Americans at home and abroad are surfeited with explanations for the Bush victory and the Kerry defeat. It will be some time before some common conclusion is reached. Whatever that is, it will shape how both parties prepare for the mid-term elections in 2006 and the national re-match in 2008.
For the moment, several explanations seem to be agreed: the Bush team ran a better campaign from start to finish; the war in Iraq and its conflation in the public mind with 9/11 gave Bush an edge as commander-in-chief; Kerry and Edwards were handicapped by their votes in the Senate authorizing the use of force in Iraq; many voters subordinated other dissatisfactions with Bush to their support for him on God, guns, gays and abortion; Kerry and Edwards could never offer a convincing alternative to Bush on either Iraq or the economy. There also seems no disagreement that Bush’s base was rural and suburban and that he cut into Democratic leads among blacks, Hispanics and women.
This outcome creates no real problems for the Bush team and its leadership of the Republican Party. No recrimination. Only reciprocal congratulations including for the leadership of the Senate and House which had resounding
success.
Democrats are in a more difficult position. They lost a presidential election which they had every reason to believe they could win with an aroused base, public support for their domestic policies, more money than ever before, an array of flanking 527 organizations and organized labor, a sitting president with a terrible record in conducting a war, in running up an unprecedented deficit and having alienated most of the rest of the world. And, they lost not only seats in both houses of congress, but the re-election of Tom Daschle, clearly the most able member of the senate.
While there has been and continues to be Democratic recrimination, it is less than after the Gore defeat. In fact, except for serious internal problems with organized labor, the Democratic campaign universe seems united in its commitment to continue its work to regain lost ground in 2006. How serious the labor dispute will be, remains to be seen. But, after the enormous effort made by the AFL-CIO to defeat Bush, there is a conflict about re-organizing its structure that can only be another reward for the Bush team - at least in the short term.
Democrats are also grappling with renewing party leadership. DNC Chair, Terry McAuliffe, who was President Clinton’s pick after the Gore defeat, will almost certainly be replaced despite a very impressive four year performance. Who will succeed him will tell us much about where the locus of power resides and the drift of preference for the party nominee for president in 2008.
Howard Dean is the most mentioned for the job but others like the highly regarded Governor Tom Vilsack of Iowa, former Georgia Governor Roy Barnes and Virginia Governor Mark Warner are also considered possibilities. Whoever gets the chairmanship will almost certainly not be a presidential candidate in 08. Presumably Kerry will have a voice in the selection since he has already signaled that he intends to continue to lead the Democratic opposition to the Bush Administration unlike Gore who vanished from the scene.
And that merges with the question of 2008 Democratic aspirants. Kerry has not ruled himself out. Hillary Clinton would have had, and may still have, the inside track as far as the Democratic party activists are concerned. But she has probably lost some ground as the Democratic perception grows that the party needs someone from the south which helps to explain the talk of Virginia’s Governor Mark Warner whose term expires in 2005.
Whatever the conclusions that we Democrats draw about our defeat, the winner seems already to have drawn his. He is more self-assured than ever, buoyed by an unquestioned majority of both the popular and electoral vote. He believes that he has a clear mandate to put through the program that he laid out during the campaign: “reform” Social Security, make permanent his upper-income tax cuts, “reform” the tax code, “reform” tort law, reduce regulatory “restraints” on business, extend federal government faith-based social programs, amend the constitution to bar gay marriage and similar conservative designs for a Republican society.
And his supporters have also drawn theirs. Evangelicals claim they were the key to his victory and they expect to be paid off: selection of Supreme Court and lower court justices, the gay marriage amendment, blocking stem cell research. The business community, from Wall Street to mining, lumbering, grazing, land developers, the military industries, and the rest will all expect that their needs will be taken care of. For them, the road ahead is clear.
But all that glisters is not, necessarily, gold. Bush knows that he has only about 18 months, at best, to deliver on his promises before the mid-term elections put everything on hold. And while the President has spoken of working with Kerry supporters, past experience suggests that he means to give them an opportunity to rally to his agenda before being rolled over. Some, undoubtedly, will do so as they have in the past. That will probably first be put to the test with the nomination of one or more justices to the Supreme Court. The first skirmishing is already very heated as social conservatives bombard the White House and Senate Republican leadership with demands that Arlen Specter be denied chairmanship of the Senate Judiciary Committee because of his support for Roe v Wade. If Specter gets his chairmanship, it is unlikely that it will be because of White House support.
The President’s nominations will tell whether he intends to conciliate or obliterate the Democratic minority. Democrats will likely use every means at their disposal to block a justice in the mold of Thomas or Scalia. Senate Republicans are unlikely to be united in support of such nominees. That has the makings of a major confrontation that will set the tone for the rest of the session.
And that will be true for other matters as well. There is a growing right-wing Republican opposition to the war in Iraq. There is a fiscally conservative block that will oppose further growth of the deficit. The Democrats, if they hang together, will have some power to restrain the President but not much and they are likely to pick their confrontations very carefully. While they will try to embarrass the first nominee to come up for confirmation, Alberto Gonzales as Attorney General, they are unlikely to make an all-out effort to defeat him.
Bush has one great advantage denied Nixon, Reagan and Clinton. Whatever scandal may break, and something is almost inevitable, there will be no congressional opposition able to exploit it. The Republican majority which smothered the top level responsibility for Abu Graeb knows what to do and will do it to cover the president. And that makes one Democratic dream fade just as the polling fraud conspiracy theories have faded.
There is only the remote hope that moderate Republican Senators like Snow, Collins and Chafee will defect if Bush is carried away with hubris and the narcotic effect of a mandate from Heaven.
But, don’t count on a deus ex machina salvation for us defeated Democrats. While Bush will continue to unite us, our comeback will depend on how we conduct the elections in 2006 and 2008.
Thomas W. Fina
Executive Director Emeritus
Democrats Abroad
[email protected]
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