All the post-election talk about bipartisanship and cooperation ignores the fact that when the 104th Congress convenes in January, the president’s party will be dominated by men and women with no desire whatsoever to adjust to a new reality, reinvent their party or run around proclaiming themselves “new” Democrats.
The House Democratic caucus has been moved considerably to the left as a result of the Nov. 8 debacle, for the very simple reason that the survivors tended to come from safe, urban Northern districts or minority districts that send the most liberal representatives imaginable to Washington. Those who lost, on the other hand, were among the more moderate Democrats from the South or from rural and suburban areas where partisan realignment has been progressing rapidly.
The bottom line is that the Democratic Leadership Council -which, remember, was most recently chaired by Oklahoma’s now ex-Rep. Dave McCurdy – will have far less visibility and clout than the Congressional Black Caucus for the simple reason that numbers count for more than ideas. Pundits and the president himself can muse about the wisdom of moving right to accommodate the new majority on substantive issues like welfare reform or symbolic ones like school prayer, but when it comes right down to it, Mr. Clinton has to worry about the reaction of the Democratic base that remains.
In politics, a party can face an almost impossible crisis when its support drops below the critical mass needed to allow it to reach out beyond its core. As its support falls, only the purists remain, and they tend to demand that those they support take positions that make it more and more difficult to attract the non-purists.
The leadership of what remains will make any comeback more difficult by projecting an image of a party that is more liberal than ever and more dominated than at any time in recent memory by exclusionist minorities wedded to big government and the very solutions the public is rejecting in ever increasing numbers.
This is what is likely to plague the Democratic Party as Bill Clinton and his advisors begin analyzing the new political reality with which they will have to contend. Cooperation with Newt Gingrich and his buddies will outrage the new congressional core of his party, and the ensuing unrest will quickly spread to party activists out in the country who, like Hillary Rodham Clinton, don’t “quite understand” what the voters were trying to say on election day.
Unrest there will, in turn, stimulate opposition not only to the president’s programs, but should he persist to the president himself. He has to worry not only about re-election but renomination, and he has to know that every Democratic president since John Kennedy has faced intra-party opposition in seeking a second term.
The opposition has always come from the purists within the party and has been beaten back by a party establishment that has included congressional leaders, governors and local officials with ties through the national party to the White House. But many of those power centers are gone. Many of the governors, state legislators and other local establishment Democrats, who would historically be expected to bolster the power of an incumbent president, are gone -along with the voters who they could deliver for the candidate of their choice.
Consider Mr. Clinton’s dilemma if he is forced to face a liberal challenger enjoying the active support of Jesse Jackson and the leadership of the Congressional Black Caucus in the south on Super Tuesday 1996. By that time, Mr. Clinton may be almost the only white Southern male still associated with his own party, and he’ll have to run in a primary completely dominated by liberal activists and blacks. If he presents himself as a new Democrat, he’s liable to get the same welcome Ralph Reed could expect at the editorial offices of the New York Times.
Even before the current election, Democrats in the Congress were at a loss as to how best to deal with the Black Caucus and its willingness to countenance the anti-Semitism of Louis Farrakhan and his ilk, who seem determined to drive the small but politically important Jewish vote out of any party with which they are associated.
Jewish voters remained largely loyal to the Democrats this year. But one has to wonder how they will react to a party increasingly dominated by elements hostile to protecting their interests and values, but willing to provide safe haven to their most virulent enemies.
In the past, Jewish voters have been held in line by a cultural antipathy to a party dominated by folks who, as Mike Barone of U.S. News & World Report puts it, wouldn’t let them into their country clubs. But the GOP, like the Democratic Party, is changing. The intellectual foundations of the new conservatism dominating the GOP were laid by Jewish intellectuals and activists like the lake Frank Meyer, Ben Stein, Victor Gold, Bill and Irving Kristol, Rabbi Daniel Lapin, Michael Medved, Mona Charen, Don Feder and a host of others.
And now even the Christian right is working closely with Jewish groups like Rabbi Lapin’s Toward Tradition to overcome the cultural nervousness that has until now prevented a lasting political alliance from developing. As Jewish voters begin to realize that their continuing support of a Democratic party increasingly dependent on interests hostile to them, yet another traditional Democratic group of voters could fall away by 1996.
So Mr. Clinton finds himself between a rock and a hard place. He has few attractive options. Cooperation with the GOP and a recognition of what the voters were saying on Nov. 8 might help him in his quest for a second term by finally convincing Americans that he is, in fact, the New Democrat he professed to be in 1992. But to win a second term he must first be renominated by a party that has been forced to the left as a result of his failure to keep his promises in the first place.
And that could be a tall order.
Craig Shirley is a GOP consultant.
LOAD-DATE: November 23, 1994
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
Copyright 1994 The Washington Times LLC All Rights Reserved