Past editorials, 1/19/01 - 2/20/01

The McAuliffe Majority

From Democracy's very good friends at Democrats.com

By David Lytel

February 20, 2001

Terry McAuliffe's election as chair of the Democratic Party has been viewed skeptically by many in the party's progressive wing, of which I count myself as a member. I know this because the membership of Democrats.com is overwhelmingly comprised of "aggressive progressives." But unlike most passionate progressives I am also a member of another community that knows McCauliffe as more than just a fundraising virtuoso. Like McAuliffe, I am from Syracuse, a corner of New York where even to be competitive with the Republican election machinery is a huge achievement.

While the rest of the country knows McAuliffe only as a money guy, up here we know him as a Democrat whose faith in our party and dedication to its principles are deeply rooted, and whose contribution to Democratic success is larger than the talent he is most widely known for.

In Syracuse and surrounding Onondaga County Democratic candidates for office face an uphill battle. Since it is hard to raise the money for a credible campaign it is even harder to find strong candidates willing to run. Anyone who would even think about running for public office has seen dozens of bright, articulate Democrats defeated by Republicans that any test of wits would rank as their inferiors. McAuliffe understands that a strategy for winning elections doesn't end with raising the money necessary to run, but as long as we're playing by the rules in place today it often begins there.

The most disturbing comment being made about McAuliffe is that his presence as the head of our party compromises our ability to fight for genuine campaign finance reform. This strikes me as unfair and untrue, both since McAuliffe's fundraising has always been consistent with the law and because he would be the last person in the world to lay down our arms on an issue that is so potent with the voters or that marks so clearly the distinction between Democrats and Republicans.

Although it has not been his role in the past, up here we expect McAuliffe to be a great spokesman for the Democratic Party, capable of articulating in a thousand different ways why we have a stronger claim to be America's majority party. Being effective as a spokesperson for the party has taken on greater urgency since the embarassment of former chair Ed Rendell's disasterous performance in December on the night of the Supreme Court decision in Gore v. Bush. Once again being a Syracusan provided a useful perspective, since up here we've all but hung Rendell in effigy for the stunning disrespect he's shown our favorite son in the NFL, Philadelphia quarterback and former Syracuse University star Donovan McNabb. McAuliffe will never make us suffer the spectacle of the party's press spokesperson disavowing the remarks made by the party's chairman, or make us listen to his football commentaries either.

Terry McAuliffe can bridge that distance - between issue-oriented progressive Democrats and the long suffering Democrats in places like Syracuse who need organization and money in order to have any chance of reaching voters and putting our ideas into practice. There is a McAuliffe Majority just starting to be built that will be adequately financed and organized so that it can be what America most urgently needs right now -- a powerful force for realizing the reform agenda.

Centrists put wrong (and self-serving) spin on Gore defeat

By Robert A. Jordan, Globe Columnist, 1/28/2001

As President Bush focuses on the goals for his new administration, a group of Democrats in Washington is still focused on why Al Gore lost the election.

At last week's Democratic Leadership Council conference titled ''Why Gore Lost, and What's Next for Democrats,'' many reasons were floated to explain Gore's defeat. But none, unfortunately, included the Ralph Nader factor, the election process in Florida, or the selection process for the United States Supreme Court.

Ironically, some members of the centrist-leaning council - of which Bill Clinton, as an Arkansas governor, was a founder and Gore, then a Tennessee senator, a member - sounded distinctly Republican in their explanations. For example, Al From, president of the DLC and a longtime ally of Gore, was quoted in news reports as saying that Gore lost because he came across as a ''liberal advocate of big government.''

''Given the fundamentals, the good economy, the fact that crime and welfare were down, the vice president should have won by a comfortable margin,'' From said. But, he continued, Gore failed to reach the high-tech workers who reflect the new economy. He added that Gore argued the liberal and populist themes of the past that suggested Gore was talking to ''Industrial Age America, not Information Age America.''

Another strong critic of Gore's campaign, Will Marshall, chairman of the Progressive Policy Institute, wrote earlier in Blueprint, the DLC's magazine, that Gore suffered from abandoning the Clinton-Gore ''reform-minded centrism'' and used instead a ''business-bashing populism.'' He said further that Gore often looked and sounded like a throwback to the doomed Democratic campaigns of the 1980s, replete with vintage class warfare themes and appeals narrowly tailored to constituency groups.

Gore had some defenders at the conference. Steve Rosenthal, political director of the AFL-CIO, said Gore gained votes (although not enough) by appealing to, rather than rejecting, his base of Democratic support.

The DLC's critique was aimed at the next election as much as at the last one. DLC officials apparently want to ensure that someone other than Gore - someone who better reflects their philosophy - will be the Democratic nominee in 2004.

One Gore backer, political scientist and author Ruy Teixeira, believes the true reason Gore lost was voter resentment of Clinton's scandals. He says the DLC's criticism has an ulterior motive: exorcism of the party's faithful.

''They are trying to portray liberals in the party, the base of the party, as somehow being completely mired in the past and lost in the future, and this does not pass muster,'' he says.

Indeed, From wrote that Democrats must no longer rely on the Democratic coalitions of the past but must ''expand beyond our Democratic base'' if they are to win back the presidency. Presumably, From would like to see the DLC lead that expansion effort.

