Once again Democrats are agonizing over tactics. The spectacle is even more agonizing to watch, because it’s so unnecessary.
The National Abortion Rights Action League launched the Democratic Party’s latest introspection with televised distortions about a Supreme Court nominee that were worthy of a Jesse Helms campaign spot. The only salvation was that liberals, virtually en masse, denounced the advertisement as strongly as the right - a dose of fairness you simply don’t see from the other side.
The left’s criticism wasn’t weakness, as a few implied. For example strategist Chris Lehane reflected that “we Democrats bring a well-thumbed copy of Marquess of Queensberry Rules while the other side unsheaths their bloody knives, with a predictable outcome.” So far so good, but then he added that the despicable NARAL ad “was great, and exactly the type of offensive that breaks through in the modern age.”
For a strategist on the left to applaud an inopportune and grossly misleading advertisement as “great” is a sign not of toughness, but intellectual desperation and spiritual defeat. To win we must become as debased as the right, Mr. Lehane was suggesting. And since winning is the sole objective, a political party’s only reason for being, then principles are playthings and truth is designer opportunism.
Sound like some other party you know - and rightly despise?
Fortunately Lehane’s was a minority voice among the minority. More thoughtful opinion dominated, such as that of former presidential counsel Lanny Davis, who, in addition to properly criticizing the NARAL ad as a “smear,” proposed “differentiat[ing] ourselves” as the wisest tactic for the broadest purposes.
And that’s where the unnecessary agony comes in. The best way to defeat the right has always sat before Democrats on a platter, kindly handed to them by none other than their opponents. The loyal opposition has only needed to oppose - another way of saying “differentiate” - and today’s ruling party has served up more idiotic policies to readily oppose than any party in recent history, perhaps ever.
But at the same time, one must choose battles wisely. John Roberts’s nomination was not one of them. He was a shoo-in from the word go, since he is clearly qualified from a legal-background standpoint and he was not nearly as disastrous a choice as most on the left anticipated. As one political analyst recently pointed out, Bush won’t spend political capital on a hypercontroversial Supreme Court nominee just to satisfy a right-wing religious base already in his pocket. He’ll save his (diminishing) capital for his true loves - solidifying a plutocracy and mucking up the Middle East. And there the left has almost endless fronts to wage effective battle on. Problem is, it hasn’t. It has allowed the administration to proceed unimpeded and only occasionally lets out a yelp.
The serial failures that now define Iraq are merely one sampling of the political ducks in a pond that congressional Democrats could have been blasting away at with rewarding repetition. The public has long since concluded that Iraq is a lost cause. Yet the administration continues playing a self-defeating, easily targeted, just-you-wait-and-see game.
“We are witnessing democracy at work in Iraq,” said the secretary of state this week with a remarkably straight face. “We’ve been very clear that a modern Iraq will be an Iraq,” for instance, “in which women are recognized as full and equal citizens. And I have every confidence that that is how Iraqis feel.” There’s not a soul alive who believes that - not among the American electorate, not among the Iraqi people, not even Condoleezza Rice.
Yet with all this, with all the failures and all their abysmal ramifications, who is that stands as the leading oppositional voice? Congressional Democrats? No, a grieving mother camped by a Texas road.
It’s a pity that borders on the laughable. Handed five years of uninterrupted maladministration, Democrats still haven’t learned how to take the lead in speaking up about the right issue at the right time and in the right way.