From the WSJ Opinion Archives
THINKING THINGS OVER
Declining Democrats,
Intimidated Republicans
Reagan won because he wasn't afraid to go on the offensive.
"I used to be a Democrat years ago," legendary Fed Chairman Paul Volcker said last week while in Iowa campaigning for Republican Jim Leach. "I'm kind of a nothing now." A week earlier I sat with a onetime Democratic White House aide over after-dinner drinks and cigars; he confessed, "I keep trying to figure out what the Democratic Party stands for anymore."
That, rather than the immediate outcome, seems to me the real story of tomorrow's elections. An establishment, policy-oriented Democratic Party dominated American politics over my lifetime, but it is no more. Yet despite big gains over the last two decades, Republicans haven't been able to muster the wit and courage to build a new dominance.
Tomorrow's results seem sure to repeat the knife-edge political balance of the last presidential election. The House, with districts drawn to protect incumbents of all parties, has so few competitive races the Democrats would need a turnout miracle to overturn the narrow Republican edge. Because no one has figured out how to gerrymander a state, the Senate is more competitive. But even a big swing, say a gain of three seats by either party, would be based on tens of thousand votes in close races.
Yet this is a remarkable change over my career. I joined the Journal editorial page during the Goldwater debacle of 1964, when the only GOP President in a generation had been war hero Dwight Eisenhower. I started to direct editorial policy in 1972, when Richard Nixon won re-election but Democrats ran the Senate with 57 votes to 43. The House remained under Democratic control with only two brief interruptions from 1932 to 1994. Yet if Republicans are lucky enough to win the close Senate races tomorrow, they will control all of the high ground in the nation's capital.
The Democrats have lost the intellectual glue that held together their imposing political coalition, at one time combining Southern segregationists and northern blacks, urban ethnics and Harvard dons. Their claims of unique expertise in foreign policy, built with World War II and the greatest generation, sank in the rice paddies of Vietnam. Their commendable civil rights accomplishments turned away from individual opportunity and into group entitlements. Their agenda of using the government to uplift the poor reduced itself to absurdity with the Great Society. Their economic policy, based on Keynesian demand management, dissolved in the stagflation of the 1970s. Under Bill Clinton, their onetime moral authority became a sick joke.
Today's Democrats are little more than a collection of narrow interest groups--unions, tort lawyers, minorities headed by an ossified leadership. They are clever, tenacious and increasingly nasty in defending their perks, as establishments typically are when they're being displaced by upstarts. So Democrats desperately scratch to hold power by their fingernails, with a frantic switch in New Jersey and by turning the Paul Wellstone memorial service into a partisan spectacle.
Democrats have recently prospered by delivering their voters, occasionally with overtones of fraud. They're helped because the world view of the media hive frames issues in the categories of a now-quaint 1960s liberalism. The academy, where Democrats once held sway, now indulges the unelectable left with causes such as disinvestment in Israel. In the face of all of this, Republicans are generally intimidated by their longtime conquerors.
The big Republican gains of these decades came under a leader not in the least intimidated, having been a Democrat and a union leader himself. Politics today plays out in the shadow of Ronald Reagan, a figure growing ever more remarkable as time passes. His tax cuts and backing of Mr. Volcker's tight money resolved the stagflation of the 1970s. No fewer than four times he predicted to unbelieving audiences that the fall of communism was imminent. And he imbued his party and his nation with a can-do optimism.
To an astonishing degree the Republican Party has turned away from this legacy. By the end of the first Bush administration the Reaganites had pretty much left government, leaving an administration intellectually dominated by Dick Darman and Nick Brady. This proved to be a path to President Clinton.
Even Republican triumphs have been tarnished. The 1991 Gulf War stopped short of regime change. Newt Gingrich won the House by nationalizing the 1994 midterm elections, but his "Contract with America" laid the basis for future defeats by putting deficits instead of growth at the center of economic policy.
The current Bush administration yearns for Reaganism, though intermittently. In foreign and defense policy Secretary Donald Rumsfeld heads a team of Reaganite personalities. They have destroyed the Taliban, crippled al Qaeda and now threaten Saddam Hussein. In a little-recognized achievement, President Bush personally has delegitamized Yasser Arafat, as President Reagan delegitimized the evil empire.
On the domestic scene the picture is far more mixed. The president did win a tax cut, though a hesitant one. The Harvey Pitt debacle is eroding moral authority won after September 11. The congressional party has officially ducked the Social Security issue in the face of Democratic lies about cutting benefits for current recipients, which no one proposes. But a few candidates like Elizabeth Dole have refused to be intimidated and make the issue.
Tomorrow's elections will of course have tactical meaning if Democrats carry the House or the Republicans carry the Senate. But the larger results may be strategic, measured by whether they move the Bush administration and the Republican Party toward realizing that they have the advantage in the war of ideas, that they can win if only they stop apologizing and take their own ideas on the offensive.
Mr. Bartley is editor of The Wall Street Journal. His column appears Mondays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com.
