Try Again, James Carville

Posted by: Good Samaritan
on April 20, 2005 @ 10:28 AM EST

At least liberal pitbull James Carville admits the Democrats have a problem:

[T]oday, too many leading Democratic strategists deny that the party we love has a problem. When you lose to an unpopular president with a soft economy and a disastrous occupation in Iraq... [more anti-Bush bile]... you most definitely have a problem.

But if you look at the advice he has to offer, it amounts to more of the same. MORE...

Carville dodges the obvious explanation of the Democrats' problem-- that they need to move to the center, and embrace some of the positions of Republicans, or of Clintonite New Dems. He dodges it by saying:

Some think the problem is that Democrats have become too liberal... Others say the problem is that the party has become too conservative... Both are right, but more broadly, both are wrong.

Why? Because Carville says so, and thus becomes part of the denial he's criticizing. However, he's right about this:

[T]he biggest problem the Democrats face is not that they're seen as standing for too many liberal issues or standing for too many conservative positions. It's that Democrats aren't seen as standing for anything.

Good. I don't know what the Democrats stand for, or want to stand for. Will Carville tell us? Here's what he has to say:

The economy

Democrats should stand for fiscal responsibility, asking the wealthiest to pay their share of the debt.

No surprises there. Kerry said the same thing. But there are two problems with it. First, there's not that much money to be raised from the wealthy. Second, fiscal responsibility has two sides, a revenue side and a spending side. Will the Democrats be fiscally responsible on the spending side? Kerry made nonsense of his claim to represent fiscal responsibility by proposing an expensive health care program, and an expensive "plan" on almost everything that came up.

We should reform trade laws that encourage corporations to ship jobs overseas.

Ugh. Another protectionist scumbag. Have the Democrats thought of drafting Pat Buchanan?

We should reform the tax code and replace the current lobbyists' dream with a tax code that is simpler, fairer and more progressive.

Are we talking about a flat tax here? Perhaps a national sales tax, with rebates? Or what? Do Democrats want to eliminate the mortgage-interest tax deduction, as my co-blogger Audi Partem Alteram has advocated? Generally, there's a conflict between making taxes "simpler" and making them "more progressive."

Above all, we should place middle-class jobs and middle-class values at the heart of our economic policy. Middle-class Americans are working hard and playing by the rules, but they are being ripped off at every turn.

I am always outraged when I hear this kind of pandering to the middle class. It's deeply, deeply immoral. Help the poor if you must. But the American middle class is among the most prosperous and privileged groups in the history of the world. They ought to stand on their own two feet, and they must stand on their own two feet, because society needs them to stand up tall and carry its burdens. They should be told, "Of him to whom much is given, much is expected." I think the middle class knows that it's up to them to make America work, to ask what they can do for their country and not what their country can do for them. I think they know that anything the government gives, the government will take away again through taxes, regulation, or the economic damage of deficits. I think they know that if redistribution takes place, they'll have to be willing to be redistributed-from, rather than redistributed-to. They will continue to give the cold shoulder to the party that infantilizes them-- that, to rephrase Ayn Rand's title, encourages Atlas to shrug. I hope.

On health care

President Bush has proposed crippling cuts in Medicaid (a program that supported Terri Schiavo).

So the Democrats want to increase spending on health care. So much for the claim to "fiscal responsibility."

Rather than reform our badly broken intelligence services, President Bush and the Republicans have engaged in political purges, rewarding those who were most wrong about the war in Iraq and punishing those few who sounded alarms.

Is this an echo of the attempt to blame Bush for 9/11? No one buys that baloney. And George Tenet, who called the case for WMDs in Iraq a "slam dunk," is no longer head of the CIA. What is Carville talking about? If it's lost on me, it will be lost on most voters.

Moreover, the claim is very unlikely to influence anyone who supported and continues to support the war in Iraq. And that's at least half the public. The Democrats keep going through the motions of campaigning against an unpopular war, but the evidence just does not confirm that the war was all that unpopular.

Rather than reforming and modernizing our alliances, President Bush has alienated our friends and emboldened our enemies.

Maybe this is Carville's way of signalling that in future, no Democratic candidate should repeat Kerry's mistake of calling our allies "a coalition of the coerced and the bribed." Good. But be careful. Seeing the rate at which Rice and Bush are reconciling with Europe, this criticism may be even more obsolete in 2006 and 2008 than it is now. Also note that this point clashes with Carville's advocacy of protectionism above.

Worst of all, our senior government officials cannot always be counted on to tell us the truth when American lives are at risk.

More Fahrenheit 9/11 paranoia. Americans are not willing to believe that "Bush lied" unless they have some evidence that's better than a lot of wacky witch-hunters.

When lobbyists are writing legislation, when gambling interests are paying for luxury junkets, when the Ethics Committee itself has been put out of business, it's time for reform. Democrats should stand for cracking down on lobbyists and cleaning up our politics.

Now lobbyists are not always necessarily bad. Lobbyists provide information to politicians. Collectively, lobbyists comprise a somewhat unbalanced and myopic approximation of a politician's constituency. The key is not to "crack down on lobbyists," it's to discriminate among lobbyists. The Democrats are in thrall to the uber-Lobbyist, the American Assocation of Retired Persons, for example, as well as People for the American Way and other liberal lawyer lobbies.

If Democrats can't take on that corruption with a bold and broad agenda of change and reform, then (to paraphrase the late senator Pat Moynihan) we'd better find another country to run in.

Why do Democrats persist in this kind of silliness? The economy is growing, the war in Iraq has been difficult but also seems to be triggering a global wave of democratization, and al-Qaeda has failed to mount another attack on the homeland. Basically, things are pretty good right now. It's an offense to Democrats' pride that things can be going just fine with the other guys in power. Their delusions of disaster are their way of being in denial about how dispensable they have proven to be.

Carville recognizes that the Democrats have a problem. And he personifies that problem. Until a Democrat comes along who is humble enough to understand why the Democrats lost, and deserved to lose, the last two elections, and the voters' trust, and who will learn from America's pre-eminent political party instead of flailing against it, the Democrats will have nothing worthwhile to contribute to our republic.

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