Views » October 26, 2005

Missing Their Moment

By Susan J. Douglas

I recently received a letter from Nancy Pelosi, my close personal friend. Well, at least the letter was addressed “Dear Friend.” If I sent the Democrats $25 or more, I would be the lucky recipient of something not available in any store, anywhere—the “Democrats Fighting Donkey Lapel Pin! Exclusively Yours!”

The letter said that the “conventional wisdom here in Washington says that it’s better just to go along and get along.” But the Democrats were not going to do that, Pelosi insisted. “I am going to work hard and fight alongside Senator Reid and all the Democrats in Congress to make sure we are asking the tough questions” of John Roberts and other judicial nominees. Hmm, I guess that explains Reid’s instantaneous puckering up to Harriet Miers and the Democratic split on the Roberts vote.

The letter assured me that the Democrats will “ensure your rights are safeguarded.” Which Democrats? The increasingly Republican-lite Hillary Clinton, who, whatever her celebrity status, cannot win the presidency and has sold out on everything from the invasion of Iraq to abortion rights? John Kerry? Joe Biden? As compelling as the donkey pin offer was, I resisted temptation. The letter is now making its own contribution to Ann Arbor’s recycling program. When we have to turn to “The West Wing” to hear a sophisticated dismissal of intelligent design by a fictional presidential candidate, or fantasize about Geena Davis being president, we know just how bereft we are.

There have been the intermittent reports and think pieces about how the Democrats need an agenda, their own “Contract with America,” since people don’t seem to know what they stand for. Indeed, in my letter from Pelosi, the “demands” that were listed were all about rolling back the excesses of the Bush administration—saying no to privatizing Social Security, stopping cuts to veterans programs and the like. But where is the bold, pro-active agenda? To create one, they would do well to get out of Washington, fast, away from the consultants and politicos, and talk to everyday people. They would get an earful, and it would be ferocious.

The Democratic leadership seems somehow unable to grasp the huge gap in outrage between them and their base. Go anywhere, talk to people who are Democrats or, poor souls, progressives, and the sheer fury of everyday people, if it could be harnessed, would solve this winter’s upcoming energy crisis. People are not only enraged; they are also deeply worried.

Hurricane Katrina not only changed things for the Republicans—it changed things for Democrats too. Katrina exposed the nation’s continuing failures to combat poverty and racism; it exhumed, from the ’70s, awareness of the country’s energy dependency and profligacy; it showed that we can move people in and out of a Big Ten football game more efficiently than out of the path of a storm; it showed that you actually need a functioning federal government; and it revealed our contempt for the elderly and the sick. (Indeed, we desperately need an 80-year-old rapper to proclaim “George Bush hates old people.”)

So, while it was fun to pop champagne corks when Tom DeLay was indicted, and when the networks, in mid-October, revealed the White House’s careful rehearsals with soldiers in Iraq for a supposedly “spontaneous” exchange with the president, the Democrats must see the implications of Katrina for them.

On the Sunday talk shows, various representatives of the party are urging, and taking, the oft-cited advice from Napoleon, “Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.” When is the last time we remember the Republicans doing this? It is this silence—that comes across as sheer cowardice—that is enraging people and could make a turn to a third party much more attractive to many more people. Pelosi and the lugubrious Reid are reportedly meeting with mayors and governors to develop a strategy for 2006. But where are the meetings with actual people? Where is Howard Dean’s barnstorming of the country, with town meetings everywhere, to get a reality check on the passion of the people?

In fact, it is that very passion that seems to scare the Democratic leaders. The Republicans have, in addition to demonizing “liberals,” succeeded in marginalizing the party’s own base in the eyes of its timid and compromised leaders as too fervent, too far to the left. This is no mean achievement given how much farther out of the mainstream the religious right is. How else can you explain the utter absence of Democratic leaders at the enormous antiwar march in late September?

Hurricane Katrina has created the moment for a true paradigm shift in American politics, because many Americans have actually become scared about what it means to have an eviscerated, dysfunctional federal government. That’s what Democrats would hear if they listened to their base, instead of shunning it as their own advisors have convinced them to do. If they miss the Katrina moment, it will go down as one of the biggest political blunders of the early 21st century.

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• Reader Comments

  I would like to believe that the Democrats are indeed using a strategy that involves “never interrupting your enemy while they are making a mistake.” I would like to believe that they have adopted his strategy of using a circumspect defense and a sudden offensive thrust. I really would.

  More than likely you capture the current state of affairs quite nicely in your piece. It’s not a strategy so much as a the fear of one. It’s a tactic without a strategy. The Dems have given the Repub enough rope. Now how much more can they really hang themselves before the Dems move in and take the initiative?

