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CounterPunch
November
6, 2002
Nosedive:
The Democrats the Day After
by ALEXANDER COCKBURN
and JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
So, the Democrats have paid the price for a cowardly,
half hearted, inept campaign, and they didn't even see it coming.
The party used to be handy with campaign mechanics: good polling,
energetic at the precinct level in getting out the vote. This
time around they had nothing much at the base and at the top
end of the Democratic Nation Committee, chairman Terry McAuliffe,
flush with millions minted from Global Crossing, a prime symbol
of the burst bubble of the Clinton years.
Look at Max Cleland in Georgia, a triple
amputee, Vietnam vet, traditional liberal and a popular guy in
the state. Yet the party let him get ambushed by Saxby Chambliss,
a chickenhawk who managed to get away with impugning Cleland's
loyalty to the flag and country because he voted against the
Homeland Security bill on account of its anti-union provisions.
But the Democrats' national political managers had no idea Cleland
was in trouble until it was too late.
There are great slabs of the country
where people have no idea what Democrats stand for, aside from
the interest groups that dump the biggest donations into their
campaign treasuries. It's blowback again from the remake of the
Democratic Party after the Mondale and Dukakis debacles of the
late 1980s, when Clinton, Babbitt, Lieberman, Breaux and the
others advertised that the Democratic Leadership Council was
open for business, anti-labor, hawkish and corporate friendly.
Having given up almost everything else
the party was left only with its well worn scarecrow, hauled
out of the barn every two years: judicial appointments. But how
many people working their ballot forms really match up a senatorial
candidate with what might happen in the US Supreme Court a few
years down the road?
Social Security? Once it was the most
reliable scarecrow in the cornfield. By now , given what's happened
on Wall St, it should have been fearsome enough to scare off
a pterodactyl. But the Democrats were unable to denounce in unison
Republican plots to privatize the heritage of FDR, because so
many of them agree with the Republicans. Go back to one of the
first fights of Bush 11's term, on bankruptcies. It was Tom Daschle,
the Democrats' leader in the senate, who leaped to do the bidding
of the banks and credit card companies.
At least when Clinton ran in 1992 he
did fashion a populist message on the economy, and also on health
care. Of course he and Mrs C did drastically overdraw on their
credibility account, particularly on health care. But this time
the Democrats could even make a convincing case against Bush's
economic management. Could the Democrats have hoped for more
favorable terrain on which to fight a midterm election?
The markets? Down, down, down. During
Bush's term the Dow has gone from 10578.20 on Jan. 22, 2001,
to 8397.03 on Oct.31, 2002, a decline of 20.6 percent. Unemployment?
Up, up, up. January 2001 to October 2002, nonfarm payrolls have
fallen by 1.49 million, as the jobless rate has jumped in Bush's
term from from 4.2 percent to 5.7
Basic economic indicators? Teetering
between indifferent and terrifying. Gross domestic product, averaged
a 3.1 percent annual growth rate in the first seven quarters
under Clinton, compared with a 1.4 percent average in the same
period under Bush.
In the second quarter alone pension wealth
fell by over $469 billion or 5.3 per cent. Housing prices cushioned
the blow a little but still left a net decline in wealth of 3.4
per cent in one quarter, with its successor shaping up to be
just as bad. It look as though the boom is house prices has topped
out. Oil prices are up 40 per cent since the start of the year.
The telecommunication industry is on its ass, and it will take
a very long time to crawl back from over-capacity in the 90 per
cent range. The airline industry is on life support.
The official rate of profit on
capital stock in the non-financial corporate sector as a whole
is now) at its lowest level of the postwar period (except for
1980 and 1982).
A recession? Most assuredly. Prospects
of long-term economic doldrums? Near certain. You want us to
go on?
Okay. So not only do we have an economy
slowly flapping its way to the bottom of the fish tank, we have
two men in the White House who, a scant two months ago, were
hiding out in some subterranean war room in the Appalachians,
hoping to dodge subpoenas on account of their shady business
conduct, even as all their buddies at Enron were striking to
make deals with the Justice Department.
It's true. Bush's Harken antics make
the Clintons' involvement in Whitewater look like the pitiful
little failed real estate deal that it was. Here we have a rich
mine of corruption and insider dealing featuring such highlights
as the Harvard endowment bailing out Junior at the behest of
a Texas oilman. We have officials of in the administration of
Bush SR tearing up SEC rules to save the ass of the president's
son. We have well you know the story.
