May I suggest the House Special?
Posted on 10/12/2002 12:12:39 PM PDT by summer
October 12, 2002
It's the War, Stupid
By FRANK RICH
As soon as President Bush rolled out his new war on Iraq, the Democrats in Washington demanded a debate, and debates they got, all right. There was the debate between Matt Drudge and Barbra Streisand about the provenance of an antiwar quote she recited at a party fund-raiser. There was the debate about whether Jim McDermott, Democratic Congressman from Washington, should have come home from Baghdad before announcing on TV that we can take Saddam Hussein's promises at "face value." There were the debates about why Al Gore took off his wedding ring, why Robert Torricelli took a Rolex, and why Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson took noisy offense at so benign and popular a Hollywood comedy as "Barbershop."
But as for the promised debate about Iraq, it became heated only after Congressional approval of the president's mission was a foregone conclusion. Though the party's leaders finally stepped up, starting with Mr. Gore, most of them seemed less concerned with the direction of the nation in 2002 than with positioning themselves for the White House in 2004 (or '08). They challenged the administration's arrogant and factually disingenuous way of pursuing its goal, then beat a hasty retreat to sign on to whatever fig-leaf language they could get into the final resolution. (Mr. Gore, after his Sept. 23 Iraq speech, dropped the subject altogether.)
Even at their most forceful they failed to state their qualified, Bush-lite case for war with anything like the persistence, eloquence and authority of Chuck Hagel, the Republican Vietnam War hero. Speaking with almost mournful resignation from the floor on Wednesday, the senator was naked in his doubts about what lies ahead. "We should not be seduced by the expectations of `dancing in the streets' after Saddam's regime has fallen," he said. That Democratic leaders added so little to the discussion is attributed to their intimidation by the president's poll numbers, their fear of being branded unpatriotic and their eagerness to clear the decks (whatever the price) to return to the economy, stupid, before Election Day. None of these motives constitute a profile in courage; no wonder George W. Bush was emboldened to present himself as the new John F. Kennedy in his Iraq speech on Monday night.
Agree with him or not, the president does stand for something. He led, and the Democrats followed. The polls, far from rationalizing the Democrats' timidity, suggest they might have won a real debate had they staged one. Support for an Iraq war is falling, with the dicey 51 percent in favor in the latest CNN/USA Today survey dropping to a Vietnam-like 33 percent support level if there are 5,000 casualties, as there could well be. But even so, the Democratic leaders never united around a substantive alternative vision to the administration's pre-emptive war against the thug of Baghdad. That isn't patriotism, it's abdication. Perhaps more than he intended, Tom Daschle summed up the feeble thrust of his party's opposition on "Meet the Press" last weekend when he observed, "The bottom line is . . . we want to move on." Now his wish has come true — but move on to what? The dirty secret of the Democrats is that they have no more of an economic plan than they had an Iraq plan.
Nor do they want to dwell on Iraq and the economy in the same breath. No one really knows how many billions are needed to pay for both the war itself and the years to follow of shouldering what James Fallows in The Atlantic calls "The Fifty-first State," post-Saddam Iraq. The Democrats are in lockstep with the president in refusing to say that we will have to sacrifice anything to pay these bills, because that would mean 'fessing up to the unpleasant truth that either domestic spending will have to be cut or taxes will have to be raised.
The economic rant the Democrats offer instead is the safely generic one they've used in war and peace, regardless of the state of the economy, since the Reagan years. As befits a clownish approach, it is all too fittingly presented this election season in the form of a cartoon — a now notorious ad in which Mr. Bush is depicted pushing Social Security recipients in wheelchairs to their doom. It's a funny example of its "South Park" genre, and we do get the point: Privatized Social Security accounts could hurt Our Seniors. As indeed they could.
