MSNBC - Seismic Shifts

Seismic Shifts

The election results were another chapter in a 40-year slide for the Democrats

WEB-EXCLUSIVE COMMENTARY

By Eleanor Clift

Newsweek

Updated: 6:30 p.m. ET Nov. 12, 2004

Nov. 12 - Out with the old and in with the new is Karl Rove’s first post-election move to fulfill his dream of an enduring Republican majority. Gone is John Ashcroft, best friend of evangelical Christians, and in as attorney general is Alberto Gonzales, son of Mexican immigrants. The nomination is a reward to Hispanics who voted for President Bush in higher numbers than they did four years ago and whose budding allegiance to the GOP could seal the party’s majority status for the foreseeable future.

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Evangelicals were the next new thing when Bush horrified liberals by installing Ashcroft as the nation’s top cop. Ashcroft catered to the religious right, subpoenaing abortion records, expanding gun-ownership rights, challenging Oregon’s Death with Dignity Act and draping the exposed breasts of a semi-nude “Spirit of Justice” statue at the Justice Department. Now that evangelicals have cemented their place in GOP politics, Ashcroft has outlived his political usefulness.

Hispanics are the future, and they responded to conservative appeals on gay marriage and abortion. “Big things occurred in this election, and they are potentially enduring,” says Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg. Bush made his most significant gains among women and Hispanics, groups Democrats thought they owned. Remember the gender gap? Hispanic voters handed Bush victories in Florida and New Mexico. In Michigan, where John Kerry won, Bush split the union vote. The cultural polarization that drove the Democrats out of the South is now eroding Hispanic and union support in the Midwestern industrial states, once Democratic strongholds.

It’s tempting to blame Kerry and the Brahmin elitism he radiates, but the election results were another chapter in a 40-year slide for the Democrats, beginning in 1964 when Lyndon Johnson won 90 percent of the electoral votes and more than 60 percent of the popular vote. Support for civil rights played a huge role in the party’s decline, but claiming the moral high ground isn’t going to win elections. “In the South, the Democrats are viewed as the party of social change and antiwar,” says former South Carolina governor Jim Hodges. “It’s time the party looked in the mirror. The problem is the party, not the candidate. Whatever accent they put on the next candidate, if the party continues to share the same image in the country, the results will be the same.”

Red-State Democrats are a diminishing breed, and worth listening to. Hodges is Zell Miller without the bombast, and he’s thinking about making a run for the Democratic Party chairmanship. It won’t be easy. The Clinton wing of the party is pushing Harold Ickes, who soldiered away at the Democratic get-out-the-vote effort and could smooth the way for Hillary in ’08. A group aligned with Indiana Sen. Evan Bayh, another potential presidential candidate, wants a “Third Way” candidate at the helm of the party. Howard Dean has put himself into the running. Then there are governors like Hodges who think the party’s salvation lies in wrestling power away from Washington. The victor in the power struggle will signal the party’s direction. “I hope we have some fight left in us,” says Hodges.

A round of post mortems this week in Washington offered a cold shower of reality for Democrats. Strategist James Carville saluted Rove for pulling off a great political comeback given Bush’s vulnerabilities on Iraq and the economy, and Kerry’s strengths as a debater and fund-raiser. This is an election that Democrats were going to win, and they didn’t, says Carville. “We didn’t win in 2000, too. We lost because we didn’t say anything.”

ELEANOR CLIFT

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Bush had a narrative forged in the ashes of 9/11. “I’m going to protect you from the terrorists in Tikrit and the homos in Hollywood,” is how Carville summed it up. Kerry, by contrast, never broke through with his litany of programs and positions. “We could elect someone from Beverly Hills if we had a compelling narrative,” says Carville, an architect of the Clinton story, “The Man from Hope.” Quirky and often over the top in his partisan outbursts, Carville is one of the few bold thinkers on the Democratic side. But he doesn’t give it away at think tanks and party retreats. His fame as a strategist and as the husband of Mary Matalin, a top Republican operative, makes him a hot commercial property, and what reporters heard this week is a preview of the advice he is turning into a guide for Democrats. “We’ve got to come to grips with the fact that we are an opposition party, and not a particularly effective one,” he says.

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A reporter observed that in a focus group he attended, when people were asked what Democrats stand for, they said: “liberal ... raise my taxes ... they’re for gays.” The reason they believe that, says Carville, is Democrats don’t have a competing story. When Carville speaks to audiences around the country, he asks how many are benefiting from Bush’s tax cut? Lots of hands go up. Then he asks, “Do you know two people in Iraq?” Typically no hands go up. “Washington has lost its moorings,” he says, warming to the narrative that is emerging. “My grandmother was a Gold Star mother. She would have slapped Rove’s face if he had tried to give her a tax cut.”

Ideas matter along with the courage to voice them. “The Democratic Party died Tuesday,” says Carville. “Today we’re born again. It’s the greatest morality story.”

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