Congress is out of session this week, which means congressional aides have plenty of time to indulge in their fear and loathing of Howard Dean. A Republican Senate staffer calls Dean a “militant secularist” who never wants to talk about religion and refers to churchgoers as “those people.” He predicts that Karl Rove will do such a job painting Dean as a far-out liberal that the Vermont governor won’t be able to get back to the political middle even if he wants to. A Democratic House staffer detects an emerging backlash to Al Gore’s surprise endorsement of Dean, tarnishing the former vice president’s martyr image and making him look opportunistic. He predicts Gore’s move will only accelerate the Stop Dean movement.
Dean should sweep the D.C. primary on Jan. 13. It’s the city’s first-ever presidential primary, and Dean is the only viable candidate other than Al Sharpton this majority black city. But the inside-the-beltway elites are terrified that Dean will disrupt their power base and consign Democrats to the wilderness for another four years. Last weekend, Hillary Clinton appeared on all the Sunday shows, insisting President Bush did the right thing in Iraq and defending her vote giving him the authorization. Dressed in soft pink, Clinton’s tough line on the war made her the rallying point for Democrats unnerved by Dean’s anti-war rhetoric.
Two days later at a rally just blocks from President Clinton’s office in Harlem, Gore stood with Dean to call the Iraq war a colossal mistake and a quagmire. Clear opposition to the Iraq war is why Dean’s candidacy resonated with Democratic voters around the country, and it’s the principal reason why Gore decided to stake his prestige on the promise of Dean as the party’s standard-bearer.
The Clintons have so dominated the Democratic party that it’s refreshing to have Gore back to kick around. His bold move pitted him against Hillary in what could become a Shakespearean clash of the titans. Dean is campaigning on a theme of “taking back the party.” Taking it back from whom? The Clintons? Gore was a founder of the Democratic Leadership Council, the moderate Democrats who moved the party to the center. In 2000, he ran as a “people against the powerful” populist. Now he’s endorsing Dean and joining the liberal wing of the party to oppose the Clinton centrists.
Given Gore’s eight years of vice-presidential deference to Clinton, the alpha male, the endorsement takes on the trappings of an Oedipal clash. The Clintons are frozen on the sidelines. She can’t speak out against Dean, and she doesn’t dare endorse Wesley Clark . Clinton, as a former president, is beholden to the tradition of styaing mum. But their operatives are out in force fueling the doubts about Dean. Even though he started as an asterisk in the polls and has run circles around the other candidates all year, they say Dean’s the one who can’t be elected. The Clintonites shudder when Dean says voters shouldn’t pick a president based on “God, gays and guns.”
Cultural issues have animated our politics for the last forty years. A new book by Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg, “The Two Americas,” points out that 17 percent of the electorate–almost one in five voters–are white Evangelicals. About 72 percent of them vote Republican, making them as loyal a political base for the GOP as African-American voters are for the Democratic Party. Greenberg outlines the likely Republican strategy for 2004 in an imaginary power point presentation by Karl Rove to President Bush. The GOP’s reelection strategy attempts to capitalize on the nation’s cultural polarization. “Every day, to some degree, we give them what they want: faith, lower taxes, smaller government, and less regulation,” Rove tells Bush. “We let them keep their guns, and our pro-business policies prove to them that we’re the party that wants them to get rich.”
Greenberg has long tracked the cultural issues. His 1985 research in Macomb County, Mich., coined the term “Reagan Democrats” when he discovered working class voters had abandoned the Democratic Party because they thought it catered to liberal elites and minorities at their expense. Greenberg’s research played a significant role in crafting Clinton’s middle-class message in ‘92. Just as Clinton proved his centrist bona fides by supporting the death penalty and publicly chastising a black soul singer, Sister Souljah, for racist lyrics, there is a high premium on next year’s Democratic nominee coming across as respectful to family and religion.
Clinton, for all his moral failings, talked comfortably about religion, and Jimmy Carter was a born-again Christian. Dean is puzzled why minimum-wage workers who have no health benefits would vote Republican. The answer he’d rather not hear is they care more about God, gays and guns than health care. “Our challenge is to raise the cultural armies in our America while not waking the sleeping giant in their America,” Rove tells Bush in Greenberg’s fictional account. Dean’s challenge if he becomes the nominee is to elevate the debate, and to make this election about real issues and contrasts, and not about which guy you’d rather sit next to in a church pew.