  Posted by Neruda on Oct 25, 2005 at 2:24 PM

  I refuse to give the Democratic National Party any money.

  I give to specific candidates I support (for example- MY SENATOR BYRD), but the party won’t get my money.
  Wanna know one reason why?

  Last week, when the congress was scheduled to vote on majot cuts is social services, while handing out tax cuts to the wealthy, I called them and asked what they were doing to stop a passage of this bill.

  They suggested I call my elected reps.

  In other words, they had no answer for me. They were silent, as far as I could tell.

  As I said in front of the white house on September 24th with the rest of the 150K.

  “SHAME, SHAME, SHAME”

  Posted by robin on Oct 25, 2005 at 6:12 PM

  >>  Hurricane Katrina has created the moment for a true paradigm shift in American politics, because many Americans have actually become scared about what it means to have an eviscerated, dysfunctional federal government.  <<

  Probably not.  Katrina was not the biggest disaster to hit the USA since President Bush first came into office.  Besides 09/11, there were other hurricanes, including four major hurricanes to hit Florida in 2004, and Rita and Wilma after Katrina.  Except for Katrina, all of these situations were handled with a minimum of trouble and disruption, considering the scale of each of these problems.

  So what was different about Katrina?  Well, New Orleans and Louisiana have long celebrated a culture of corruption.  And Louisiana and New Orleans were the only sites that had a Democratic governor and a Democrtic mayor.  And Louisiana was the only place where the elected officials refused/declined/failed/whatever to call an emergency with a Cat 5 hurricane bearing down on them.  And when President Bush called the governor and the mayor on Saturday and suggested they declare an emergency, they waited until Sunday morning to act, just 24 hours before the hurricane hit.  And Louisiana and New Orleans had detailed emergency plans in case of a hurricane, but the plans were not activated on time.  The plans called for a 72 hour evacuation procedure, but many things were not accomplished because the plan was implemented late.  The most important thing that was not done was the failure to mobilize the school buses and the city buses to evacuate the poor and the immobile, as the plans called for.  The school bses ended up in water up to their sparkplugs.  Consequently, tens of thousands of people who should have been several hundred miles north were stuck in the Superdome and the Convention Center with no electricity and few supplies, because the emergency supplies, like the buses, were never mobilized.  Then the mayor panicked and started talking about rapes and murders and 10,000 dead, but the real number of dead was about 1000, there were few rapes, and there were only four murders, about normal for New Orleans.

  Now, there were some real shortcomings in federal planning, and these must be corrected.  But these shortcomings did not show up to any great extent in all of the other disasters we have discussed.  They would have been much less obvious in Lousiana if Louisiana authorities had acted on their own emergency plans.

  And I know Mary Landrieu is upset, but everyone in the nation could track what was going on in New Orleans.  And if you think you can make political capital out of the Democrat’s or the Republican’s performance in New Orleans, I think you are crazy.  But knock yourself out, lady.

  Posted by scorp on Oct 26, 2005 at 5:54 AM

  The Democrats are out of touch with their base because they are too obsessed with reacting against anything the Republicans do. The electoral failures of 2002 and 2004 was an obsession to oppose the President on the Iraq War, more so out of sheer contrarism than any “swelling grassroots opposition” to the War. The Democrats refuse to believe that the reason Bush won in 2004 is exactly because of the War.

  Or rather, the Democrats’ gross miscalculations.

  Ditto on what Douglas says about the failures that Katrina exposed,

  Katrina exposed the nation’s continuing failures to combat poverty and racism

  That failure is called the welfare system, the “nanny state”. Democrats will not address the failings of an entrenched poor feeding on the teat of government entitlements, if only because the Republicans beat them to the punch in 1994.

  I don’t know if it was Napoleon that said this, but this is the advice the Democrats are really following, Never show weakness in the face of the enemy.

  Even when they are right.

  Posted by Jay Cline on Oct 26, 2005 at 6:15 PM

  In point of fact, Bush did not win Ohio in 2004, any more than he won Florida in 2000. Purging of voter rolls, voter intimidation, long lines and malfunctioning voting machines that without exception malfunctioned in Bush’s favor, even machine tampering by employees of the manufacturer so as to avoid a manual recount, are what gave Ohio to Bush, while exit polling, accurate in every other state in the union, in every other election in which it was used, as well as in some former soviet republics where we depended on it to allege election fraud, gave Ohio to Kerry, just as eventually a statewide manual recount in Florida would have given Florida to Gore had not the SCOTUS violated the constitution to install GWB. Imagine the possibilities, no war in Iraq, no out of control debt, no tax breaks for the top 1% and the oil industry, very likely no 9/11, as Clarke would still have been on the job.

  Posted by Kenneth D. Brown on Oct 27, 2005 at 4:51 AM

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