Rescuing the Democrats By DAVID BROOKS
Published: October 21, 2003
NEWTON, Iowa - In the current issue of The Weekly Standard, Fred Barnes argues that we have seen the birth of a Republican majority. In 1992, Barnes points out, Republicans held 176 House seats. Today, they hold 229. In 1992, the G.O.P. controlled 8 state legislatures; now it controls 21. In 1992, there were 18 Republican governors; now there are 27.
But the really eye-popping change is in party identification. In Franklin Roosevelt's administration, 49 percent of voters said they were Democrats. But that number has been dropping ever since, and now roughly 32 percent of voters say they are. As Mark Penn, a former Clinton pollster, has observed, "In terms of the percentage of voters who identify themselves as Democrats, the Democratic Party is currently in its weakest position since the dawn of the New Deal."
The Democratic presidential candidates wending their way through Iowa, New Hampshire and the other primary states are offering theories about the party's decline, and what can be done about it.
Howard Dean argues that the Democratic Party has lost its soul. If it returns to its true fighting self, instead of compromising with Republicans, it will energize new and otherwise disenchanted voters.
privates Gephardt argues that the party has lost touch with the economic interests of working men and women. Instead of offering bread-and-butter benefits to lower-middle-clbutt workers, it endorses free trade policies that destroy job security.
Joe Lieberman argues that the party has become too liberal and too secular. It has lost touch with the values of the great American middle.
John Edwards has the most persuasive theory. He argues that most voters do not place candidates on a neat left-right continuum. But they are really good at sensing who shares their values. They are really good at knowing who respects them and who doesn't. Edwards's theory is that the Democrats' besetting sin over the past few decades has been snobbery.
Edwards came by this outlook autobiographically. On the campaign trail, Edwards will mention - every five minutes or so - that his father worked in a textile mill and his mother retired from the post office. He didn't grow up poor. But he does say that his parents were not treated with the respect and dignity they deserved.
Edwards's father rose to become a mill supervisor, but with only a high school degree, he was perpetually underestimated by the college grads around him. Edwards seems to have been raised by folks who know what it feels like to be condescended to.
His campaign is based on the argument that the Democrats need to nominate a person from Middle America, not from the coastal educated clbutt. "My campaign is a different Democratic campaign," Edwards said in his announcement speech. "Not only will I run for the real America, I will run in the real America.... Democrats too often act like rural America is just someplace to fly over between a fund-raiser in Manhattan and a fund-raiser in Beverly Hills."
Edwards draws an implicit contrast between himself and Howard Dean and John Kerry by pointing out that he worked for everything he has. He loaded trucks to pay for college. "It didn't hurt me at all," he says.
He draws an explicit contrast with George Bush, arguing that the Bush administration rewards wealth and punishes work. This is not about economics, he says; it's about values. The Bush administration disrespects working Americans. It lowers taxes for people who sit around the pool and collect capital gains, while shifting the burden to people who wake up early, work hard and hope to get rich.
Obviously Edwards's campaign has not caught fire. (Although it is far too early to count him out. One thing I learned last week in Iowa is that voters are far more interested in Gephardt, Kerry and Edwards than we in the national media.) But that doesn't mean Edwards's theory is wrong, or that Democratic primary voters accurately understand their plight. When I interviewed people during the 2000 campaign I found many voters preferred Democratic policies to Republican ones. But they didn't trust Al Gore because they thought he looked down on them. They felt Bush could come to their barbershop and fit right in.
Except for Bill Clinton, Democrats have nominated presidential candidates who try to figure out Middle American values by reading the polls, instead of feeling them in their gut. If they do it again, the long, slow slide will continue.
-- It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking about what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the numbers of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. Operations of thought are like cavalry charges in battle -- they are strictly limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments. - Alfred North Whitehead