Perry On

Steve Perry, uberliberal editor of the City Pages, isn't happy:

Q: Are the Democrats really as stupid as they look?
A: No one is really as stupid as the Democrats look.

One gets the impression Steve Perry is throwing in the towel.

He goes on:

The first Kerry Edwards yard sign appeared on my street last week, ironically, just as the president was parlaying his Unreality TV moment into a double-digit lead in the latest Time and Newsweek polls. My reaction to the sign was reflexive: never heard of him.

Aside from making out in public with women who are not his wife, John Kerry has so far seized every opportunity within reach to ensure a Bush win in November. No Democratic presidential candidate since FDR in 1932 has been feted with such a rich smorgasbord of incumbent Republican disaster.

Y'know, I can remember five Republican incumbents in my life; Nixon (vaguely - I was nine in '72), Ford (sort of), Reagan, and both Georges Bush. And in every case, the hard-left has always called the status quo "a disaster for Republicans". For Ford, of course, it was - the economy was vastly worse than even the worst of the Clinton recession. George 41 had largely himself and Ross Perot to blame for losing in '92, of course.

But as much as the left would like to make Bush look like Hoover, the simple fact is that George W. Bush was dealt a lousy hand when he entered office - and has responded like any good president, if not great one, would do.

But that's not Perry's point:

And W's résumé is substantially worse than Hoover's, since it includes not only domestic economic outrages (tax cuts designed for the wealthiest 1 percent, staggering deficits, worse-than-stagnant employment reports) but also a fabricated foreign invasion that has now cost over a thousand American lives as well as tens of billions of dollars, an unseemly portion of which has gone to Bush/Cheney pals in the energy sector.

Give Perry a break. He has to establish his bona fides with his prime demographic, people who think MoveOn is a credible source.

The question was never whether this election would be a referendum on Bush--that was bound to be the case--but whether John Kerry and the Democrats would be the ones telling that story to the people.

Question: Isn't that an incredibly cowardly way of approaching that question?

If Bush is indeed as bad as the likes of Perry make him out to be, shouldn't clobbering him be child's play?

"Of course", says Perry. "If only...:"

And what has happened? Kerry on the Bush tax cuts: I am not a tax-and-spend liberal! Kerry on the economy: There's this offshore tax break I'd eliminate. Kerry on Iraq: I would conduct needless and immoral foreign invasions more responsibly. Kerry on Bush/Cheney cronyism: Huh?

It's impossible to see how diehard partisans of the Democrats can endure this campaign without learning a thing or two, but they seem to be holding up thus far. Their collective wailings fall along two main lines: Kerry is regrettably timid, or Kerry is hewing to the "middle" to woo those fabled centrist swing voters. Indeed, some true-blue Dems (the clinically delusional ones) still rise to defend Kerry's craven non-strategy of standing back in the weeds while Bush, theoretically, sinks Bush.

There's just one trouble with all three critiques: They assume that the men and women charting the course of the Democratic Party are some of the dumbest people on earth. Can they not see that this election offers dramatic and even unprecedented potential for galvanizing anti-Republican reaction and bringing new voters out of the woodwork?

Of course they can see this. They refuse to act on it because new blood would mean new demands of a very old sort on a political machine that has spent the past generation trying to rid itself of public association with "special interests" such as labor, minorities, greens--the people. Who needs the headache of taking them back aboard? Better to keep on flouting them and hope they will vote for you anyway out of desperation. The voters that Democrats thereby leave on the table are their traditional base. But no more.

To paraphrase Pauline Kael, "Of course a Howard Dean or a Dennis Kucinich or Ralph Nader would have won! Everyone I know would have voted for them!"

No, really!

But they could win so easily. Yes. So what? Given the choice between winning what might prove an unruly victory and running yet another me-too campaign that will likely lose (but without upsetting their real base, which consists largely of the same funding sources as the Republicans'), they take the second path every time. The Democrats are not stupid. They are cynical. They have no interest in changing the rules of the game, and toward that end they are even more loath than Republicans to invite new people into the "process."

And it's here that I find agreement with Perry. The Dems loathe change; the Republicans pay it lip service, and wait for everyone to come to the party on their own.

But here's my big question for the likes of Perry - is this election still a "referendum on Bush" if he wins in a landslide?

Posted by Mitch at September 20, 2004 07:52 AM | TrackBack