Big Tent. Big Plans?

Bush-bashing gave the Dems a majority. Now it's time to make something of it.


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I'd been recruited for this job all of 60 hours before the polls opened, and I wasn't the last one by a long shot: On Monday night, poll watchers were still scrambling and troubleshooting, getting shunted from one polling place to another, receiving last-minute instructions from the lawyers. Thus came together a lumbering Democratic counterweight to the fearsome Republican get-out-the-vote machine.


It did.


There were local reasons, as there always are: Sweeney, with a reputation for boozing, was revealed by the Albany Times Union a week before Election Day to have "knocked around" his wife (her words to a police dispatcher) last year. But many of Sweeney's peers with no domestic baggage went down on November 7. Around the country, Democrats were on fire. So were disillusioned Republicans and fed-up independents. Sheer, shared hatred of Bush—of his war, his criminal negligence, his useless moralism, his fiscal recklessness, his corruption and all-around malfeasance—set off a backfire that started to isolate the still somewhat solid South, the region that Karl Rove and Bush believed to be the base of their base, the core of an enduring Republican majority.

There is an irony here. The Republicans ran, as they have since 2002, as the party of fear. Vote for us, or evildoers will blow up your cities. But by election time they were seen as the orchestrators of fear, and fearsome themselves, menacing those who would differ about how to protect the nation. It became cliché to quote Machiavelli: "It is much safer to be feared than loved, when, of the two, either must be dispensed with." But perhaps when Rove underlined his edition of The Prince, he got so excited at this point that he skipped the following paragraph, which begins: "Nevertheless a prince ought to inspire fear in such a way that, if he does not win love, he avoids hatred."

Seemingly indifferent to the hatred he courted, Bush gave the opposition a heckuva raison d'être. When I made get-out-the-vote calls to various states for, and (as the script requested) asked Democratic-leaning voters which issues weighed with them, they insisted to the last woman and man that there was no particular issue—it was "everything." When I asked one woman the boilerplate question, "Do you think the country's on the right track?" her response was an extended, throaty laugh. These people had had enough.

The consequences are potentially enormous. What with Bush's overreaching and underperforming, the Democrats have willy-nilly become the big-tent party. In alignment with the nation, they are on their way to overcoming most of the cultural cleavages left over from the '60s, making room for a progressive pragmatism on many issues. Fueled by both the netroots and a party apparatus coming to life, they have availed themselves (teeth-grittingly, at times) of all the anti-Bush currents in American life. All of them—the liberal (progressive, if you like), the conservative (in the rock-ribbed fiscal sense), the keep-out-of-the-bedroom sorts along with the hands-off-my-gun types—plus the swarm of frowners who, on one score or another, couldn't be happy-talked out of the evidence of their senses. Together, these strands of discontent do not add up to a liberal majority—let alone a lock on 2008—but rather a "thumpin'" for those who thought they were building a permanent reign of the right. As Salon's Tim Grieve noted, there was not one Senate or House race where voters evicted an incumbent "in favor of someone more conservative." Not one.



Second, the Democrats have to contain the tensions already evident under the big tent: netroots vs. apparatchiks, free traders vs. fair traders, red-staters vs. blue-staters, Hillaryites vs. anyone-buts. With due credit to Nancy Pelosi and her "mother-of-five voice," don't trust anyone who claims to know whether they can manage this political feat.

Don't bet that the cracks are fated to deepen into fault lines either. Political pros and amateurs alike know that a widening base requires more than "enough is enough." To build such an alliance, a majority that doesn't have to rely on winning by margins so skimpy they invite vote fraud, Democrats need to take care of both the immediate no-brainers—minimum wage up, drug prices and college costs down—and the common-good programs that will endure for more than one season. My own middle-term wish list is fourfold: a rapid exit from Iraq along with real Middle East diplomacy; universal health insurance; a return of progressive taxation; and real R&D on energy alternatives, a twofer that creates jobs while addressing global warming. All of these embody liberal principles and skirt what's left of the culture-war morass.



