second consecutive 20 years from 1974 to 1994, thank to the Watergate crisis. Although Democrats only held the White House for six of those 20 years, the party's grip on Congress remained rock solid. For, following the adage of old House Speaker Tip O'Neill that all politics is local, they made themselves more than ever, the defenders of the vested interest and minders of the pork barrel.

During the Reagan era, it worked. But once the Dems lost control of the House and its fiscal powers in 1994, it also lost that vast patronage power around the nation. And for a party that had become dependent on the power of patronage rather than the power of ideas, this proved to be a mortal blow.

This is the real and ultimate underlying reason for the failure of the Democrats to take advantage of George W. Bush's miserable domestic record and his reckless adventurism on Iraq. Until the party dares to develop new policies and boldly articulate its old principles, it will not be able to take advantage of any sociological and demographic trends, no matter how overwhelming or how favorable. And it will not be able to critique Republican policies, no matter how failed or inept they be.

As Nicholas Murray Butler acutely warned Sen. Mark Hanna at the Republican National Convention of 1900, "You can't beat somebody with nobody." And until the Democrats finally come up with "somebody", in policies and leadership," nobody" is all they are ever going to get..



Martin Sieff is Senior News Analyst for UPI. Comment by clicking here.

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