But such accounts are likely less imminent than a Saddam nuclear attack; even Republican ideologues are running away from them in this economic environment. The real wolves at the door today are rising unemployment and falling consumer confidence, a cratered stock market that may soon be mirrored in the real estate market and . . . well, every Democratic candidate (and most American voters) can recite the litany. But in the words of Fritz Hollings, a Democratic senator so old that, like Robert Byrd, he sometimes commits the political sin of speaking the truth: "Our problem is the Democrats whine and whine. Everybody knows what the trouble is. The question is, `What's the solution?' "
The solution seems to be the same as that for Iraq — call for a debate and pray. Here is what Richard Gephardt had to say last week: "I have asked the president for nine months to have a summit on the economy to try to figure out a new economic game plan for this country." On Thursday Mr. Daschle asked for Congress to extend unemployment compensation and help bail out teetering budgets in the states (without saying where the money would come from), floated the whimsy that Mr. Bush might replace all his economic advisers with Clinton administration alumni and, yes, again called for an "economic summit." This kind of visionary leadership and a tin cup will get an unemployed American another presidential economic conclave of fat cats in Waco.
You might think that Mr. Gore, who has much to gain by showing political spine, would seize the moment. But fresh from his Iraq oration, he trotted out an economic address that offered only the familiar recitation of woes, followed by a few boilerplate bullet points largely remaindered from the 2000 campaign (including, of all musty Gore golden oldies, a plea for maximizing Internet bandwidth).
Like his party's Congressional leaders, he conspicuously avoided suggesting any kind of rollback of the Bush tax cut that now looms over the nation's economic future like the sword of Damocles. Pressed in a subsequent Q/A to take a stand on this fiscal elephant in the room, Mr. Gore said: "This is the time when we ought to be making some tough choices and reassessing what parts of the plan work and don't work." Far be it from him to offer his own reassessment at a time of national crisis. With or without his wedding ring or beard, the current new Al Gore is the same old Al Gore who fudged tough choices on issues like gun control and the death penalty during the 2000 debates.
As if to complete the picture of Democratic bankruptcy on what is supposed to be its signature issue, the party's chairman, Terry McAuliffe, was sitting in the front row for Mr. Gore's talk. No one is a more brazen role model for pseudo-populist hypocrisy at a time when corporate corruption has undermined fundamental American faith in the integrity of capitalism. Forever decrying the crooks of the dot-com bubble, Mr. McAuliffe has made millions (all legally, of course) from his serial insider's status at two telecom companies, Global Crossing and Telergy (where he was a director). While both subsequently went belly up, costing many Americans their jobs, their retirements or both, he was long gone when those non-insiders took the hit, much as Mr. Bush was at Harken.
In Washington, the main question about such Democratic fecklessness is: How will it play on Nov. 5? Is the economy so bad that despite everything, the party might hold onto the Senate and retake the House? I have no idea, and, I suspect, neither does anyone else in a punditocracy that with near unanimity erroneously predicted a G.O.P. sweep during the impeachment midterms of '98. But we're not in the frivolous 90's any more, and as we hurtle into war a better question might be: Do the Democrats stand for anything other than the next election?
As Congress prepared to sign off on the war resolution Thursday, Mr. Daschle sounded relieved, predicting that Americans would start brooding over the economy "once we get this question of Iraq behind us." Behind us? Given that he just signed on to a policy that by the C.I.A.'s estimation may increase the likelihood that a ruthless foe will attack us with biological and chemical weapons, you have to wonder just what America he is living in.
Guess the Slimes figured it's safe to print Rich, it's Saturday, the day no one reads the Slimes.........lol
That reminds me, whatever became of Ol' Sasquatch, down in Florida?
May I make a bold prediction no one mentioned yet?
If we (pubbies) increase our hold in the House and regain the Senate, the Rats are going to "retire" en masse for 2004. President Bush's coattails floods the House and Senate with fresh blood, and a near insurmountable margin in Congress
Bush has won over the Independants and will appoint conservative judges, keeping his base happy.
IMHO
May I suggest the House Special?
An honest analysis by a liberal!! Will wonders never cease?
I wonder if this will be his first step on the way to mental health or a total nervous breakdown.
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