But contrary to the DLC's views, Gore's populist themes were not what denied him the White House. As Teixeira and other Gore backers point out, Gore's standing in the polls surged after he delivered his populist ''I'm on your side and I'll fight for you'' speech at the Democratic National Convention. It was a theme that resonated with and beyond his core Democratic base of working families, African-Americans, and liberals.

Gore then slumped in the polls because he was virtually branded a liar in many news media reports for not being completely accurate on some of his folksy stories. Later, after the debates, his populist themes helped him to climb back into a virtual tie with Bush by Election Day.

Yes, Gore, like all candidates, made mistakes during his campaign. But he had more going against him than his own mistakes.

Nader, who appeared but did not speak at the DLC conference, said in a news report that he was one of ''20 banana peels'' that Gore slipped on during the campaign. But without Nader in the race, Gore might have won both or either New Hampshire and Florida - and thus the election.

There was the Clinton factor, with strong views on both sides of the question of whether Gore could have won if only he had better utilized the popular president. But what matters is that nearly half the voters had their minds made up early in the campaign that they wanted change, and to them, Bush represented that change. Only a Bush mistake of gigantic proportions would have shaken their resolve to vote for the Texas governor.

However much the DLC attempts to gore Gore, one fact remains undebatable and indisputable: Gore won the popular vote by more than 500,000 votes. If not for the flawed electoral process in Florida, and if not for the interference of the Supreme Court in the state of Florida's affairs, Gore would be president.

If the self-serving members of the DLC had listened to the telephone calls from viewers to a recent C-SPAN program on the topic, instead of listening to themselves, they would have heard that.

Perhaps the DLC would do better to analyze its own shortcomings and perhaps conclude, as did most other Democrats, that Gore did not lose the election, but rather had it seized from him.

Robert A. Jordan is a Globe columnist.

This story ran on page F3 of the Boston Globe on 1/28/2001.
© Copyright 2001 Globe Newspaper Company.

The Politics of Resentment

By Ed Madden

Maybe it was the bumper sticker I saw on a pickup truck in northeast Columbia. Or maybe it was all the hokey "let's come together" rhetoric lately passing as political analysis. Maybe it was the e-mail I got on my fraternity computer network when I forwarded an article criticizing the Supreme Court's decision to stop the Florida recounts: "I don't understand your desire to continue to perpetuate all this negativity."

Whatever it was, I'm tired of all the talk about coming together and moving on, one nation united under W. Forgive me, but after eight years of vicious Republican divisiveness, I have decided not to move on. I think I'll stay negative just a little longer.

In December, I read one opinion column after another about how the nation must come together after the polarizing election process of the past few months. A local newspaper editor waxed eloquent on the graciousness of Gore's concession speech. On television, political pundits proclaimed the need to put the whole nasty affair behind us.

Then, while out Christmas shopping, I saw a bumper sticker that seemed to me indicative of a republican way of thinking. You're seen it before: the sticker of a little boy urinating on a word. Usually they feature an automotive brand name or a sports mascot. But in this one, the little boy was relieving himself on another name: Clinton.

As a Gore supporter, I'm supposed to be a gracious loser. Yet this bumper sticker reminded me that for eight years we've seen anything but graciousness controlling popular, if not always official, Republican agendas. For eight years, we've read bumper stickers declaring "Don't Blame Me, I Voted for Bush."

For eight years, we've endured Rush Limbaugh and talk radio. When Clinton took office, Rush became the celebrity embodiment of Republican rancor. For eight years, we've heard bitterness masked as political commentary. For eight years, we have seen the proliferation of right-wing talk radio, which spawned any number of nastier Web sites and publications-- as well as the otherwise inexplicable credibility of Reagan apologist Dinesh D'Souza and Dr. Laura.

For eight years, we have witnessed a determined witch hunt, from the wackos who claimed that Clinton killed Vince Foster and that Hillary led a coven of lesbian "feminazis," to the legal machinations of Ken Starr and others. In a parade of trumped-up scandals, a series of taxpayer-funded but ultimately unfounded investigations left Starr and company empty-handed, until they finally trapped Clinton in a lie about extramarital sex. Monicathon was the culmination of years of Republican resentment finally finding opportune expression in a sex scandal.

For eight years, we have tolerated the politics of poor sports, the agendas of resentment. Now republicans want us not only to pretend that the past couple of months are behind us, but also to ignore their own record.

Republicans are asking for bipartisanship. During Clinton's first term in office they shut down the government rather than work with him. Republicans are asking for graciousness and cooperation, when they have demonstrated anything but. I remember the alarming image of angry white men, pounding the walls and doors of a Florida recount office -- is this our example of Republican graciousness?

I am not asking that liberals take their dissatisfaction to the streets, as Republicans threatened. And I hope that, unlike the Republicans, liberals won't confuse vitriol with legitimate criticism. I simply ask for honesty and a memory of history extending beyond last November. It is both simplistic and deceitful for anyone to expect the American people to all come together after the last two months -- much less the last eight years.

During a trip to Washington,D.C., over the holidays, I discovered two bumper stickers: "Re-elect Gore in 2004" and "Hail to the Thief." I haven't put either one on my car. Yet.

Dr. Madden is an associate professorof English at the University ofSouth Carolina.