And Cheney? As bad if not worse, in terms
of self-enrichment at the expense of the public investors in
Halliburton.
This was the economic and scandal-stained
backdrop to the midterm campaign , only two short months ago.
So what happened? The public said, "Sure,
the economy doesn't look good, but we're not stupid. The economy's
sagging, but you can't blame the whole of the 90s on George Bush.
Gives us till 2004, and we'll tell you what we think then."
The problem is, the Democrats have no
credibility, because they haven't earned any. No one believes
they have an economic strategy and as we hunker down amid the
rubble of the bubble, we can ask, what were the Democrats doing
as that same 90s bubble swelled. Led by Senator Joe Lieberman
they destroyed the regulatory apparatus put in place in the 30s,
after the 20s bubble, and burst into ecstatic applause every
time the federal watchdog of the markets, Alan Greenspan, ambled
along to the Hill to tell everyone what a fine job he'd been
doing.
On top of all that we've had the war
whoop against Saddam Hussein. It's not been popular. A majority
of Americans appear to believe that it's not a particularly good
idea to trash Iraq, even though it would be fun to see Saddam
Hussein swinging from a lamp post. Aside from Tony Blair the
world is against it. Closer to home, the Joint Chiefs are against
it.
All the same, the whooping worked. It
changed the subject from the economy and Harken and Halliburton.
It got the Democrats rearing and plunging till Gephardt panicked,
and rushed to the White House to enlist in the great Crusade.
The Democrats are a party of ghosts and
revenants, not the most convincing battalion to put against the
party of property and oil, of fundamentalist Christians now in
coalition with warmongering neocons ranging from Wolfowitz to
Hitchens. The most articulate voice against the war fever has
been an octogenarian, Bobby Byrd.
Final verdict? We agree entirely with
this assessment by Mark Donham, an Illinois environmentalist
who sent it along to us the morning after.
"If the democrats do not see this
as a serious repudiation of their strategy of trying to 'out
republican' the Republicans, then I think we will continue to
see the Democrats become more and more irrelevant. Only if the
Democrats embrace a new vision based upon real change, change
that will mean taking on the status quo in real ways, not just
pandering to the status quo, will they return to power.
"An interesting article ran in yesterday's
USA Today regarding the lack of voting by people in the age group
of 18-24. In non-presidential elections, the percentage of this
age group that are voting is only about 25%. That is because
no one is providing them with a vision that makes sense, and
the smaller parties that might be providing that vision, like
the Green Party, don't have the resources to reach them in adequate
numbers.
"Therein lies the untapped political
resource to revitalize the Democratic Party, but they will not
be fooled or interested by milktoast ideas. It's time for Daschle
and Gephardt to step down, admit that their strategy failed,
and let some new, progressive leadership re-excite the party.
If the party leadership looks at this and concludes that the
they weren't conservative enough and tries to push their positions
even more to the right, then I see the Democrats disintegrating
into near irrelevancy."
So, can the Democrats reinvent themselves
out of the cement overcoat of its DLC years? Wed doubt it, and
furthermore we reckon that for the people who control the Democratic
Party, it's far more important to beat off radical ideas and
drive the McKinneys out of the Party than to win elections or
to lose elections on matters of principle like civil rights and
economic justice.
One last thought: the Democrats don't
have Nader to blame for this one. Ralph even went out and campaigned
for some of them.
Yesterday's
Features
Linda S. Heard
An Opportunity
for the Israelis to Choose Peace
Fedwa Wazwaz
Oprah
Winfrey: Warmonger?
Uri Avnery
All Because
of One Small Olive
Michael Dahan
Israel's
House of Cards
Ron Jacobs
Throwing Stones at Northern Korea
Frank Bardacke
Botox,
the Naked Empire and War on Iraq
Norman Madarasz
Canada's
Metis:
Overdue Recognition for Its Third Founding People
William Hughes
Bloody Sunday. Bloody Palestine.
New
Print Edition of CounterPunch Available Exclusively
to Subscribers:
- The Shafts of Death: Bush, Coal Mines, and Death
in the Tunnels;
- Speak Memory!: Carter and the Draft;
- Daniel Pipes' World: Smearing Pro-Arab Academics;
- Ashcroft's Gays: the War on Free Speech;
- Saddam's Amnesty: Could It Happen Here?
- Criminalizing Dissent: a history and preview;
- Iraq 1987: When the Going Was Good;
- Egypt in Turmoil: an Anthropologist's Account;
- Green and Grounded: Profiled at the Gate.
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October 26
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