A Democratic debacle

Conventional wisdom says that midterm elections are not kind to the party of the sitting president. Conventional wisdom says that the Republicans should have lost seats in the House and not been able to take the Senate. Conventional wisdom says that the Bush camp should this morning be scrambling to fortify what was left of its platform.

Clearly, conventional wisdom was wrong. And twice in a row now, too – the Democratic gains in 1998 no longer appear to be an aberration, but perhaps the first hints of a new “conventional wisdom,” one where the party in power doesn’t suffer at the halfway mark, where a victory in a battle for the White House doesn’t automatically turn into a slaughter in the midterm battle for Congress. Perhaps, rather than using the Congressional midterm vote to reprimand their presidents, the American polity has now embarked upon a strategy of using the midterms to give the president a helping hand.

Perhaps Americans, who once appeared to thrive on divided government, now value the idea of a unified voice in Washington. Perhaps Tip O’Neil was wrong, and all politics are no longer local.

Or perhaps the Democrats just blew it.

Incompetence appeared to be the name of the game this political season – for both the Democrats and the GOP, but more so for the donkeys.

The Democrats failed to capitalize on the sputtering economy or make their case against Social Security privatization against a backdrop of the faltering Dow. They even failed to live up to their traditional commitment to civil liberties by not raising a more vociferous challenge to the dangerous power of the proposed Homeland Security Department, or drawing a line in the sand to block the vulgar Patriot Act. They ran weak campaigns and candidates in states they should have won, and bottled up the all-important soft money contributions (which sadly passed away this Wednesday) on improvements to their data collection systems and headquarters, instead of doling enough out to aid their tightest campaigns.

Perhaps with a little more savvy and money, the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee could have taken New Hampshire’s open seat – Republican candidate John Sununu won despite being backed by a party still wounded from the scarring primary in which he ousted sitting Sen. Bob Smith – and held on to the heartland state of Missouri, giving the Democrats an undisputed majority. But they ran poor campaigns in both states, giving the GOP the votes it needed to tie up both houses of Congress.

And then there’s Minnesota, where the groundswell of support that followed the death of Senator Paul Wellstone 13 days ago turned into a backlash of disgust when his memorial service became little more than a harsh partisan rally. Early polls after last-resort Democratic candidate former Vice President Walter Mondale jumped into the game showed him with the inside track, until last Friday’s funeral-cum-rally.

The Democrats never had a chance in several states, including Texas, but perhaps they might have, had their campaign been coordinated. Newt Gingrich and the Republican freshmen of 1994 showed that its possible to nationalize a Congressional election, but neither the DSCC nor its junior counterpart, the Democratic House Campaign Committee, seemed to have learned any lessons from the spanking Speaker Newt dealt them halfway through Clinton’s tumultuous first term.

Instead, they relied on traditional, and discredited, “base politics.” Rally enough minorities, union members, single women and seniors, and you can hold the Senate and take back the House, the Democratic theory goes. But clearly that is no longer the case. Voters today are more intelligent, and less monolithic. Campaigns have to be fought on issues of a national scale today – even congressional campaigns.

The Republicans understood this, and ran, quite clearly, on the war against terrorism and Bush’s gung-ho desire to obliterate Iraq. War drums bring with them the specter of patriotism – and its dark twin, nationalism – and are hard to counter, but not impossible.

The Democrats had a chance this year, they really did. Great swaths of the public are behind Bush when it comes to his pet wars, but are uncomfortable with some, or much, of the way the Administration has dealt with the looming crises. And voters like to vote their pocketbooks – but by refusing to take on the president’s handling of the economy, by refusing to recycle the “it’s the economy, stupid!” slogan that won them 1992, the Democrats gave the GOP a pass on the one issue where they were clearly vulnerable. And by being too timid to tackle the march to war, the Democrats had little in their arsenal but soft jabs about prescription drugs and budget deficits – important issues, no doubt, but not the stuff majorities are made of.

The Democrats blew this election by refusing to learn from their past defeats, by refusing to use the issues at hand. And as they sift through the ashes of their self-made destruction, the only question left for the left to ponder is where do they go from here?